a nest for everyone

let us all, individually and together, be a soft place, where eggs of different colors, shapes and sizes feel safe gestating, and hatching, so that they may bring us the unequaled joys of being surrounded by a fractious and noisy mixed brood.

egg collection in nest of prairie grass seed heads

interspecies love

i sometimes talk about trees and plants as friends. if that makes sense to you, then it just does. and if it doesn’t, then it maybe never will. but i see this photo, and i think about winter walks in silent landscapes that fill me with a vast and enveloping sense of being alone. in places like that, i can look at the friendly red of a dogwood, or the patient elegance of a leaning birch tree, or the strangely summery green of a juniper, and i feel accompanied in almost the same way as if i had a friend walking beside me, and my loneliness is relieved.

paper birch bark, juniper, and red dogwood

hello. goodbye.

rain and wind has beaten almost all remaining autumn color to the ground (except for the tenacious oak leaves, many of which will stay on until the new growth pushes them out next spring). in their place, are the grays and browns of tree trunks, twigs, cattail stalks, and bracket fungus. this is my palate now, for a little over four months.

miscellaneous autumn finds: bracket fungus, wasp nests, autumn leaves

dead ends

i don’t love this image. i tried hard. i cleaned it up. i reshot it. i raised it off the black surface to try to get more definition. sometimes you just do work that’s less than your  best, and you have to let it go out into the world. my husband just spent 4 days he couldn’t really afford on a food writing piece that he was never super excited about, and that his editors didn’t like. nor did he. nor did i. but there’s a deadline, and more deadlines after that. and so you turn it in and move on.  you have to remember all those days you spent wondering what it would be like someday if you ever got the chance to make art that people wanted to see. you have to remember that that’s what you’re doing right now, and that, even at the end of a dead-end day, it’s dreamy.

winter fern frond

chew toy

i left this pheasant wing in my studio after photographing it, thinking hard about how i would try to describe its beauty, which manages to be both subtle and showy at the same time, both broadly colorful and intricately patterned. later we had friends over and they brought their siberian husky, who trotted around the house, familiarizing herself with all the new smells, and who, in the process, simplified the task of describing this wing. it is a chew toy.

male ringed-neck pheasant wing