Category Archives: Nature

Fly by Night

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graphite drawingBeguiling Moonlight

Every autumn evening, at the end of day,

The moon’s pale eminence sends out a silver-shining ray

A-glinting through the branches and glimmering on leaves

And shimmering on spiderwebs tucked underneath the eaves

And calling all the kitty-cats from shadowed alleys out

To torment all the night-birds still fluttering about,

And drawing from their houses the dogs behind the slats

Of shuttered sleepy windows to torment all the cats,

And pulling on the heart-strings of every sleepy child

To call each one to play out in the moonlight, in the wild,

To dance among the cat-kins and soar among the birds

And leap among the moon-mad dogs and sing the magic words

That cast a spell of loveliness on creatures so, and soon,

We’ll fall asleep, each one of us, under the autumn moon.

A Change of Seasons

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digital artwork from a photoAutumnal

Faint as the smoke from a fir-branch fire

far off on the foggy shore,

Where salt-stung sea choruses a choir

as the tide rolls more and more

Of the oyster shells in its back-and-forth,

tumbling them to pearly dust,

I can hear the birds winging from the north

as each Fall they surely must,

And I watch as they darken the silver skies

in a wave of shivering black,

Sailing south toward warmth with their anguished cries,

to bid the sweet Summer backdigital artwork from a photo

What if I Never Grow Up?

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digitally doctored photoAside from the fact that all of you know already that this is a given rather than a question, I can still pose it rhetorically and ask it of all people in general. See, I think about this a fair amount, and not just because of my own level of maturity at any given time or in any given category. It’s simply a question we all get asked in one way or another at some point, or should jolly well ask ourselves, at the least.

This marvelous Möbius loop of inquiry and insistence begins the first time we are told, as children, that we need to Grow Up, and it can be applied to any number of circumstances. The irony that this mandate is almost invariably handed down to us by a person or persons barely older and more grown than ourselves is of course lost on all of the parties involved, because we’re all too inexperienced and naive and, conversely, too full of ourselves to understand it. The bigger kid tells the littler kid to Grow Up mainly because the elder wants something that the younger has or has simply lost patience with her.

It doesn’t change. When we’re older, the toys and privileges may have changed to different brands of money and power, but as long as we think someone else has more of whichever kind we desire than we do, we’re just as inclined in adulthood to nit-pick at that someone for his supposedly lower maturity levels both as cover for our covetousness and in shallow hopes of shaming him into being more generous than we are ourselves. The failure of this silly system doesn’t change either, but it doesn’t stop the less magnanimous and less mature from nagging at those who are more so, no matter the age or the occasion.

There are perfectly good reasons to wish anybody, including ourselves, would think and act with maturity and keen sense and the wisdom of experience. Those things tend to lead to our being more level-headed in emergencies, more practical in the everyday, and more inclined to share those traits and all sorts of other things with other people–and that leads to better community. Who knows, even World Peace.

But isn’t it grand, all the same, to forever retain a large enough pinch of immaturity and, if not childishness, then at least the ability to be childlike, that we can still look at the wide world with the awe and wonder it requires. We should hang on, with youthful enthusiasm and gleeful tenaciousness, to innocence and hope, to curiosity and rambunctiousness, to unalloyed silliness whenever the moment permits. Maybe we should even be willing to get down there with the actual kids and roll around in the grass once in a while without batting an eye over how dirty it’ll get us or whether it might make our old joints sore tomorrow. If we can’t still do somersaults, then we’d better find other ways to regain and retain our not at all grown up point of view, because the world, especially while it’s still short of outright Peace, can really use a healthy splash of the ridiculous now and again.

 

Here in My Safe Little Place

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graphite drawingComfort and security, that’s what I want. And I think I’m hardly unusual in that urge. Aside from the rare adrenaline junkies whose craving for danger and life on the edge knows no bounds, most of us like to have at least one place in life, on earth or in mind where we can crawl in, curl up and feel like nothing and no one can assail us there.

While I adore travel and I treasure those people and experiences and grand-and-glorious places that it has brought to my acquaintance, there’s at least a small part of me that may always be leaning toward Home. I don’t think of myself as an adventurer by any means at all, but I’ve grown a bit more attracted to the happy mysteries of the unfamiliar or even the exotic as I’ve gotten older, and I can appreciate much better how much wealth and delight the new and unexpected can often bring into my purview. Now, what I must keep in mind instead of a constant combat against my natural urge to shun all movement outward from my safe, soft center is that my concept of that person-place-or-thing identifiable as Home has changed, and can change, and certainly will change, because that’s exactly the sort of surprising flexibility that an even minimally worldly human can experience, once the crying need for total security is breached satisfactorily.

So here goes: once more I shall leap outward in hope and expectant happiness, and all at the same time remain busily, constantly honing the cozy little hideaway that will shelter my spirit and, if need be, my self when the adventures get a little overwhelming. With a cheery wave, when I’m not too tightly coiled up with my security blanket there, I shall ever bid you all a fond goodbye, farewell, and goodnight–and see you in the morning.

If It’s Wednesday, This Must be Foodie Tuesday Deja Vu

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Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? Why, yes, if you are a fresh berry. Those sweet little nuggets of juicy goodness are the very epitome of summertime’s joys, and the longer we can extend the berry adventure by means of preserved, frozen or baked goods, the merrier. I’ve already rhapsodized about my mother’s justly famed raspberry pie (the mystic quality of her ethereal pie crusts a deservedly notable part of the equation, in the interest of full disclosure), and she made many a jar of equally brilliant raspberry jam over her wildly productive years of canning and preserving. I will never be her equal in either of these arts.photo

I do, however, have enough fondness for some berries that I will gladly binge on them while their season lasts, and far beyond, in whatever forms are available, because I can practically feel the vitamins rushing into my cells when I do, and more importantly, because they taste so fabulous and are such great utility players on Team Food. On their own, they are magnificent and refreshing. In salads, a divine break from any leanings toward excess of greens. Think, for example, of a marvelous mix of butter lettuce, Romaine, toasted sliced almonds, shavings of fine Reggiano cheese and a generous handful of raspberries all happily commingling with a light creamy fresh thyme dressing. Transcendent! Fruit salad melanges practically insist on having a handful of berries gracing them when the season is right. And I’m told by those who eat blueberries that no berry surpasses them for muffin or pancake making. Me, I’ll gladly stick with Swedish pancakes piled up with whipped cream and fresh strawberries when it comes to the breakfast berry-ations. And of course there are endless possibilities in the universe of fruit smoothies when it comes to berries, whether you’re in the camp that must strain out the seeds or among those who appreciate the fiber therein.

And don’t get me started about desserts! The natural affinity fruit has for sweet foods is showcased wonderfully in so many after-dinner or coffee-time treats that a mere post could hardly suffice to even skim the list. But some goodies do come immediately to mind: strawberries dipped in chocolate; cloudberry cream, as I learned to love it when prepared in the seconds-long fresh season by my brother-in-law’s late mother; blackberry tapioca pudding. Pies, tarts, and crumbles, oh my. A heap of berries and a gentle sluicing of vanilla custard atop a slice of toasted pound cake. Honestly, few ways to go awry.

Still, the berry, with its pristine, bright, zingy flavor, and the hints of sweetness underlying it, makes a superb foil for savory dishes too, not least of all meats and seafoods. One of those ways to slip berry-liciousness into the main dish is to pool any of the multitude of possible berry-enhanced sauces and purees under, over or alongside a portion of entrée. I’m fond of Beurres Rouges ou Blancs made with wine, butter and berries cooked down to dense, flavorful stupendousness. Hard to argue with, say, a blackberry-Cabernet sauce served with lamb or duck, and I can only imagine that a dry, red-fruity Rosé would pair gracefully in such a sauce with raspberries or, dare I say it, salmonberries, to accompany a roasted filet of salmon or breast of pheasant or grilled chicken. Champagne Beurre Blanc is hard to resist with shellfish; why not top that with roasted strawberries and a quick grind of black pepper?

As you can see, what happens when I get the mere image of a berry into my tiny brain is that it plants the seeds for extensive food fantasizing. And that is hardly a bad thing, my friends. Bury me in berries. I could do much worse.

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Simplicity Itself

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photoSimplicity, I think, is like most of the virtues and values that we humans might hold dear–those who have it don’t necessarily appreciate it, and those who talk the most about it tend to know the least about it.

The rich and comfortable are so obsessed with the idea or ideal of simplicity nowadays that there are magazines, fashions, classes and whole philosophical movements devoted to its study and cultivation. People will expend massive quantities of energy and spend large quantities of money on trying to simplify their lives and themselves, when very likely simply giving up the energetic striving and letting go of the amassed money would do the trick in a trice. (Perish the thought!)

The poor and underprivileged have ultimate simplicity forced upon them, and tend to choose whether to embrace the unsullied earthiness and quietly hardworking ways thrust on them by their circumstances or to battle against them. Probably a majority of people, both poor and rich, will always think the grass greener where they are not, and hardly give thought to how hard the next person is trying to get over the fence onto their own enviably other property. Dissatisfaction may be an essential part of humanity’s natural state of being, much as it naturally chafes us to think so.

On the other hand, looking at what dissatisfies us with as unsparingly honest a glare as we can might in fact shed some light on how to find better contentment, not necessarily by having more or less of something (tangible or ephemeral) but by giving it all its appropriate due and then saving our true love for the most meaningful virtues and values of all. At the very least, that narrows down the field for most of us. At its best, it frees us up to say that life is remarkably livable where we exist right here, right now, regardless of the shade or tint of the lawn. The simple presence of any one particular leaf of grass or bud of bloom in the one square foot of soil nearest to hand may be quite enough, at least for one simple day.photo

 

Another Good Thing about Waving One’s Arms

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Waving my arms is something I may think about more than the average person does. From when I was pretty young I was conscious of arm movement as being mighty significant in a seriously diverse series of ways. First of all, there was that childhood training we all enjoy, if we’re well inducted, in the art of waving hello and farewell. I have almost always preferred the former to the latter, but in either case, whenever the occasion was deemed genuinely worthy of such a gesture, I knew that it was a sign of love or affection, and that made it pretty darn worthwhile.

Then again, I also had an early fondness for wagging my crayon-gripping fist over a piece of paper (or whatever flattish surface was convenient) to make squiggly lines and, if I got lucky, get them to coalesce into picture-like concoctions. I  might be sitting off in a cozy corner at Grandma and Grandpa W’s, scribbling away, with the faint sounds in the background of parental and grand-parental chatter as they sat drinking their coffee intermingled with the slight chattering sound of Grandpa’s cup doing a little jitterbug against the saucer, because he had a mild tremor in his hand. Of course, his arm-waving was hardly dramatic, but it was one of those delicate underpinnings of my early memory that became part of the whole subtle weave of my perceptions.

Sometime in my early teens or thereabout, I found that the family resemblance extended to my having my own familial tremors, occasionally in my head and neck but mostly in my hands and arms. There have been times when it was more pronounced than was entirely convenient for a person wanting to draw, but fortunately it’s rarely been at problematic extremes, more often merely requiring that I find ways to compensate for or control or use the tremors to advantage in my art-making. In any event, keeping my hand in (no pun intended) as an artist has tended to keep the inevitable interactions of these two kinds of arm-waving present in my attentions. Meanwhile, my other grandmother had her own kind of arm-waving to lend to the family skill-set: Parkinson’s Disease.

Typically, Granny had the wit and will to battle her Parkinsonism not only with great tenacity in staving off the ravages of the illness for many more years than is typical but also with a lot of good-natured humor, because that was her style. So whenever we had a family gathering, she was the first to offer her services for tossing salads and making milkshakes. That my mother has followed in the Parkinsonian lineage would make her forms of arm-waving far worse to behold, knowing that the same sort of insidious progression lay ahead for her, and to be fair, including the knowledge that the odds are a bit higher for me than for some that I will eventually join the parade, but she too has maintained a bright attitude about it all. Besides that, I am very slightly suspicious that her particular skillfulness when it comes to shaking the dice gives her a unique edge in the evening board games.

But the top of the list when it comes to magnificent ways and reasons to wave one’s arms has surely got to be the one I’ve been witnessing so much now that the concert season is well underway again: conducting. Bands, orchestras, operatic performances, choirs. No matter what the form of the musical art, if there is a conductor up there waving his, her (or, particularly, my beloved husband’s) arms, the love that fills the air is what makes all of the arm-waving a worthy and beautiful thing. It brings hearts and minds into focus and, often, into community, and it makes the world a more wonderful place to be.

And that makes me want to stop waving my arms altogether, just opening them wide enough to embrace that better world and anyone I can in it.digital image from an acrylic painting on canvas

 

Call Me Thomas–No, *Really*

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graphite drawingIn some areas of experience, I am admittedly as credulous as a baby, but generally I suppose I tend toward the skeptical. If American political, religious and social rhetoric can’t turn anybody into a skeptic I don’t know what can, but I find there’s plenty of fodder for the mill in endless other realms. ‘The Most Delicious Boeuf Bourgignon You’ll Ever Eat!’ Truly? Then why does your [self-] acclaimed dish look so convincingly pre-digested and taste exactly like I would imagine cheap dog food to taste? (Just so you know, the idea that I’ll never want to eat Boeuf Bourgignon again after yours doesn’t count as its being the best I’ll ever eat.) No such thing as Climate Change? Feel free to run around in your skivvies while half of us are bundling up for the lowest temperatures in forty years and then mummify yourself in a zeppelin-sized parka while the rest of us try to keep a modicum of cool somehow–all I can say is, I learned how to read a thermometer when I was smallish, and the patterns on that alone have changed plenty in my brief time stomping around the planet to convince me that the weather’s different from what it once was.

‘Organic’ food? Great! But know thy USDA regulations–and what many needful things they may well lack. ‘Green’ energy from windmills? Well, yeah, I am fully persuaded that the simple movement of our breathable atmosphere is far more reliable and consistent and predictably present for generations than, say, vintage Pleistocene joy-juice (a.k.a. stinky petroleum-based fuels)–as long as we also keep in mind that there are offsets: the parts for contemporary wind farms are produced and serviced in very few locales yet and are often therefore shipped across the continent by truck–teams of semi tractor-trailer drivers plus guide cars are required for shipping a single giant blade of one of those behemoths several days cross-country–both to their workplaces and to be repaired. Yet I wouldn’t say wind power isn’t one of our better currently available alternatives. I just think the inquiry must be made, and honesty and transparency are useful all along the way.

Question authority? How about questioning everything and assuming nothing!

All the same, none of us is equipped to investigate every single experience, idea or item that comes our way so thoroughly as to fool ourselves we’re magically well-informed. We must assume, trust, take chances and hope or we will surely stultify and die. Not to mention that it’s very easy, especially for those who, like me, have any tendencies toward insularity, NIMBY attitudes, fear of change, anxiety disorders, allergies or eccentricities that don’t fit nicely with the communal norms to simply hole up and hide from unpleasant and unpredictable reality. And when you boil everything down, I find I’m not actually the least bit attracted to being a conspiracy theorist, aggressive activist for or against anything, or to adopting the kind of narrow, mean-spirited and curmudgeonly attitude that I find repellent in other people.

So I may pry a little bit at the lid of the shipping crate to see what’s really inside it or nag you a little to justify your claims that you’ve invented the world’s most astonishing miracle product, but beyond that, I’m content to believe that the universe is generally fairly benign and most of the people in it rather pleasant and honest, after all. Clearly, you needn’t take offense at my insistence on your being straightforward with me and my preferring to be forthright with you, although I still believe in the value of a certain few little white lies, so you’ll never know absolutely whether I do or do not think those summer pants of yours make your backside look like the White Cliffs of Dover.

Meanwhile, you may call me a bit of a Doubting Thomas, or better yet, just call me Thomas, which was in fact the name my parents had reserved for me in case I turned out to be a boy-child. Because, let’s face it, their previous one-child history of producing girls didn’t prove anything, and their doctor certainly wasn’t able to guarantee my girly-tude in those ancient days, so it was more practical to assume that the little Kathryn Ingrid sprout could possibly show up and be a Thomas Lauren instead, or even have the personality of a Katrina (another option they kept open) rather than a Kathryn, whatever that meant. It’s just best to know that we can’t always guess how things are going to turn out and we don’t always know everything, at least unless we do the homework and get lucky. And if it all catches us by surprise, that might not be an entirely terrible thing, either.graphite drawing

 

Rust in Peace

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I flatter myself that I am improving with age. This morning’s Wordsmith offering from the fabulous Anu Garg of A.Word.A.Day was ‘crepitate’–one of my very favorites, thanks to the also fabulous S.J. Perelman‘s introducing it to me in the context of one of his typically scintillating, outrageously funny tales. I was reminded that crepitation refers to the creaking cracking popping grinding and other percussive noises of dusty old age, and that, not at all surprisingly, Perelman used it in self-deprecatingly hilarious description of his own antiquated joints as he gave what one must assume was–despite his stated intent of dash and panache–a dance demonstration to his date that was more rusty than rakish. Having done the requisite amount of damage to my own human machinery over the years by falling over and off of things, lifting things I had no business hefting, and in turn, turning, squeezing, smacking and otherwise torquing various portions of myself just enough more out of sync and syncopation that it’s remarkable if I only creak and don’t fall into syncope or crack up altogether.

So, whether dancing or just shuffling my slippered way around the hallowed halls of home, I consider myself  very fortunate only to ‘boop, whoosh, queel and grake‘ like another of my pantheon of fabulous wordsmiths, James Thurber‘s, old family car, and not to simply disintegrate wholly on the spot. Grey hairs? Bring ’em on! (Best color of hair I’ve ever owned by nature, as it happens.) Wrinkles? Oh, my, yes. Smile creases are only a badge of honor reserved for people who’ve had long and happy enough lives to earn them. Aches and pains will generally come and go, with more of the comings than the goings as time passes and I forget to accommodate my crepitude a little, but by golly it beats lying around and dissipating into a dust bunny of boredom.

And honestly, lots of things get more beautiful not just in spite of but because of their evident age, so why shouldn’t I give it a try?photo

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Art, Before & After

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graphite and markers on wood panel

Today, another little glimpse of artful goofing to re-imagine an existing piece of my work. I almost never tire of reworking/revisiting my old artworks from time to time. In part, it’s a way to critique and edit my stuff and see how I can grow and change over time. Mostly, it’s just good technical practice–a little bit of re-training my eye and hand and, when I get lucky, learning a new skill or two. In this instance, I took another of my pipeshade designs done in 2007 in preparation for Martin Pasi’s carving the wooden screen panels for his Winnetka instrument and I did some Photoshop playing with it to turn a pair of the panel designs into a merged single image and then ‘hand coloring’ it digitally to redefine it as a wholly new looking picture.

The whole Winnetka project was based on the church’s part of the collaborative team’s desire to have their organ artwork reflect local character. Since Congregational churches don’t tend to wish to fill their worship spaces with traditional religious iconography but rather prefer a more generally meditative space, so it made sense to aim for a design more simply nature-based and reflective of regional beauty. I decided to incorporate some of the Illinois state symbols into the design. This pair of panels featured the state bird, Cardinalis cardinalis–the Northern Cardinal. Is a cardinal too religious a symbol? Oh, that’s right: not a Roman Catholic church. Okay, cut me some slack.

Not really necessary to elaborate, is it. I just decided to show you the Before and the After versions today, and dispense with the intermediate steps–they’re not entirely thrilling to see, being a series of steps mainly devoted to converting the graphite drawing to a crisp black ink-outline appearance (only moderately laborious with the help of Photoshop) and then using my digital ‘coloring crayons’ to fill in the blanks to create a full-color version. This time, I opted for something much more cleanly graphic than yesterday’s reworked image. Who knows what happens next time? That, in fact, is the fun of both making art in the first place and then, in having the option of revising it, maybe even more than once. Can you say, mercurial? Nahhh, we know that I’m still just a big kid with a short attention span. No need to dress it up. I’ll just spend the dress-up energy on the art, if you don’t mind too much.digital artwork from an original drawing on wood panel