Today I’m grateful it’s the second shortest day of the year and that soon we’ll be gaining daylight. I’m also grateful for this photographic reminder that although the landscape is currently dry-and-drab as far as the eye can see, brown doesn’t always mean dead. And ugly. And depressing.
Brown can also bring joy. Today I post this intricately beautiful brown iris as a reminder that blooms of many colors are in my not-so-distant future.
I wanted to express my magpie love today and went in search of a fun fact about this member of the corvid family. Guess what you call a group of magpies? A parliament.
However, my research didn’t reveal what the parliamentary procedure is for one magpie reuniting with the rest of the gang.
“Animals don’t behave like men,’ he said. ‘If they have to fight, they fight; and if they have to kill, they kill. But they don’t sit down and set their wits to work to devise ways of spoiling other creatures’ lives and hurting them. They have dignity and animality.” ~
Looked closer and found
brave blooms in midst of the drab
guess I’ll try the same
sunflower shadows
blooming no more, still lovely
patio painting
This boxelder bug has been hanging out in my bathroom for days, somehow managing to avoid getting stepped on or otherwise accidentally smushed. I’m happy for its company and frequently pause to appreciate its dapper coloration.
Good things do come in small packages.
As I crouched next to my writing room window to photograph a Red-tailed Hawk on the wire, I was so intent on focusing the shot on the bird rather than the branches and power lines that I didn’t see what else was going on: another hawk had arrived.
It wasn’t until I’d downloaded the photos that I saw those legs in the upper right-hand corner of the image. Maybe there’s such a thing as being too intent on one’s goal.
Brisk weather bathing
splash fast splash often get out
no need for towel
Hope is a waking dream.
~ Aristotle
Participate joyfully in the sorrows of the world.
We cannot cure the world of sorrows, but we can choose to live in joy.
~ Joseph Campbell
Agility test
failure’s not an option here
Strength and persistence
When you rise in the morning,
give thanks for the light, for your life, for your strength.
Give thanks for your food and for the joy of living.
If you see no reason to give thanks, the fault lies in yourself.
~ Tecumseh
Anything can make me stop and look and wonder, and sometimes learn.
~ Kurt Vonnegut
Rustler Gulch Trail. Crested Butte, CO. July 2018.
Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul. ~ John Muir
Today’s yoga view
now must loosen my muscles
with guidance of rocks.
As the nervousness and anxiety mounts regarding the outcome of tomorrow’s votes, I turn to my default emotional-health tool: nature.
This deer showed up in our front yard just over a year ago and today I’m grateful for its grace, beauty, and calming demeanor.
Breathe, Tracy. Breathe . . .
This weekend many, many people are volunteering their time and energy and money to political candidates and causes. I am grateful for the collective passion and commitment aimed at turning this ship around.
This cotoneaster was a volunteer in my yard. I didn’t plant it, one day it just showed up. And now it’s among the most beautiful and vibrant bushes in the garden.
Volunteers are the very best, whether flora or fauna. Thank you all.
Still life with squirrel
rare moment of inaction
in a life of GO!
Hey, Laughing Gull! How about an assist for this lowly writer toiling down below? Could you please tell me how to organize the scenes in this new project?
There’s a bread crust in it for you . . .
I understood at a very early age that in nature, I felt everything I should feel in church but never did. ~ Alice Walker
It’s a whole new week and there’s much to be done. I’m gonna try to smile along the way and I hope you do, too.
Let’s do this.
Be as a bird perched on a frail branch that she feels bending beneath her, still she sings away all the same, knowing she has wings.
~ Victor Hugo
Our guest next to Zippy’s hand for scale.
I spent the afternoon working in the yard in preparation for the winter storm and below-freezing temperatures on the way. I cut back perennials and chopped up greens to add to our two compost tumblers and standing bin. Zippy joined me after his bike ride and made the plants from his vegetable garden compost-ready. As he stood over the bin and chopped up tomato plants, he discovered a guest he’d been dreading all summer: a tomato hornworm.
He showed me and said his friend had told him that hornworms turned into swallowtail butterflies. That didn’t sound right so I checked. In fact, tomato hornworms turn into the five-spotted hawkmoth. Either way, that’s quite the transformation. (I do think it’s kinda too bad the horn gets lost along the way.)
The complexity of things – the things within things – just seems to be endless.
I mean nothing is easy, nothing is simple.
~ Alice Munro
