Discovering Beauty in Everyday Life

Bush is holding onto a few of it's most beautiful Winter Leaves, but it's not easy in 56 degree weather!

Did you feel that? That tiny nibble on the edge of things, that quiet bzzz on the very tip of an upper rib... I love these skinny days in March! I shun that awful April thaw, that happy May, those shiny days of June. I crave dull, pencil-shredded nights and sleeted mornings, frozen with muddy footprints marking off the year, those tripping ruts and deadly shallows. How dare you sting me with the sun.

The Metripolitan Museum is always steaming with beauty, but it is very rare to glimpse the manifestation of this phenomena--and to get a photo, Well!  Our hardy Fifth Avenue Photographer has captured the very essence. Metropolitan Museum of Art, February 2012

Wee Winnie was a Winkle, so I hear tell with a bell and a whistle and a "What the Hell". Winnie went to Canada to see the Northern Lights, and when she Came back, she was wearing purple tights. "What difference does it make to you?" said Winnie with a toss of her new yellow curls and her new lip gloss, "I'm a Winnie and a Winkle, and I do what I choose. I run my own game, I either win it or I lose. If I hit a double seven, I'm as happy as a clam, If I lose, toss in another, 'cause I don't give a damn. 'Travel light and travel lonely' is my motto by the way, 'cause I'm a Winnie and a Winkle and a Come what May."

Ounce has learnt so much from watching traffic! Now we both must wait until the exactly correct time to cross the road.

Hop on, said the axon we'll find us a dendrite in no time. Hesitating, I climbed abroad  the whitish gluey tentacle.  Sticky it was, no need to hang on. I found myself crawling easily along the slippery center track,  toward the glittery end. I felt quite confident as I learnt to balance among the whiskery filaments. As I drew closer  to the narrow tip, I thought perhaps I ought to reconsider. I tried to slow down, and the strand began to oscillate and whip!  I held on as tightly as I could, but there was no hope.  I made a last grasp for a filament, and Thwang!  I was cast out into the sprinkling starlit space, tumbling and turning like a helpless asteroid.   My mind became a blank.  My life passed before my eyes and disappeared completely! What was happening?  The starlit sprinkles began to thin, and for a time I was suspended in a midnight vacuum blue. As though in a dream, the emptiness began to fill, one shimmer at a time....

There is nothing cheerier than a couple of happy flowers from a Safavid Empire tiled wall--Iranian, from the new exhibit at the Metropolitan Museum of Art