A Minnesota Original

A Minnesota Original

Our local public television station, TPT, has just released a short film about STILL blog and me for a series called Minnesota Original. The producer, Amy Melin just doesn’t do anything that isn’t less than breathtaking. I have admired her work for so long, and now she has trained her careful and perceptive eye-behind-the-camera on me. The film is about STILL Blog and my creative process, set in my home and in our surrounding woods. It perfectly captures the spirit of STILL. It is a quiet film steeped in the early spring green of ferns and oak leaves, and the late winter browns of cattail beds.

I hope you’ll take a look. You can watch it here.

If the link above doesn’t work, try cutting and pasting this link:  https://www.tptoriginals.org/exercise-your-creativity-by-journaling/

  • Ginny says:

    Congratulations! It’s a beautiful presentation, Mary Jo, attention well deserved!

    reply
  • Carol says:

    Yes, beautiful. I watched it last evening – congratulations. I loved it

    reply
  • Susan says:

    How wonderful to live in your world for a bit. Thank you for sharing it. You inspire me. Congratulations.

    reply
  • Susan L says:

    I enjoyed this so much. I feel like I’ve been asleep for a long time and listening to you, watching you, felt kind of like a nudge. Wake up! I do want to wake up. Thank you!

    reply
  • Pauline van Eijle says:

    So special to see you ‘live’ and and hear you talking! I live with your blog more or less since you started it, so nice to get to know you a little more. Thanks for your daily inspiration!

    reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

basket weaving

basket weaving

i’m pretty proud of myself. i eyed these twigs sticking up out of the snow along a boulevard in south minneapolis. the delicate leaves still intact despite two feet of snow and two months of northern winds.  i had no idea what kind of plant it was. maybe a kind of fern? maybe an asparagus? but then those empty seed cases caught my eye down near the vertex of the branches and i thought, huh, those look . . . and yes i used this word . . . those look “milkweedish.” a quick google search when i got home led me to something called whorled milkweed. a new-to-me minnesota native plant. if not for STILL blog, i probably wouldn’t have even seen this plant among all the urban distraction. and if not for STILL blog, i certainly wouldn’t have been able to identify it so readily. it’s a small thing that is not quite so small as it seems.

whorled milkweed

minneapolis, mn

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

living by the seasons

living by the seasons

living in our tiny corner of rural languedoc in southern france has reminded us just how pleasant it is to live by the seasons. we usually arrive in late summer. for one month we feast on plums. just as we feel we can’t eat another plum–no matter how it is sliced, simmered, baked, poached or preserved–the season ends abruptly and is replaced by peach season. the same pattern repeats itself–the initial delight, the comfort, and ultimately satiation. and just like that, it is suddenly fig season. i bring this up because i am guessing that some of you are getting a little weary of my snow and ice covered winter images. but rest assured, soon enough, and abruptly, there will be signs of spring. but for now we are entering the last phase of winter season. we’ve had our fill. most of the figs have been made into tarts and preserves. there are just a few left, and then the apples and pears will be coming into prime. or in the case of southern minnesota, soon enough, the final tenacious oak leaves will drop, pushed into free fall by the first swelling of juicy buds.

crabapples in february

  • Patty says:

    Thank you, fellow Minnesotan, for the reminder to enjoy, or at least embrace, the fleeting moment of being “full” of snow. I will try to remember to be still, for a moment or two, later this afternoon when I’m out shoveling this new eight inches.

    reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

why is blue so uncommon in nature?

why is blue so uncommon in nature?

this photo made me wonder why the color blue is so difficult to find in nature. a quick google search turned up several explanations all explaining the same thing–that there is no blue pigment in nature, and all the blue we see is really manipulated light waves.

Most pigments that animals exhibit on their fur, skin or feathers due is related to the food they consume. Salmon is pink because of the pink shellfish they eat. Goldfinches get that yellow color from the yellow flowers they consume. But while pigments like red, brown, orange, and yellow come from the food animals eat, that’s not the case with blue. In fact, that blue you see is not really a pigment at all.

When blue does appear in nature, it’s related to other reasons than pigment. In many animals, that blue color is due to the structure of the molecules and the way they reflect light. For example, the blue morpho butterfly (which you might recognize as the butterfly emoji), gets its color from the fact that its wing scales are shaped in ridges that causes sunlight to bend in such a way that blue light, at just the right wavelength, makes it to our eye. If the scales were shaped differently or if something other than air was filling the gaps between them, the blue would vanish.

well, i thought that was pretty interesting. and then i stumbled on this little factoid too:

The ability of us humans to see the color blue is relatively recent in our evolution. No one could see the color blue until modern times. There are studies that show that certain tribes in Africa cannot distinguish blue from green but can see nuances in green that most of us cannot see.

all that from contemplating one fallen mallard feather.

mallard feather

  • Charmian McLellan says:

    Color….that elusive property that is difficult to define and that definition varies widely among cultures. In ON COLOR by David Scott Kastan and Stephen Farthing, they maintain that color VISION must be universal. The human eye and brain work the same way for nearly all people as a property of their being human. In other words, we ALL see blue. But the color LEXICON is shaped by culture. Physiology determines what we see; culture determines how we name, describe, and understand it. The SENSATION of color is physical; the PERCEPTION of color is cultural.

    reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

leaves within a leaf

leaves within a leaf

i spent an afternoon at our local conservatory in como park, which is easy to underestimate when you live in the twin cities, but which is really quite spectacular and beautiful and just the kind of humid tropical escape that someone with dry skin can benefit from on a bone dry winter day. at the conservatory i came across this leaf, which looked like a stalk of leaves growing inside another leaf. i was just so jazzed and inspired at having spent an afternoon rediscovering the como park conservatory, and then newly discovering this rare and exotic leaf. in fact i was so inspired that i (may or may not have) pinched off a leaf or two in order to photograph them later. when i got home i looked the leaf up and found to my dismay that it was the leaf of a rattlesnake plant, a quite common indoor tropical plant from brazil, to which wikipedia devoted exactly three grudging paragraphs. then, adding salt to my wound, the wiki page called those elegant dark leaves within leaves . . . i hesitate even to employ the word . . . wiki called them . . . blotches. welp. thanks for ruining a great day, wiki. remember how i donated to you last year? yeah . . .

rattlesnake plant leaves (calathea lancifolia)

  • Jerilynn Lijewski says:

    This plant is one of my current favorites….not only the beautiful front markings, but also the burgundy-purple colored back of the leaf. Oh! And the crimping-iron edges! It lives quite happily in Northern Wisconsin by a corner window in a room that gets fairly cold at night. I let it get dry before a good watering. It spreads out during the day, and prays at night.

    reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *

"/> "/>