This

This day.
This light. 
This blue sky. 
These clouds.
This hill.
This yellow-green grass.
These green leaves.
This moment.
They're enough.
Right now.

Let Us Now Praise Stars

Especially on this day,

a day with a high of 89 and blueblueblue sky and full sun

and a night of no moon and black sky and starsstarsstars,

 More, please.

Beginning and Ending

At day's beginning: flowers against cloud-feathered sky.

At day's ending: my first Viceroy of the year resting at dam's edge.

One fine day.

Sometimes

I just want to sit and watch the sky change.

Where I live, I can do that,

and always be surprised.

Making a Garden Grow

The word palette, according to Dictionary.com, derives from Old French, the diminutive form of pale or shovel, resulting in small potter's shovel. A spade with which the painter mixes pigments, grows new colors, and plants them on a prepared ground.

Today, the palette at my feet invited me to do otherwise: hold it against the beautiful blue ground of sky. Imagine, then, a flower barrage bursting and floating above our heads in brocades and confetti streams and bouquets of intense color.

A garden of the imagination fit for another bitterly cold day.

Blue Sky

Even only 50 minutes of blue sky lightens the load of a heavy day.

Silver Skeleton

The tree sheds its skin,

cuts a silver skeleton

in turquoise sky.

My veins buckle,

flooding turquoise rivers

under winter skin.

Sun Show

For five minutes in late afternoon, I stood alone on my porch, gazed through a tangle of trees, and admired the setting sun brush the sky museum with pale pink, like a girl's ballet tights, then blush, fuschia and orange, finally deepening into maroon and indigo.I celebrate the upward gaze.

Blue Everywhere

This afternoon, sky startled me. I had to stop to photograph it, not once, but four times. Turquoise shivered toward the horizon, deepening in value and hue to a rich jewel-toned blue. The clouds, too, startled me, ranging from stark white to blue-white to gray-white to gray.

I felt as I did today only once before, years ago, when I sat alone, inside St. John's-at-Hampstead Church on a rainy, cold day in January 1989. The ceiling and white trim made me feel as if I were sitting inside a Wedgwood bowl.

Today, I admired a living Tiepolo painting.


A picture may not always be worth a thousand words, but sometimes no words can capture the majesty of what we take for granted: the sky.