The Primrose Path
February 11, 2017
Swans: Streaming White Crosses
February 9, 2017
“Did you too see it, drifting, all night, on the black river?
Did you see it in the morning, rising into the silvery air —
An armful of white blossoms,
A perfect commotion of silk and linen as it leaned
into the bondage of its wings; a snowbank, a bank of lilies,
Biting the air with its black beak?
Did you hear it, fluting and whistling
A Shrill dark music — like the rain pelting the trees — like a waterfall
Knifing down the black ledges?
And did you see it, finally, just under the clouds —
A white cross Streaming across the sky, its feet
Like black leaves, its wings Like the stretching light of the river?
And did you feel it, I your heart, how it pertained to everything?
And have you too finally figured out what beauty is for?
And have you changed you life?”
— Mary Oliver, Swan: Poems and Prose Poems
I went to the Skagit Valley to see snow geese, but they were not in their usual places. Instead, I saw swans — trumpeter swans, I think, although both trumpeters and tundra swans overwinter here. Mary Oliver’s images — white crosses in the sky, black feet like dark leaves — capture the swans’ presence so perfectly.
In Praise of Idleness Drawing 27
November 21, 2016
In Praise of Idleness Drawing 5
October 31, 2016
Wild Geese
by Mary Oliver
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
Are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting —
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
In Praise of Idleness Drawings 3 and 4
October 30, 2016
Back to Basics with a New Project
October 29, 2016
I’ve decided that if I am going to commit to becoming an artist, I need to give even a little time each day to making drawings or paintings. So I will start by using a paperback book as a sketchbook, something so portable that I can have it with me and available to pull out and make a quick sketch in odd moments. To keep it even more simple, I will just use a black ink pen for my drawings — no color or pigments.
Small ambitions are about all I can commit to right now. I will keep this project light-hearted, more in the nature of doodling away in idleness than anything more serious. The book has 168 pages, and I plan on drawing on the right-hand pages only. My hope is to have filled the book by the end of the year. And to have cultivated the good habit of taking time each day to spend on something important to me.
I like the theme of the book I have chosen, In Praise of Idleness by Bertrand Russell. I will inevitably read a couple of pages each day as I add my drawings, and perhaps this exercise will give me something to think about as I work.
I expect the book to become well worn as I handle it in the coming days. It already has a coffee stain on the edge.
Intensely Ordinary
October 18, 2015
Hands and the Farmer, Hands and the Artist
October 13, 2015
“As Gill says, “every man is called to give love to the work of his hands. Every man is called to be an artist.” The small family farm is one of the last places – they are getting rarer every day – where men and women (and girls and boys, too) can answer that call to be an artist, to learn to give love to the work of their hands. It is one of the last places where the maker – and some farmers still do talk about “making the crops” – is responsible, from start to finish, for the thing made. This certainly is a spiritual value, but it is not for that reason an impractical or uneconomic one. In fact, from the exercise of this responsibility, this giving of love to the work of the hands, the farmer, the farm, the consumer, and the nation all stand to gain in the most practical ways: They gain the means of life, the goodness of food, and the longevity and dependability of the sources of food, both natural and cultural. The proper answer to the spiritual calling becomes, in turn, the proper fulfillment of physical need.”
― Wendell Berry, Bringing it to the Table: Writings on Farming and Food
Gordon Skagit Farms does a great job marrying farming and art. A visit there is a visual feast.
Wildflowers Near Mount Rainier
September 14, 2012
The wildflowers are definitely one of the highlights of hiking the Naches Peak Loop Trail near Chinook Pass on Hwy 410. They peak in late summer, so this is still a great time to go and see them. Here are some photos of the wildflowers I saw along the trail:

I am not sure what this is — perhaps yellow dot saxifrage or slender mountain sandwort? Does anyone know?