Welcome!

Welcome! This is a place to share how we celebrate & deepen our relationship to Nature. Here you will find stories, images, & ideas about wilderness, human nature, & soulfulness. Drawing from the experiences of everyday living, the topics on this blog include: forays into the natural world, the writing life, community service, meditation, creativity, grief & loss, inspiration, & whatever else emerges from these. I invite you on this exploration of the wild within & outside of us: the inner/outer landscape.



Monday, March 18, 2024

Monday Meditations

mindful practices to nourish you throughout the day and week


Feel the outdoor temperature on your skin. Really - just abide outside, eyes closed, and feel it.  




Friday, March 15, 2024

Values Anew #The100DayProject

Last Saturday morning I was thinking about the little oil pastel landscapes that are part of this year’s hundred-day creative journey. I was marveling at how these sunrise and sunsets have continued to flow across the paper. And I remembered what a terrific practice it is to do a creative form so repetitively, daily, over so many weeks in a row. 

 

I notice how from day to day I am able to see the details in the photos I’ve taken and am using as inspiration for the paintings. The ways in which my fingers are able to add those details with greater truth. By “truth” I do not mean precision or accuracy, as in photographic realism. I mean the ability of the character of that soulful landscape to emerge with greater clarity across the art card. 

 

I suppose this is also true of my book manuscript project; the more I write to convey the details and depth of my various relationships with the more-than-humans in my community, the more clearly they show themselves, nuance and all, on the written page. 

 

When I started in January, I thought I was doing #The100DayProject again this year to make progress on my book manuscript and to create art pages for themed landscape books. And these might even be the outcomes that occur. 

 

But more importantly for my creative and spiritual life, I’m learning anew the value of:

 

Creative practice as deepening of relationship with the natural world

Creative practice as enhancer of vision (like creative eyeglasses for the soul?)

Creative practice as harbinger of inner -  and outer  - change

Creative practice as flow and enjoyment (read: the end of striving!)

Creative practice as connection with the world

Creative practice for its own sake

 

May we create on! 





Wednesday, March 13, 2024

Monday, March 11, 2024

Monday Meditations

mindful practices to nourish you throughout the day and week



Choose two or three colors (paint, marker, crayon) and swirl them on a page.





Friday, March 8, 2024

Small Workaround #The100DayProject

Just when I was on a roll, thinking I had the countdown to fifty days in my pocket – so easy, no worries – I cut myself. That is to say, I pierced my right thumb near the tip. It bled so much and so long one night I wondered if I’d be driving the forty minutes to the nearest hospital ER for a little sewing patch-up job. When the bleeding finally subsided a long while later, I audibly said, Thank you! I’m so grateful!

 

It wasn’t until the next morning when I sat down at my art table that I realized I couldn’t paint as usual. My landscape oil pastels require at least eight fingers engaged in the process simultaneously and it’s a very messy endeavor. I didn’t want the oils getting in my cut and there was no way I could use that thumb for holding, spreading, texturizing the pastels like I usually do. But I wasn’t going to let this deter me from #the100dayproject. So… I went ambidextrous, something I’ve relied on from time to time since childhood (though never for creative work). 

 

What you see in the little landscape drafts below are a couple of the lefty-made, six-fingers-only oil pastel paintings, and a couple of those I made with all my fingers and both hands before the knife cut. 

Workarounds: they work.  




Monday, March 4, 2024

Monday Meditations

mindful practices to nourish you throughout the day and week



Journal some words and phrases of hope that you find encouraging. 





Friday, March 1, 2024

Thirty-Plus of One Hundred #The100DayProject

I did it. A few days ago, I met my thirty-day goal for this year’s hundred-day project. Every one of those days I have drafted a landscape painting; every one of those days I have added content to, edited, read, or fine-tuned my book manuscript. It feels good. It feels so good, in fact, that I have continued beyond Day 30.

 

My new commitment—I just decided right now as I type these words—is to keep going to Day 50. 

 

This is working. I am inspired to pick up the oil pastels each day. I am similarly inspired to re-engage my book pages. For both, I go where my energy is in that moment. Some mornings I need an unlikely-for-me color like pink to scrawl itself across the art paper. Some days I feel like revising a portion of text in my book; on the next morning I might have energy for adding new ideas, or I go with an insight that has come to me and type that onto the page. I’m suddenly struck by how collage-like an approach this is to both projects: pieces fitting together toward a whole. Intuition leads the way, allowing what’s in motion in my inner landscape to express itself on paper. We can journey toward the completion of bigger creative works in just this way. 

 

What is your preferred pathway for creating something?  



 

Monday, February 26, 2024

Monday Meditations

mindful practices to nourish you throughout the day and week



Reflect on what it means to you to act from a place of gratitude. 





Friday, February 23, 2024

Current Reflections on Landscapes #The100DayProject


Fri:  Why is it that I expect precision from my unskilled hand and from a medium I haven't used in fifteen-plus years, or from words on a page that only symbolize actual experience? A draft is a draughty experience…written or visual.

 

Sat:  The beauty and colors of Nature are so much more detailed than I can convey in any form. 

 

Sun:  The imaginal landscape I carry within is an untidy place where unlikely alliances grow oddly curious yet lovely floral and faunal elements.   

 

Mon:  Sometimes, just sometimes, the way in which actual landscapes enter my inner wild places opens a pathway for flow onto the page…art paper or writing paper. 

 

Tues:  “Simpler” is definitely not easier. A photo of silky, flat sky and backlit, smooth land is an oil-pastels challenge; a simple model I’ve created and modified over years suddenly becomes infinitely complex as it enters the pages of my manuscript. 

 

Wed:  It takes courage, audacity, or possibly hope to use blunt black and payne’s gray oil pastels to attempt depicting the fine needles of a backlit fir tree against the delicate baby blue and creamy pink sky. It takes guts, an embrace of the profane, or sheer rugged determination to redraw the model for the manuscript—and to call it something other than “model”—after twenty-eight years.  

 

Thurs:  While it seems inconceivable, and surely wasn’t something I could’ve predicted, there is a surge of creative thought, impulse, other media, and inspiration seeding additional creative projects this week. My only limit is time. A sweet new journal is becoming inhabited by sketches, words, prayers, colors, and more…in addition to this 100-day project.

 

Summary:

A garden of creativity is abloom in my home this week. The more I water, prune, offer to sunlight, fertilize, and converse with these growing beings, the more they fill this space…my haven…with their palpably robust desire to exist.