something in the air

jeff bezos just rode a giant penis into space. and i found two perky breasts on the sidewalk. what’s going on? do i want to know?

green acorns (oaknuts)

bonus: the word acorn comes from old english and is a derivation of oak + corn

rest

i opened my front door today to find this small tragedy on my stoop. fly away home, tiny miracle. may your heaven contain an abundance of caterpillars, beetles, spiders, and wasps.

nashville warbler

ingenious deception

these burdock blooms look just like thistles. but they are surprisingly supple to the touch. it is not until they dry out in winter that those hooks will get rigid enough to snag (without yielding) to anything that passes by.  i have no doubt that the thistle imitation plays an evolutionary role, but it is still the clinging properties of of those tiny pirate hooks that has immortalized burdock as the precursor of velcro. i love this plant in july. i will curse it all winter long.

burdock flowers (Arctium)

generative mess

i’ve got two big art projects going on right now (in addition to my daily STILL). one is a proposal for STILL book (still only in proposal stage…so, sorry, nothing imminent),  and the other is very large (8 foot long) collaged paper art piece made from hand cut pieces individually dyed in my handmade natural inks. wowsa!  so, two big projects. which means bits and pieces of art projects everywhere–drying dyed paper, sample book pages, reference books, vat of natural dyes, paper scraps from all the hand cutouts…it’s a beautiful, generative, kind of chaos. but still chaos. and this minimalist can feel a little enervated by the whole mess, even when it is my own mess. this photo is just one corner of my specimen table swept up into a (temporary) neat circle. beautiful, generative, productive, exciting clutter. but still clutter.

hiding in plain sight

i picked this queen anne’s lace over a week ago. it’s been sitting in a vase on my kitchen counter ever since. today i decided to photograph it before all the of the flowerheads opened. i placed the vase in front of my kitchen window, set up my tripod and pulled the image into focus in my camera’s viewfinder.  only then did i notice the hitchhiker who has been living as a guest in my house for over a week. a swallowtail caterpillar–one of my favorite butterflies.  he looks healthy. he must be finding enough food to sustain himself. now i am faced with the moral dilemma of returning him to the wild or keeping him on my kitchen counter  so i may watch, first hand, one of nature’s most extraordinary transformations. and so, a quick snapshot of  queen anne’s lace has turned into an existential crisis. some days are more challenging than others.

queen anne’s lace and eastern black swallowtail caterpillar (Papilio polyxenes)