skyline

in the future, we will grow our buildings from bulbs, and we will live inside their comfortable, bioengineered cells for a limited number of years, until it is time for them to return to earth, by which time we will have planted other bulbs, that will be waiting for us a little ways across town. our cities will all be temporary cities, near water, which we won’t pollute, and then those cities will be earth again, and we will generate energy from their slow deterioration. i ask you. is that more far-fetched, in the history of humankind, than a human being whose feet never touch the earth, who drinks only water filtered by the government because no other water is safe to drink, and who eats blended protein powder for breakfast?

paperwhite narcissus shoots (narcissus papyraceus)

stop

i talk a lot about the design and the composition and sometimes the biology of what i shoot for STILL blog. but i don’t often talk about the whole point of this, which is to stop and look at one thing at a time. what this feather did for me was let me see, in the faint ripples of the far side barbules, an overcast lake shore on a calm day in november. not a very important observation on one hand, and on the other hand, taking the time to see that was the best couple of minutes of my day.

crane feather

a human compulsion to create order

we have a large dining room table. it seats eight comfortably. but there are only three of us at home now. so, half of the table is usually covered with leftover nature and recent bits of STILL blog compositions. over the years, i have learned that if i set the table to for dinner, and kind of scooch an interesting collection of nature bits close to the plates. then someone will inevitably start sorting and stacking. that was my plan yesterday when i “carelessly” left a pile of driftwood within easy reach of dinner. by the time i’d finished the dishes, this had happened.

driftwood

steal like an artist

one of my foundational pieces of advice, which really lies at the origin of STILL blog, is “do good work and put it where people can see it.” that quotation is from austin kleon, who also wrote a book called “steal like an artist.” his point is that there is nothing new, and that everything is more or less borrowed from something else, so go out there and find influences and copy them and you can’t help but make them your own. i don’t know the name of the artist i stole this from (theirs was in metal), but i am admitting without any hesitation that this is a concept i “stole like an artist.” thank you to whomever i stole this from. and to whomever they stole that from. and to whomever that person stole their image from. etc. etc. etc.

winter stems with circles of birch bark

what it could be

• lost archipelago recently found in the in the south pacific with new species of palm.
• dr seuss’s original truffula trees
• golf divets from augusta national found by creatively inclined groundskeeper
• bigfoot’s bonsai experiment
• cordyceps fungi parasitizing an abstract art installment
• the saddest little garden
• the alien invasion at last
• a genetically modified hyper-carbon-consuming flower that will soon alter the trajectory of global warming and save the world.
• blobs of moss with winter wildflowers stuck in them
• (the last one is my least favorite)

ok fine: blobs of moss with winter wildflowers stuck in them. sigh.