Honestygirl

In this time of warming and unusual weather, I'm noticing signs of spring. Our Ozark witch hazel in front is in full flower. There are a few Green and Gold flowers in evidence.  Curious for the end of January.  But that's the language of our time. The antidote is to be more ecologically-minded in our gardens than ever before -- plant more natives, encourage more tree plantings and ecological gardening in our communities, and support global efforts around tree-planting and habitat restoration, to be sure.  Here's an image from mid-February, five years ago. And the accompanying post.

(A duplicate post from Places of the Spirit) I had a lot of fun in a Zoom acrylic class this afternoon where my painting was nothing like the instructor envisioned, I imagine, but it made me happy to do.  And that's been a commodity that hasn't been too frequent over the last year... I initially had been disappointed that we all were going to use the same subject, as I had a subject in mind, but no matter.   Because I had my own acrylics and brushes and my canvas size wasn't the same as was sent out to the Quebec English-language folks, I just started playing with my paint, water, fluid retardant on heavy-duty watercolor paper (I thought I'd "save" the stretched canvas board for the painting I want to do of one of our sheds in Quebec.) Our teacher was demonstrating how she was using the colors, encouraging to see and create what we wanted to do, too, but still worrying about the unfamiliar Zoom venue. As a lifelong teacher, I'm all about encoura...

Reposted from Places of the Spirit: Inspired by a daily writing program's prompts, I was reminded of the National Trust's excellent work.  In one of the prompts, we were asked to: Do one undone thing today.  (Then we're supposed to write about what we felt about it.)  The second prompt involved doing a "colorscape" of the day, whatever that meant to us.  Hmm. I chose to spend time reading the fall issue of the National Trust members magazine, which is one of my favorites. It's been languishing in my magazine basket along with other favored magazines, waiting to be enjoyed at leisure. I thought it would be a welcome alternative to the lure of the NYT online, which has won in recent months. And, indeed it was, prompting wonderful memories of garden and natural area visiting in 2008 and 2009.  I did just a quick search with "National Trust" and brought up several nice posts -- I'd like to revisit posts about both of those trips, which we...