Hens looking for Worms, 2021, Archival Digital Photo
We are entering the second spring of the Covid-19 Pandemic. We are changed in ways that will take years to recognize and assess. As much as we want to return to the Before-Time, it isn’t possible.The future is always new but now we are conscious of this with more dread than usual. The hens peck for new worms and don’t care. They just enjoy the fresh green of the grass and the fact that they can spend the day outside.
The Night with Orion, 2021, Archival Digital Print
Last night, like always, I looked up at the stars
The dogs’ last visit to the run before we go to bed.
A new storm was coming in the morning.
Weather has become tiresome.
Up there Orion was where expected
His eternal trip around the sky.
We humans form patterns
Out of the random.
Expecting Show, 2021,Archival Digital Print, 2021
Suffused with longing for spring and yet an almost gasping consciousness of the spare beauty of deep winter.
Ours is a long season, longer and more expanded by the pandemic and isolation.
Longer and more shocking as memories of the Insurrection vomit up
On the clean snow
As we wait for more.
Right before the Snow Starts, Archival Digital Print with Hand Coloring, 2021
That time when the clouds are full and the air smells of it
Every living thing knows that something is
about to happen,
The colors seem so full of themselves
I rush to get back to the house
The flock fed and
watered
The house will feel
just right.
Found Arrangement, 2020, Archival Digital Print
Everywhere are arrangements to be seen and noticed.
An extraneous proof of a new print
A window, a view into another world
The edge of a paper cabinet
A perfect rectangle
A favorite book and
Always the plugs
Inside a hermit
though always connected
to the juice.
The Studio and The Moon, 2020, Archival Digital Print
We are deep now in the pandemic, many of us straddling two domains. There’s the world of our isolated lives and the world of the media. Our personal lives can be anything depending on circumstances, ingenuity, curiosity and the ability to reflect and learn, whereas our media life is filled with death and suffering and the continual sideshow. Hope now must be self generated. Learning about the people we’ve elected is sobering. I have concluded that many in Congress are marginal and ignorant. Perhaps this explains why they don’t understand the basic tenets of science and stand instead as beacons of ignorance. This governor of Florida looks like he would have been incapable of success in any other business he tried. Poor fellow, politics was probably the only home he could find that paid his bills. As to Trump, lugging a long record of failure behind him, only politics was available to him. At least he has been consistent.
One of the gifts this time has given us is the chance to remember and reflect. We have gotten in touch with people we forgot about or had a spat with and the reconnecting feels good and mends. This reminder of last chances and wanting to have a settled heart has been a benefit of this scourge.
The land is ever filled with beauty and solace. The moon shines down on my studio. The coyotes howl. The deep winter is on the doorstep. And, at least for today, I am safe.
I hope you, Dear Reader, are too.
Siblings, 2020, Archival Digital Print
Siblings [enlarged], 2020, Archival Digital Print
The Cheesecake, 2020, Archival Digital Print
Homage to Bonnard’s The Cherry Tart, Virginia is as lured as is Bonnard’s Dachshund.
Yesterday, 6 PM, 2020, Archival Digital Photo
The changes we are experiencing during the pandemic will alter life going forward. Of course that’s the mantra and we’re tired of hearing it, but given how long we experience this virus and how long it will take even with a vaccine to make us safe, children will have been born and entering kindergarten who never knew anything else. Then, perhaps, given our destruction of the Earth, another new virus will emerge and all this will start again until the noxious primate called man is finally eradicated.
Our stupidity and greed have no bounds. Look at the exemplar of this, the Resident Evil that sits in the White House and actually has ignorant cult followers who claim to be Christians. We are the world turned upside down, our own created horror film, bad actors and all. But even in that, the land, the patches that survive and thrive, remind us of the radiant beauty we share. To live here is a gift, an honor and I am grateful.
Goose Muybridge, 2020, Archival Digital Print
Zach is assisting me in this. He’s a very sweet boy and as white as a cloud. In fact, to hold him is to feel you are holding a cloud, except a cloud that occasionally grows irritable and bites.
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