weight

i don’t know that i could explain why i love this composition but i do. there is something about its weight. about its center of gravity. my husband was trying to explain to me, after his recent trip to france, why a particular view of his favorite vineyard was so satisfying. he said he kept looking at it as a whole and then kept looking at all of its elements and kept looking back and forth and everything always worked. there is something almost like satisfying a hunger that goes into consuming a composition you love, whether natural or manipulated. this one fills me up, and leaves; me empty.

botanical collage with found nature bits

linked in

this is either a whimsical arrangement of randomly collected autumn cottonwood leaves, or it is a diagram of the number of degrees of separation between me and kim kardashian. if the latter, it is a comfortingly long and winding path.

cottonwood leaves (Populus deltoides)

repeat

one of the unstated principles of STILL blog is that if you do something over and over again, even if it’s sort of the same thing, the repetition becomes its own kind of art. in this case, i sort of liked my late summer crispy leaf pattern assemblage, but when i doubled it i liked it even more, and when i doubled it again and doubled it yet again, i liked it a lot more. it suddenly looked like filligree work, or like some kind of north african tile pattern. i’d like to think that seven years of still blog has created something similar. an accumulation that becomes its own kind of art.

assemblage of dried green leaves (repeated)

kids

these seeds will be kids someday. looking a lot like their mother and father. i wonder if adolescent trees have hormone surges and don’t do the dishes. i wonder if they need their parents one minute and despise them the next. i wonder if they give one word answers to open ended questions. oops, gotta go. my teenager wants to know where his soccer jersey is.

amur maple seeds in september

birth

this seed head was encased in the stem of this grass until i touched it and suddenly the grass split and gave birth to a new baby seedhead. i’m guessing if the grass were sentient, that splitting would have been painful. i currently have a 14 year old boy who doesn’t talk to me quite as often as I would like, as hormones have begun flooding his system. when he is being especially taciturn, i like to find a way to embarrass him as deeply as possible to get him to talk, and one way to do this is to remind him out loud that i once carried him in my uterus for nine months and then he came out of my vagina. it’s a can’t miss line. i recommend it.

prairie grass seed heads just opening