gathering in

everyone in the north is getting ready for winter. the expansiveness of summer, arms thrown wide under the sun, has been replaced by the classic cold weather stance, each hand grabbing the opposite bicep, and rubbing up and down for warmth. if you don’t know what i’m talking about, look at any minneapolis bus stop between december 1 and march 31. everybody looks like this fern.

late october fern frond curling on itself

iterations

there is a book called designing your life, written by the founders of the stanford d-school, which i read recently and decided i should teach as an undergraduate design course. we’ll see whether that happens or not, but meanwhile, one of their suggestions is to make a mind map of what you think your interests are and how they might be applied in the real world. then you take that to a second iteration. then you take that second iteration, and make a third iteration, and by the time you get to that point, you have begun to imagine some interesting possibilities. in the case of this photo, first i stepped on a dried leaf, then i tried carefully to separate the fragments into something more interesting, and then, finally, i blew on them, and suddenly things got interesting.

dried smoketree leaf, shattered

order with a bit of chaos

this composition started with the semicircular chain of yellowing hosta leaves. that took about 35 seconds. then i took about an hour or so of arranging, then disarranging, then adding elements, then removing elements, then disarranging some more, then arranging just a little bit,  to make the “random”  elements of this image look both random enough to feel random, and distributed interestingly enough to be worthy of your attention, dear STILL blog visitor. i work hard to earn your morning visits. don’t think otherwise.

autumn detritus

a spade full of forest duff

when you live in the north american woods you learn that the forest floor is not made up of soil. or rather its top layer is not made up of soil. it is made of something called duff, which is a loose semi-deteriorated layer of leaves and roots and needles that some woodland wildflowers can only grow in. below the duff is the actual soil. but i love the concept of duff. that a unique layer of life in the forest can only live in conditions that are constantly in transition.

hardwood forest duff

all of autumn in one leaf

look at all of the colors in this leaf. in some ways so ordinary and in some ways so spectacular. lime green. basil green. lemon yellow. harvest gold. tangerine. magenta. rust. scarlet. blood. with a couple of small insect holes to boot. a STILL blog leaf if i ever saw one.

maple leaf in october