asemic exhale

this is what it looks like after holding your breath for five years, and then letting out a slow, centered, conscious, regenerative, lung-emptying, jaw-slackening, shoulder-slumping, eyes closed, blow-out-all-the-candles, fucking exhale.

unidentified winter weed seed stalks

seed poetry

my mother once won a blue ribbon at the minnesota state fair seed art competition, where artists arrange seeds of different sizes, colors, and textures to create painterly compositions. i have lately been wanting to do more asemic writing, but i was stuck. it’s not usual for me to be stuck. but nothing was speaking to me (pun intended). today, with the help of my husband steve, and inspiration from mom, i started working with seeds. not seed art. seed poetry. asemic seed poetry…but with him at my side. and her in my mind.

p.s. if you can enlarge your screen, take a look at the incredible texture on those itty bitty seeds. seriously, who knew? i always assumed they were just smooth little BBs.

poppy seeds

what does it mean to be popular?

according to pinterest, eucalyptus is consistently among my most pinned images. people like it. its popular. i wonder, what about it makes eucalyptus more popular than say queen anne’s lace? or willow? or ferns? is it familiarity? or uniqueness? delicacy? or sturdiness? sentimentality? or universality? association? color? repetition?  beauty is interesting that way. in the way that it cannot easily be defined. how everyone agrees, but no one can explain it. how it changes over the decades. all i know, it that right now, in the early part of the 21st century, eucalyptus is popular.

dried eucalyptus 

what do da vinci, darwin, and picasso have in common?

my first impression of this tendril, as i was looking at it through the viewfinder on my camera, was that it looked like a face. the kind of face picasso might doodle. but on closer inspection, on my imac, i see it is a perfect example of darwin’s tendril perversion, in which tendrils adopt the shape of two sections of counter-twisted helices with a transition in the middle. while we are at it, shall me talk about da vinci’s obsession with spirals? da vinci, darwin, picasso. quite a mighty tendril.

wild grape vine tendril

perfect conditions

today we had temps hovering right around freezing (32 F), and a winter white sky. i went to throw the garbage out in the garage and saw hanging from the gutters a STILL composition waiting as if prepped for a photo shoot. some days are easier than others.

icicles