from Lafayette, LA 9-30-12:

Our world is wonderfully complicated, with so many fascinating features, each one a doorway to a bigger picture. We can follow any slender thread that captivates us - the humble snail, the town of Carencro, the history of hammers or perfumes, the smallest whale, the flowing fern in the images above, a favorite actor on the Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, the poems of eastern Europe, aspirin, measles, dress patterns, door hinges, peanuts or pistons - and enter the interlocking gears of existence.

from May, 2012 in Austin, Texas:

sometimes they let go of words

bells and we're all on board
a boat with oars thru pastel mists
(yes pogy are
the most important fish)

Nonexistent champagne
in the Nonexistent glass
more and less than we request
a toast, and we are cast adrift

Below is a photo, a rather weak photo, of the 4th mushroom to which I referred the other day. These seem to grow in clusters. For some reason, this mushroom was quite camera shy, the lens could not get a grip, could not focus, but there you go. I'm including another recent image of morning glories, just to remind myself there are times I can get clearly focused. (Referring to photos here, but also could be applied to life....)

I'm attaching a link to the home page of the Mycological Society of San Francisco. The photos there are stunning. If you dig a little deeper into the site, you'll find lists - quite lengthy lists - of the many fungi they find during their annual forays into the wilds of the Bay Area of California.

as i walked to the store, Big Grumpy Face was up in the sky. i'm always happy to see him....

a fungal post from Lafayette, Louisiana. I've come across at least four unfamilar mushrooms this month (photographed only three). Though a lot of the dirt in our yard seems to be depleted (no worms, active composting), the mushrooms to me seem to be a promising sign. I've been saving banana and apple peels, coffee grounds, onion and potato skins and such, and covering them in shallow holes with earth to encourage composting, figuring even small contributions to the soil are worthwhile. Though we had a light bit of rain today, it's still dry (for Louisiana) and hot here (in the nineties fahrenheit in the afternoons). Sleeveless shirt and sandals kind of days....

They were a plucky bunch.

(Taken this morning in Lafayette, LA, Monday, 9-24-12.)

wedding flowers - May, 2012

oh the funky balance
of light and dark -
equinox
within the heart

Speaking of bugs, I took this image of a winged beauty on August 4, 2012 in Lafayette, Louisiana. Earlier during the walk, I'd seen a small cluster of what looked like large dragonflies in flight, but was unable to get very close. Then, fortunately for me (though not for this bug which perhaps collided with a car), I got to see one up close.

Haven't happened upon any regular honeybees here but, as in Austin, have seen a few of these large, solitary pollinators. These images were taken this morning, 9-19-12, in Lafayette, LA.

I'm posting these two photos together because they happen to be nine thumbnails apart in my Windows Photo Gallery. Since each of the rows is nine images long, these two pictures ended up one above the other, and I like how they look paired up like this.

I like serendipity.

(Taken March 28, 2012, Austin, Texas around 3 AM)

'The sky is falling,'
he heard the tv say.
He took his umbrella
from the enameled stand
and walked to work,
his feet in gleaming leather
with black laces
double-tied.

(This image was taken yesterday morning, Saturday, September 15, 2012, in Lafayette, Louisiana.)

This is a photo I took this evening on the street where I live in Lafayette, Louisiana. I held the camera pretty steady, and the answer to your question is, 'Heck, I don't know.'

(This is the second of two images - they both look about the same. I didn't see all the ornamental lighting and stuff with my bare eyes - this is just what the camera gave back. I saw the silhouette of the trees against the sky at dusk, and street lights and house lights. I saw and felt nothing to be afraid of, and I think the picture is pretty cool if I do say so myself....)

For the last two days, there's been a bit of a theme emerging from my artwork. Here is yesterday's photo of work in progress:

Sometimes things were so surreal,
so uncanny,
even the vegetarians would go for burgers and fries to recalibrate.

Photo taken May, 9, 2012 in Austin, Texas.

they endured practical jokes
so intimate, so cruel, and so unlikely,
they grew mute
rather than suffer the disbelief
of family, friends, and officials

everywhere they went it seemed people were growing mute about what was happening. No one could talk right out about anything....

Found this in the yard. Don't know quite what it is, but I call it The Fungal Mat.

(image taken 3 Sept 2012, Lafayette, LA)

day after day
the oven was set on high
the sun fierce and very near
and well
was it the apocalypse
it must be

but you know

spiders had left eggs deep
in narrow shafts beneath window sills
and there were patches of lawn
against the peeling picket fences
untended little paradises
where things still grew
unnoticed
wildernesses
on a very small scale

babies were being born

i saw a screech owl in my dream this morning
safely hiding
an unexpected armadillo
in the pocket of glass window
of a neighborhood church

Outdoors, even the scary stuff had a degree of theater to it, sometimes humor. It was the strangeness indoors that, experienced as personal, was hardest to bear. Thus, their feet grew more calloused, their skin, darkened by the sun, their minds a fund of information about street names, identification of flowers and trees, and the location of the friendliest hangouts.

July 11, 2012, Austin, Texas

This is a painting from June 2012, when I lived in a little house off Burnet Road in Austin, Texas. I loved that little house; it was the first place I painted where there was soft daylight to work in. Things could go awry, but if I was able to sit at the table in the quiet light flowing through the windows, bruises and obstacles of the day would break down in the weight of the brush, the texture of the paint, the flow of color, the unpredictable effects of water.

It was real.
They could touch it,
they could see it,
they could hear the rustle of the leaves.
It was real,
like a movie set.
(Actors wandered
in the background
as directed;
the sun was projected
by the lighting crew
on a suspended screen of blue.)

(image taken 9 August 2012, Lafayette, LA)

There's Bloom County's Opus (the cartoon penguin). There's Mylar - more generically known as BoPET. And there's the visual appeal of a hard drive (see the image below I took this evening).

The penguin has been surfacing in my art of late - incognito - and I hadn't thought of him in quite a while. Bloom County by cartoonist Berke Breathed was enormously popular with my family. We not only read it in the paper, but bought every book of past episodes, to catch up on the origins of the critters and people who inhabited the fictional county. The pages were smudged with ketchup, yogurt, cinnamon sugar, chicken noodle soup (as were the pages of volumes of Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes) because serious reading at the lunch and breakfast tables were the norm in our household. (We saved arguing for suppertime, where reading wasn't allowed.)

I'm fascinated by Mylar, and have compulsively saved deflated Mylar balloons, and more recently the wrappers and bags that hold Fritos and BelVita cookies and Annie Chun's seaweed snacks. I'd reuse the balloons as gift wrap, and now have crazy uses for the wrappers which I seemingly can't bear to toss. What is Mylar, anyway?

What is a hard drive? I remember reading years ago about the huge rooms where computer workers dressed like medical staff in a surgery unit, and dust and sneezing were absolutely verboten, but what were they doing in there?

Here is an image of a work in progress:

Here are images of the paper card I was using as a palette for the work in progress:

without appointment calendars
or synchronized chronometers
they flowed into shared space
in shared moments
and sent visual messages to each other -
sensory silliness -
within the landscape

a crisp play million dollar bill
skittered across the street
and underfoot
at the moment her shoe touched the asphalt
she reached down
and examined her unexpected wealth
quite pleased
how do you do that?
i don't know ...
it just happens
when I think of you.

(Lafayette, LA, 9-5-12)

They came to discover it wasn't witchcraft, but the meta-physics of networking.

(Lafayette, LA, 8-28-12)

walking to the store
under the hot

in the wet heaviness
of tropical air

the neighborhood
was sweating

as it went to play
and mow the lawns

I walked and gazed up
at the networks of

the sky the power
lines and down

at St Augustine
grass and strange

fungal mats
and tiny tiny ants

in a hibiscus bloom.
I walked on paved streets

and sidewalks littered
with twigs and

watched for cars
and rumbling trucks

with thumping trailers
and I looked in the tall

flowers against the tree
branch backdrop

and saw the neighborhood
of perception

of mind
interplay with

the lens of
my camera

life
of notmatter

notcells
of my mind greets

yours and yours
in the stillshot

of jungle
sky,

leaves, flowers
thought, light

and shadow.


(or something like that...)

Lafayette, Louisiana, 9-3-12

Austin, Texas, August 15. 2012