young and pliable

the challenge of my day today was figuring out a way to weave pliable stems with very little backbone into stiff willow stems and new-growth cattail leaves. i both want to invite such insignificant challenges into my life, and be open to how privileged i am to be in such a position. i hope that more people who look like me may be troubled by such thoughts, who may previously have been untroubled.

weaving of june branches

BLM

not talking today. just listening.

low fi

in order to post images to STILL blog, i have to resize the originals to a tiny fraction of the original image size. otherwise your load times would take forever. when the image is complex, like this one, with lots of edges or lots of details, then the resizing often loses a huge amount of fidelity. enjoy your reasonable load time. but i sure wish i could make you wait for the original.

young waxy cottonwood leaves

a new direction

part of a daily blog is that you do it every day. still blog has never missed a day, in over eight years, through good and bad days, both personally and globally. i plan to continue every day, because that’s what i do, and because solutions to injustice have to fit into daily life eventually or they will never work as solutions. but don’t think for a minute that the placid exterior of this daily exercise in peacefulness is hiding anything but outrage and grief and exhaustion at the latest expression of how the powerful in this society get away, literally, with murder, while the less powerful must always, always, find a way to absorb that reality into their lives. i hope this is the beginning of some form of end to that. but until then, i want to be unambiguous about which side i stand on.

(unidentified) branch with dried leaves

the season between seasons

it’s easy to think of this as high lilac season, or high wild geranium season, or high lily of the valley season. but it is also the season between seasons. it is the season of the budding but not quite flowering black locust flower. it is the season of the buttercup bud. and it is the season of the immature wild grape bunch. everything moves through the seasons together, like generations that overlap but that are each of a different age.

wild grape vine in spring