After Lessons and Carols

The nearest I ever come to a religious experience: the playful magic of light through stained glass.

It's enough for me.

More than enough.

Discarded Prize

Two days ago, when I last saw Oscar, an enthusiastic black dog (my favorite of the regular Lake Cheston canines), he carried an empty fish, all husk without organs and flesh, like an Olympian champion might his country's flag: so proud, so joyous, Oscar running to catch up with his human in a victory lap.

Today, almost three-fourths of the way around the lake on the opposite side, I caught the fish out of the corner of my eye, stopped and studied its serried scales, mottled blue and cream in dull light and embedded with sand grains, and saw beauty even in defeat.

Flow!

The thing about making something is that the more I do it, the more I want to do it, and the more I want to do it and the more I do it, the more likely I am to make something new.

Yesterday's and today's metal and paint shots inspired an Aha!

The next time I shoot a single something odd and get a snap that I really and truly like, I will challenge myself to find other subjects on the same theme, until I take a photo of some other odd thing, . . .

. . . and today, I found it quite by accident.

Plastic!

Seasonal Cheer

Autumn Meadowhawks seek out sun, and despite the cold, some still fly. When I first paid attention to odonates at Lake Cheston, I thought it amazing to find one of these on Christmas Eve. Now I know that the weather cooperated mightily, and now I look forward to seeing them late in the fall, even in dwindling numbers.

Unexpected Death: One Known, Many Unknown

"If it be now, 'tis not to come; if it be not to come, it will be now; if it be not now, yet it will come; the readiness is all. Since no man knows aught of what he leaves, what is't to leave betimes? Let be." -- Hamlet, V:ii:207-211.

Confession

As the child of, sister of, and aunt of paint manufacturers, I confess this: I love paint -- the tantalizingly acidic smell that sticks in my nose hairs; the pockety-pockety-pockety echo of a working ball mill; the thick swish of large paddles swirling pigments in waist-high mixers; the metallic clang of lids pressed onto cans; the thunder of 50-gallon drums, turned at an angle and rolled along the floor; the rhythmic passes of a printing press; the splotches of paint on concrete floor and machines and work clothes and painters' caps and skin. Short of standing in a factory making paint, placing my hands on a shuddering paint shaker is a meditative joy unlike any other.

And the shaker itself is a delight to the eye.

Rainy Day Illumination

Metal and Paint, Number 7

Lonnie Bradley Holley's Spirit Bird and punched-tin chandelier