rebuilding

i am still piecing myself together after my recent bout of “la gastro.” i think i am healed and then my abdomen announces that i am not healed. i eat one day with hunger and without issues. i eat the next day without hunger and with issues. i will spare you much more detail than that. to those of you who have had newborns just back from the hospital, do you remember how absolutely locked in you became to the digestive system (and its results) of the tiny creature in your care? yeah. it’s much less fun when it’s your own digestive system, and you are not one week old, and not tiny, and not adorable.

beach tumbled terra cotta roof tiles

energy

i arranged these quail eggs four or five different ways. this was not the best composition, but it had the right energy for some reason. it looked to me as if the ring of eggs facing in were somehow caring for, or nurturing, the egg in the middle. maybe this came from my association with quail eggs. the first time we came to the languedoc, my son discovered hard boiled quail eggs and it was one of his transition foods between what we ate in the u.s. and what was available for us to eat in france. we had brought the dog along on that first trip, and one day we gave him a raw quail egg to play with. he was so extraordinarily gentle with it, cradling it in his mouth, and immediately looking for a place to play with it. in the end, we found the egg under one of our pillows, completely unscathed. he had “buried” it like a bone, but so tenderly, that it reminded me of my own guileless and gentle 6 year old son, and now the sight of quail eggs always gives me that feeling of gentleness and male energy harnessed in the direction of caring, like a big hairy arm rocking a baby to sleep. so that’s my very long story, about why a ring of eggs nuzzling another egg in the middle of their circle had an energy i responded to today. amazing how many of these associations we have, biding their time, waiting to be triggered by a memory.

quail eggs

the nose in front of your face

you know how you can hold your raised finger up against the bridge of your nose, and it is so close that you almost can’t see it? that’s how i feel about never having photographed an oyster for STILL blog until today. nine years and six trips to the same village in the languedoc, with oysters delivered to our village square every week, and not once has it occurred to me that an oyster might be an interesting subject for a post. it’s like the back of my hand. yup. there it is. all the time. every day. couple of veins and a few freckles. not gonna feature it in a STILL blog post . . .

huîtres de Bouzigues (oyster from the Etang de Thau)

rebirth

one explicit goal of STILL blog is commemoration. Not as in remembering the dead, but as in valuing moments, beings, and objects, living and dead, seemingly significant and seemingly insignificant, by paying attention to them for however brief a time. everything in this photo is ostensibly dead. the split leg bone of a wild boar found on the bank of a trout stream and the russet colored moth with the feathery antennae found on the ground below a window. one was mighty once, one could fly. they lived, i believe, in the pleasure and fear that is the lot of every earthly life form. i like to think that the accumulation of moments that you spend looking at them extends their life in some small way.

wild boar leg bones with a november moth

late november in autignac

here’s a little standing ovation for the neglected color palette of late november. look how happy they all are to be themselves. ladies and gentlemen, let’s give them a hand. you should know, however, that they can’t really take a bow. you’ll just have to take the bow on faith.

assorted stems from a late november walk