I LOVE winter. I love walking outside on snowy days with my camera. I love that winter forces me indoors to rest and listen and read and think and paint.
And, speaking of painting, yesterday I had some time to work on my Saskatoon berry compost painting. It's becoming like an old friend who I get to spend time with. I am slowly working my way around the compost pail, starting new berries, building up others and fine tuning both the berries and the spaces between them to create three-dimensionality.
I was getting a bit lost, so more berries got colour coded.
The section that I am working on now is pretty interesting. Calyx sepals are showing. And, for the most part, these sepals are made visible by the shadows they cast. Get it?
When I am working on a painting, no one gets to use my pallet. No students, no grandkids. My pallet is a treasure trove of colours that have been mixed for the current painting. The beauty of good quality watercolour paints is that they can be sprayed with water 10 years from now and still be perfectly fine. These are either Winsor & Newton professional or Daniel Smith paints.
Out the window is the reason I am inside.
And, inside the house our Christmas Amaryllis (thank you, Marga) is beginning to bud. It's like another friend, bringing joy to the wintery day.
And, look who else is budding? How can you bear to throw out a tree that buds? It still drinks every day and therefore still releases vapour into the house. The buds started near the top a week ago and are working their way down the tree. Christmas season is trickling into January.
Last weekend, when we celebrated our family Christmas, Charlotte rearranged the Christmas story for me. Hers is a place of wonder where giant rabbits look on in amazement at what is happening.
And Mary wonders about Joseph.
Today's sponsor? Something else to wonder about.
Someday a shooting star is gonna shoot me down
Burn these high rises back into a ghost town
Of iridium-white clouds
Matted close against the ground
While the sky hangs empty as a frame
See the reddening horizon line
Feel the planet spilling on the space time
On the way down Somerset I take pictures of cement
For the history books on Mother Earth
To the west now it begins
In the sound waves in the wind
There is an echo going by
Of the mountains caving in
And the parted roads and I
Knew that one day we would die
And become smooth and old again
Like the ash that sweeps the sky
Someday a shooting star is gonna shoot me down
Burn these high rises back into a ghost town
There's holy water lying in the crater well
Heavy metals high test gasoline
Blessed singularity
A telescoping memory
Where the sky still flickers through the leaves
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