Discovering Beauty in Everyday Life

I've decided to investigate the photography of dew. Many people do photograph dew diligently, and these folks have mastered the art of throwing a positive spin on just about anything.  However, in this dew series, dew is taken as is--sans diligence. sans Photoshop, sans anything but a set of dewy ephemerae! Uhm, I mean unless you count the rabbit in the lower left.  

Go back to the grassy fizzy place with a peach colored mist and flattened bubble gum. Go back to nights alight with honeysuckles, where ball games spin. Go back to awaken with a robin's nest and two blue eggs in the poplar trees. Go back to the grasshopper path with stickers and bare feet and horny toads and mud. Go back into a summer evening, with a cricket and an arching cigarette, flicked by a silent smoker on a porch. Come back with green and gold and clear red underpinnings. Come back with a small ball of open sky to play with. Come back to touch a finger tip. After all, why not?

We are not some suburbanites with a lawn and a garage full of weed-killers and power tools! We have a $3.97 trowel, a 12 inch rake and a couple of plastic food service preparation gloves, but what choice did we have? It was the $3.97 tin trowel or the measuring trowel made of plastic! Do not ask me what is a measuring trowel, how would I know?    I mean we're talking serious wood-chipped concrete covered clay root-balls here! Urban gardening is no joke!   See those tomatoes? Well, that's no picket fence they're up against! And the tiny impatiens, out there among the relentless commuters and the dirt deprived dogs and the cigarette butts, protected by a string? Nobody gave  us any wrought iron tree guards. Never mind! We are the Urban Planting Volunteers, and we are armed with Faith!

Look how fat and round our Ordinary Tree is growing, with its palm-sized leaves and symmetry of bulges. I recall those hard and bumpy dingles, iced and cold, but the sharpness fades someway into a frosty attic happenstance.  Bring down the dusty bucket and the old stiring spoon.  It's time to find a puddle, build a dam, and launch a floating toothpick with a leaf.

OK, perhaps I am not the best at wildlife photography, but I have waited long and hard for a clear view of Silhouette, and now I have it. You know how it often goes, the light is wrong, the subject doesn't wish to stay still, or some other something intervenes . I have finally understood that Silhouette simply chooses to remain two dimensional!

Unbendable iron stanchions, crossed,   It's named a fence, but "fence" means pickets, whitewash, dogs and snapdragons, hollyhocks. These glossed posts are black in the core. Why wont my mind go through the open cells? Why this Raven black with just a hint of a moon to add dimension?

What they do not tell you is how to get there on foot, on the weekend, when all of the elevated trains are operating with a sense of discovering new schedules and eliminating stops.  Oh, but the gardens are beautiful!

Have you gone crazy lately?  Feeling the burning sun at dusk?  Inside you?  Did  you forget?  Knowing what they mean by it at last? Crushing?  Doubled over? Why now?  What happened? Go away! Oh no, not yet! Please wait a little while.

How does a tree grow?  Wouldn't you think it grew from way inside? But for most trees the new wood grows on the outside, pressing against the protecting bark.  The bark--cut, crusty, weathered, broken--shelters the new growth and at the proper time gives way to create a tiny crevice for a leaf.  What stories this bark tells around the aging campfires. 

Christian Fletcher, Artistic Director “Broadway at Harlem Meer” may 16 @ Central Park

This is Half and Half, an American Sycamore and without a doubt a beauty of the species. On the bottom half we have a barky trunk, but up above we find a London Plane.  See how it stands alone mid-field, lifting the air around the boughs? How many childhood mowers must have made a careful detour?  Mowers large enough for fields of hay, yet taking care to go around a tiny stick with maybe seven leaves? Yes, I know. Perhaps it had a childhood fence, but a fence is so material.  Do you know what I think?   I think the field knew all along.

I feel the ache of summer. The calendar would disagree, but I know the warning signs.  A cool day with leaves four inches wide, green side up, stem-red, semi-glossy.  Two sparrows in a chasey touch and go, three geese splashing in the Harlem Meer vying for that taste of early honey. Oh I see the saddened, bitten days.  I know how to hesitate, and what's the use? But must we miss the smell of summer linden? Is that the price of closing well? Or are those squares and pieces gnawed and splintering regardless?  Look!  Over there!  That carefree early summer rain is smoothing out the endgame.

I left Ounce wet and tottering  and wandered off to check out another bush across the way.  When I came back by, there was damp little Ounce perching on the puddle rim with that happy secret look.   What could I do?  We waited a few more minutes until Ounce was dry enough to fly, and off we continued.

I consider myself a person of some decor and perhaps occasional moderation, but not my Sparrow!  The name is Ounce, after the weight.  I know I'm avoiding gender here, but I personally don't know it, and you know I never ask.  "I'm Thirsty," said Ounce.  "Can't we stop for a sip of water?  Can we?  Please?" Well, it is not possible to say "no" to  a thirsty Ounce! We located a nearby puddle collected in a dish.   Ounce took a tiny sip, and simply could not resist! Ounce tumbled in, scattering droplets every single place.  Tweeting and Dripping, Ounce finally skipped out to the rim and is now trying to look remorseful, while regaining some sort of soggy composure. 

Sometimes I tire of an entire season of say, summer.  And I go looking back through my files.  I happened on this elegant and beautiful lady strolling in the park one day and just had to take a picture. I was captured by the graceful presence and neglected to take a  c a r e f u l  look. Why is this person standing in the middle of a vacant lot, for example?  What is the nature of the slightly startled look?  Is that a plastic bag in the lower left?  I zoom in for a better look.  She's wearing a single glove!  And what's that she holds?   A pocket mirror?  Zoom.  Zoom.   Oh no. There is no mistaking it. Pixilated or not, this is a classic case of an unconcealed gardening plantoir. Shhhhhh

I was walking along an old path when I saw a large pot.  Inside it was a map with faded ink and well worn creases.   "I know where the rainbows are," it said.  I keep it in that small indelible compartment.  You know the place.

I took a walk up into the foothills a time ago, through the cornflowers and the wild onions.  I went up to see the Rocky Mountain Columbine that lives in the moss and shade near the creek bed. I remember, because now I have the palest columbines.  I grew them from a seedpack.  It's a sturdy bunch of flowers, New Yorkers born and bred. 

I grew up in a house in Colorado.  We had a mud puddle, a yard and a patch of iris that came up every year, regardless.  Things are not that different here in Central Park, so I discover.

I had nothing to do in particular, so I thought I'd see if Squiva was around. He or she was getting ready for dinner and hadn't much time. He/She had misplaced a nut last Fall while in a rush to a photo shoot. Squiva was quite clear that I was not to show a face in any photo, since as you know, Squiva is a Union Squirrel. There are guidelines. Nevertheless, Squiva loves his or her tail and agreed that this photo would not be in disagreement with the rules.

Great White Egret Ariel pauses while nibbling on a reed and takes a dainty, downward peak.    "Oh yes, I am light as air in a bubble and free as a wing, yet I can still leave my white shadow for this fertile earth."

Stone Houses Remembrance of the Metropolitan Museum of Art, 2004 Andy Goldsworthy on the Roof, May 4 -- October 31

Very often the world is difficult for a blossom, who must remain safe and connected to its branch until budding is secure, and it becomes the proper time to depart.  Each of these foxy blossoms has made a duplicate for backup and saved it in a nearby puddle.

I know it seems impossible, but this sturdy forest has appeared on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art!  I don't know if anybody knows about it, but there is a Very Big Something right up-- there.  Could it be a new species?  Is it going to build a nest?  Does it eat?  Shall I poke?  Oops! Oh no.......uh oh....

See the big beech tree at the right? Can you imagine one day (once upon a time) etching a tiny pair of initials in a heart? Somebody did. A passing sparrow saw it yesterday. It's high up now along the eastern side on a substantial branch. Sparrow says the heart still glows warm this time of year, when the early sun touches it exactly right.

Life has its give and takes;  here are our fierce pansies guarding the spring evergreen tree.

It was only a tiny pinch on my right calf.  I thought nothing of it at first, though I did stop to wonder what it was.  I looked down as one does at such times, and saw nothing out of the ordinary.  I looked right, then left. Nothing. I looked down again and saw a gaggle of  innocent wildflowers tangled and leaning along a square wire fence.  Oh, how nice I said, since I do love a vacant lot and a fence.  Pinch!  Ouch! And then I saw it; there were two of them, moving, and they were --hungry! One came after me, and one was after the fence itself.  I saw the bend in the fence, I saw the nippers, I saw the sudden flowery lurch and  I can tell you, I did not stay around to watch the outcome.