Thursday, January 31, 2013



Lightweight browsing of the internet on prairies and prairie grasses -

Prairie grasses tend to have deep roots - up to six feet below. Up to 75 percent of their mass is below the surface of the ground. This makes them resistant to drought and fire, since they're protected in the dirt. Being deeply rooted also suggests the grasses are one of nature's ways of preventing soil erosion. Prairie lands, many of which in the USA have been lost to agriculture and highways, consist of diverse and fascinating plant and animal life. Think butterflies, deer, ground squirrels, grasshoppers and miles of wildflowers.

We often think of restoring damaged lands by planting trees, and forget to include other options such as the grasses and wildflowers that are native to the land. They can provide ground cover, food for the birds, insects and animals, and nutrients for the soils. At least some of them take relatively little time to reach maturity.


Meanwhile, a little side journey to cultivated St. Augustine grass. Can't get further away from prairie grasses than St. Augustine, the provider of trim, bright green, low diversity suburban lawns. It doesn't provide a lot in the way of food, yet, it has it's place in the world. St. Augustine has very little in the way of roots, but spreads like a net on top of the land, helping to prevent soil erosion. It easily propagates via the runners that shoot out. St. Augustine, from my own experience, is surprisingly resistant to droughts and freezes and insects, and provides insulation for the soil below, and that which lives in the soil. Like the other grasses, it mats the ground, keeping the moisture in the soil from rapidly evaporating. St. Augustine has been kind of a dirty word in recent decades in environmentalist circles - it's rather dull and disconnected from much of the outdoor chain of life - but it's been proven a real trooper in urban areas during recent droughts.

The above image was taken June 11, 2012 in Austin, Texas.

Tuesday, January 29, 2013







Sometimes I imagine that below the surface of our lives there is an internet that supports our lives above. Not a computer internet, but a spiritual internet. The souls of the trees and bugs, the alligators and the quail, the seals, and the humans and the jellyfishes and clover are shared. We're all one. With the relationship between our distinct lives above and the wholeness of the soul, we find it safe to sleep, easy to breathe, to live happily. We respect all forms of life. When one species becomes extinct, we all are affected. When we kill for fun, destroy forests for 'progress', or slaughter fish for food and then waste what we harvest, the soul suffers, and we weaken the warmth and security of the great and benevolent spirit that cradles us all.

Sunday, January 27, 2013

After banana trees and whales, I've been thinking about otters, seals, storks and sponges. I can't quite spin all of them into one story tonight, but the old myth of the stork does come to mind. Remember when maternity stores had an image on their storefronts of a stork carrying a baby in its beak? To avoid awkward conversations about sex and childbirth, children were sometimes told their baby siblings would arrive in a tidy, cheerful fashion by stork. The stork, like a hobo with his bundle, bore the new arrival - Special Delivery you might say. However, I can't say I ever heard of a single kid who believed this.

I read tonight of people in Bulgaria who, on March 1 each year, began the process of saying good-bye to winter. They put red and white hand-crafted amulets called martenitsi on their wrists. Toward the end of the month, the first stork of the year would arrive, migrating to set up a nest for babies. (That would be baby birds.) The Bulgarians considered the stork's appearance the first sign of spring, and the amulets were taken off and stored away until next year.


This photo was taken November 2012 in Lafayette, Louisiana.

My computer photo gallery ('Windows') has been compromised - images cropped and otherwise altered. Many images are missing. They are no longer in the order in which they were shot, some shuffled from one file to another. The dates are incorrect on some. There are some images I did not take. I can no longer revert to original images for those where I previously adjusted the brightness or contrast.

I've been careful about dates and locations in what I've previously posted on all of my blogs. These blogs have been a kind of daily practice for me. Honesty has been a core goal, and beauty a general goal. I hope to continue, functioning within those limitations that occur now and then.

Saturday, January 26, 2013

There are camellias, tulip magnolias, and an azalea bush in bloom. birds are singing again. The scarf around the banana trees was heavy with dew.

Friday, January 25, 2013



“Curiouser and curiouser!” cried Alice (she was so much surprised, that for the moment she quite forgot how to speak good English).

Lewis Carroll
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland

This image was taken September 17, 2011 in Austin, Texas.

Wednesday, January 23, 2013



It's been a great night to begin a banana scarf project. When times get rough, and life on our planet earth is under siege, the perfect thing to do is knit a banana scarf.

Monday, January 21, 2013






(These photos were taken April 8, 2012 in Austin, Texas.)

Louisa May Alcott is one of my favorite writers. The details of her books written in the mid-1800s, such as Little Women and Eight Cousins, take you to another era when the United States was still young. With no computers, radios, televisions, or telephones, people exchanged information by visiting each other's homes. If the residents were occupied or not present, the visitors left personalized calling cards so that their friends would know they had dropped by. In New England, it was a tradition on New Year's Day to make the rounds to the homes of your friends and family. I like reading about the clothes people wore, how they prepared their food, what they did with their free time, what they gave and received as gifts. They learned about other countries through the ships that arrived in the harbors bearing goods for sale. In some ways, there's more historical information in old novels for kids than in carefully researched history books.

There's an honest intimacy with Alcott's characters, who are each clearly set apart from the others with his or her own personality and manner of behaving and speaking. The stories are kid-friendly, but include some of the darker realities of everyday life. You put Alcott's books down feeling as though you've journeyed to another world, with people worth getting to know. Their adventures speak to the heart.

Sunday, January 20, 2013



This is not my first post on the amateur composting project. One of my daily chores is to carry the fruit and vegetable peels, the eggshells and spent coffee grounds to the bit of yard in the back devoted to soil renewal. I call it a chore, but it's an activity that calls me, even in cold or rainy weather - turning the soil with the shovel, patting the kitchen debris into the shallow hole, covering it with earth and leaves, pouring a cup of water on top. With mud on my shoes and strands of hair clinging to my face, I feel cheer and a kind of healing. The transformation is evident within a few days; the matter is being integrated with dirt into rich soil. It's a sensual, deeply grateful bit of time. I'm a part of the trees towering above, and the process beneath my feet. I'm included in the conversation between rain and worms and twigs and leaves, and the birds and squirrels who depend on and contribute to this process in its natural grand scale.

The photo above was taken in Austin, Texas on March 15, 2012.

Saturday, January 19, 2013


Tonight, I was researching the important question, 'what do camels eat?' and as usual, went on a tangent. From 'camel' I searched for 'camelops' then 'coffee' and ended last of all with 'Oromo people'.

Here's one fact from each stop on the trip:

Dry berries and leaves.

The body temperature of a camel can range during the day from 93 to 104 degrees F (34 to 40 degrees C).

A fossil of the camelops found in Mesa, Arizona is known as the 'Walmart Camel' because it was discovered during excavation at a Walmart construction site.

Coffee is an antidepressant.

'Gal la' means 'he said no' in arabic.


Image taken 7 February 2012 in Austin, Texas.

Thursday, January 17, 2013












These images were taken in Austin Texas on April 9, 2012. I was so awed by the light fixtures of University of Texas's Whitaker Fields, that I've waited quite a while to post them. The ground was hard and dry from the drought, and I was sorry to find no students playing soccer or other sports on the fields as I walked by, but somehow, the size and magical patterns of the fixtures lifted my spirit. A gentle and giant whimsy had created a work of functional art out of light poles, like masts of a tall ship, sailing on a light breeze.

Wednesday, January 16, 2013

Monday, January 14, 2013

painted October, 2012


i didn't know how to make a scarf but i made you a scarf anyway

Sunday, January 13, 2013

it rained this afternoon -
the night sky is luminous as a pearl.


'graft'
9-12

Friday, January 11, 2013



This picture was taken April 4, 2012 in Austin, Texas.

I'm looking down at my white socks with grey lettering at the base of the toes: No nonsense.

There are times I've looked at my message-bearing feet and thought, you bet! Don't mess with me today - no nonsense, y'hear?

There are times I've looked down and thought, whatya mean, no nonsense? Everybody needs a little nonsense now and again.

Wednesday, January 9, 2013

I took this photo in Austin, Texas on January 10, 2012 - a year ago today.



I think the trees and plants went into a kind of shock when the rain first returned. I mean, they didn't know what to do. It felt cool and wet, but what if they tried to drink it, to absorb it, to enjoy it - and it suddenly stopped? So they held out a while, frowning dourly as the rain came down around them, striking the hardened earth.

There were a few days of sunshine, and then storm clouds returned, with more steady, plentiful rain.

This time they drank. They stretched their limbs and leaves upward to the sky.

Tuesday, January 8, 2013





Shoal Creek reflecting sky; April 10, 2012, Austin, Texas

Monday, January 7, 2013

This photo was taken December, 2011 in Austin, Texas.

Saturday, January 5, 2013

Hard to believe, I've been blogging for nearly ten years. Usually, my approach has been to reflect something that has attracted my attention during the day. Sometimes, all I have available is a piece of very dark material. I've learned that if I pause, and keep living my life, the dark material passes by, and something else will come to the foreground. My preference is to reflect the beautiful or quirky or humorous over the painful.

After moving into this house at the end of the summer, I began experimenting with composting as a means of re-establishing the living process of good soil. I'm not a gardener, so I had no plans for the compost. I just wanted to see what would happen if I dug shallow holes in dry, powdery earth that had no worms or ants or fungal matter evident, and started adding discarded fruit and vegetable remains. Each deposit of kitchen scraps was then covered with a light layer of the dirt and leaves.

It's been amazing how quickly coffee grounds, potato, apple and banana peels, mushroom stems, eggshells, and old lettuce have melded with hard dirt and transformed into something crumbly and rich. A friend's recommendation to add a small quantity of water as I add new material has hastened the process even more. A couple of worms and elongated beetles even showed up.

So today, with an area perhaps six by two feet with a healthy working chain of life established, we were ready when a large, chopped up victim of an unhappy landscaping and lawn maintenance event showed up. The tropical plant may or may not survive, but it's now transplanted to a nourishing space that may be exactly what it needs to heal, as though these past few months, we've been preparing a bed for this particular arrival, for just this day.

Thursday, January 3, 2013

When I was a kid in Lafayette, Louisiana, my parents and a friend of the family went in together on a piece of farmland. For a year or two, we spent many a Sunday there. We picked dewberries in late spring, blackberries in early summer, figs in mid-summer, corn in late summer, persimmons in the early fall. Our friend's son made little crawfish traps out of chicken wire, and would leave them near or in the coulee. There were insects known as mosquito hawks that were slender and graceful in flight. They would perch on the barbed wire fence. Some were powder blue, some green, some yellow. I got stung once at the edge of my right eye by a wasp. There were ant hills over a foot high. These ants didn't sting and were larger than the fire ants that were starting to show up around that time. Roly-poly bugs and June bugs were abundant. There was a sink hole we had to watch out for, and occasional snakes. We kept an eye out for water moccasins. **** Near the coulee in the back, we'd find the best blackberries, some as big as a small plum. We would bring several bucketsful home at a time. **** As a child, I didn't know the names of trees, except for a couple of chinaball trees that attracted some specific commentary because of the berries dropped all over the ground. Trees weren't as frequently and aggressively pruned back then; the branches hung low, and there were very old vines, some as thick as a grownup's arm. We could climb them, or sit and swing on them comfortably in the shade from the branches above. Little birds would flit around the undergrowth. Birds also feasted on the berries, figs, and persimmons as they ripened. The land was a kind of shared paradise, and was called Paradise Farm.

Wednesday, January 2, 2013

My mom happened to call when I was walking to the sea, the Pacific, in San Francisco. She'd never been there and told me to please 'spit in the ocean' for her. That was a little odd, but once I arrived at the beach, standing on a concrete platform, I honored her request. I leaned over and spat. In that second as my tiny offering touched the rolling water, I became aware of the enormity of ocean. I felt a great relief at my smallness. I appreciated my mom's wish.

Tuesday, January 1, 2013

i saw in the funny papers today that you are still alive, your hair inked black your trousers red your green shirt buttoned to the very top. you smelled poignantly of paper. i was glad to see you, the happy quarter notes of a whistled song drawn on blue sky above your puckered lips.