our daughter, eva, recently had to put together a visual arts portfolio for a few of her college applications. so i was rummaging through some old journals from our time in southern france, when the whole family was working our way through the classic drawing book Drawing on the Right Side of The Brain by betty edwards. it was fun to revisit all those exercises (even though i hated them at the time). turns out, we were better than i recalled. anyway, as i got to the back of one of the journals, i flipped the page and out fluttered a handful of found feathers from our beloved languedoc. i was immediately transported. right over my head, riding hot mediterranean thermals, circled a buse variable, waiting patiently for a rabbit or hare to wander too far from the protection of the dense, prickly garrigue. it was a 30 second homecoming, and has me thinking about our return to that magical place this fall.

wing feathers of la buse variable (buteo buteo)

languedoc, france

p.s. this photo almost looks like an illustration because it is backlit. in order to get the white stripes to show up against a bright white background, i shot it against a window for back lighting.  if you are interested in getting occasional glimpses about my improvised set ups, you can follow me on instagram here.

i can’t help experiencing these dried grasses and flower petals not as colors but as flavors. i taste red chili oil on my tongue, i taste saffron rice, i taste mangoes and lavender, and i taste a refreshingly cool star-fruit crunch of hydrangea flower.

colorful debris

i tried very hard and very unsuccessfully to flatten this strip of birch bark in order to photograph it, and then, finally, i stopped and listened to it. it had been talking to me the whole time. saying it wanted to be photographed like this. got it. my bad. thanks for your patience.

paper birch bark

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here’s what i know about super bowl 50. somebody played somebody, and somebody won and somebody lost, and a lot of people cared, and some people are happy about it and some people are sad, and they were playing something which is a thing that is not actually football in the rest of the world, but is football in america. and there were cheerleaders and they held pom-poms, and the sad ones looked like this picture and the happy ones probably did not. meanwhile i was not watching the super bowl, but was eating pork ribs and french fries and sauerkraut by a hardwood fire and feeling, despite everything, very comfortably american.

dried mum

we are all feeling a little dry and crispy around here. we could use a little vitamin d.

dried gerbera daisy