precarious times

the water fowl have returned. but there is very little open water for them. they are quite literally sitting ducks for the coyotes. yes, i know this is all part of the natural cycle of things. but my heart breaks when i happen upon yet one more mass of feathers left behind by someones late night meal.

mallard feathers

life happens

i am one of those people who never misses a deadline, rarely forgets an appointment, and dislikes being late. it’s not a badge of honor or any kind of statement, i simply don’t like the feeling of running behind or things hanging over me.  i remember once bringing my son into the school office to sign him in after an early morning doctor appointment. as the secretary was in the system to update joseph’s status from absent to tardy, she commented “my goodness, he’s never had an absence!”. Nope,  I replied. She stopped typing, looked up at me and asked in all sincerity “But doesn’t life just happen sometimes?”.

yesterday, life just happened.  i had a 10 AM artist date with my friend Martha that ran longish, and then a 3 PM catch-up with an old friend that went to 10 PM.  when i got home at 11 PM, i fell into bed. and never even thought about posting STILL. yup, every day for 10 years and i still occasionally forget :-) . luckily, i did have an image, already made. all i forgot was the posting part. but, it is still march 25th, so i fortunately (for me, i know you don’t really care) i haven’t technically broken the chain.

winter thistle leaf detail

under the canopy

we have a lot of pines in mjnnesota, and many of my walks pass through (under?) groves of 60 foot evergreens. so these fallen-then-caught-again pine needles on the bare branches of the understory frequently decorate my walks. i have been wanting to photograph them for a while–but it meant either grabbing my equipment and heading back to the trial i had just walked, or snipping a branch tip and then carrying it gingerly all the way back home. neither option is much fun, so i kept putting it off. it took the threat of coming leaf-out to break my procrastination. nothing like a non-negotiable deadline for motivation.

fallen pine needles caught on bare branch

turn towards the sun

rain last night. not snow. we are making progress. i heard sandhill cranes today. and red winged blackbirds. and some south facing hills are now bare. spring is arriving on it’s own internal clock. it’s reassuring to see these signs. this season of unlocking can be a tough one on us northerners who have been frozen for nearly 5 months. but look at those shadows! the sun is getting brighter every day. we are so close now…

winter wild sunflower stems in march sunlight

one, maybe two

i went down two rabbit holes today. the first was trying to identify these winter stems that i come across often, and who always catch my attention because of all that glorious texture. after several failed attempts, and a life-line call to a fellow local forager (who also failed), i finally found my answer–narrowleaf vervain. a common wildflower/weed of the central united states. whew. it shouldn’t be so hard to identify plants in their winter state. the second rabbit hole was much more abstruse. i am currently reading Jenny Odell’s new book Saving Time, Discovering Lief Beyond the Clock. last night while i sat by the fire reading, she made a brief mention of a french writer, Georges Perec, who coined the term infraordinary. She summarized his idea as such: “Media and the public perception of time, he wrote, focused on the extraordinary—things outside the ordinary, like cataclysmic events and upheavals. The infraordinary was, instead, that layer inside or just beneath the ordinary, and being able to see it involved the challenge of seeing through the habitual.” infraordinary! STILL is an exercise in seeing the infraordinary, i thought. common weeds, like vervain, aren’t even ordinary, they go so unnoticed that they become infraornindary. so this morning, i started googling “infraordinary” to see if it is a thing. it is. people know about the concept, but mostly in academia it seems, and maybe a few architects. and just out of curiosity, i went into OpenAI’s GPT-4 system to see if that could tell me anything more about infraordinary than i had learned doing my own research. whoa! was i blown away. freaked out, actually. i had an hour long, full on conversation, with GPT-4 about every aspect of infraordinary. it was like having lunch with someone who had done their dissertation on the concept. i learned which artists have applied the concept to their work, who the leading experts in the concept are today. we talked for an hour–me asking questions, and GPT-4 giving lucid, concise answers. that rabbit hole got a little too deep. i was so freaked out by how smart this system was, i had to go outside into the sunlight and shake it off.

p.s. i just spent 20minutes typing up my experience with GPT-4 today, and it just occurred to me…i could have asked GPT-4 to write the summary for me! 😳

narrow-leaf vervain in winter (verbena simplex)