i like taking this time of year to write an appreciative  summary of the previous year, and a STILL blog promise for the coming year. but this new year my head is in the vice grip of a nasty head cold. so i am going to wait a day or two until i can think clearly. meanwhile i chose this vine tendril to photograph today because i am thinking a lot about paths lately; straight paths, alternative paths, wandering paths, curlicue paths. i will make sense of all this when my sinuses drain.

wild grape tendril

rice creek regional trail, saint paul, minnesota

i did not alter or enhance the hue of this spruce sap at all. that’s how it looked dripping from the knot of our tree. i realize that blue is the color of melancholy, and that this weeping sap looks like tears. but i actually ended 2014 very happy, thanks in great measure to all of you, and the daily creative sharing you encourage, appreciate, and enhance. thank you, thank you, and thank you.

spruce sap

saint paul, minnesota

for some time, i have been a big believer in writing down your goals and intentions. it has been a gradually increasing conviction for the past twenty years. my husband, steve, and i try to sit down once a year or so, usually over a nice dinner date with cocktails, and write down our 5 and 10 year goals. what we soon realized was that when we did this, the goals were more likely to get accomplished, and often in 2-3 years instead of 5-10. it was astounding to us at first, and then we came almost to expect it–if you write down your goals, not just say them out loud, but actually write them down, they are more likely to happen and usually sooner than you’d ever imagine. so, i probably shouldn’t have been surprised today (but still was), when i wrote on one of my instagram photos that “in 2015, i’d love to license a line of textile linens using STILL blog images,” and within an hour the Home product manager for Target Corporation had emailed me and invited me to coffee. see? i had finally written it down. tomorrow, i plan to cure cancer. stand by.

dried leaf of unknown identity

saint paul, minnesota

p.s. i’ll keep you all posted on this meeting with Target, but this first meeting is just a getting to know each other, no licensing contracts promised.

it was too cold to take the dog out for a walk today, and i have a head cold, which required a day of recuperating. but i stil had to do a photo for STILL, so i went to gather a bouquet of roadside black-eyed susan stems. it wouldn’t be long before they were bent and buried under the snow, so i had been thinking i had better nab them while i could. i had already planned the photo in my mind: i was going to shoot the bouquet top down with a very shallow depth of field (f2.8), so the seed heads would appear like a constellation, with only a few in focus and the rest fading to a soft blur. so i did that, and it was just okay. then i had a thought: all the stems looked a lot like a wigwam, so i tried to capture a sort of arched ribbed ceiling effect. it was . . .  just okay. ok, let’s try just the seed heads, in a roughly random pattern on white paper. meh. just okay. by now, my energy and my light were both fading, and i was about to make the best of “meh,”  when i noticed the sort of beautiful random mess of seeds that the black-eyed susan heads had released due to my not-so-tender ministrations. in the end, the byproduct of the process was more interesting than the process itself. my carving was a failure. but the wood shavings fell artfully.

black eyed susan seeds

vadnais lake trail, saint paul, minnesota

i did an interview over the holidays for Lucky Brand (here), who featured STILL on their company blog on christmas day. they emailed a dozen questions about my daily routines, about jack the puggle, and about how and where i find my inspiration. the questions prompted me to revisit a number of images and moments and some of my original motivations for starting this blog. when they asked about my favorite finds over the last three years, i realized i had to sift through a number of quite spectacular finds, including a baby eagle, a great horned owl, a trumpeter swan, a coyote, and the great blue heron above, but my favorite finds, as opposed to my most spectacular finds, were the ones that had emotion behind them. the favorites each had a story that meant something to me. which is not something i think about very often. i mostly search for images that are beautiful or interesting, but not necessarily images attached to an emotion or a narrative. perhaps, thanks to an unexpected interview, that will now change.

great blue heron feather

grass lake, saint paul, minnesota