mid-summer musing

Are you as surprised as I am that July is over (not including today)?

Muji ears

Muji is eating his meals these days - for the most part.  I have to baby him through the last bits by mashing his wet food to a grainy pulp- sheesh! - before I'll give him his longed for and much demanded kibble. I know, I know, I've created a monster!

My reward for this draining behaviour is a stroll around the gardens.

The sun is too bright to capture anything that isn't over-exposed or too contrasting. 

The grapes are coming along now with the heat they love

The bumblebees are out in unusual numbers and love the Echinacea

The day is heating up nicely- a little too much for me, so I got myself back in.

I had a request last winter for an old picture of mine, and try as I might I couldn't find it. 

Thankfully it had survived 5 winters on the covered front porch in a box with some other older work; I found it towards the end of June. I cannot tell you why I've stalled so long in sending it, perhaps a little sentimentalism mixed with worry that it will not survive transit.

I took it out of the frame to photograph it without glare.  It is a watercolour done in 2008 of a chameleon, a subject with which I was quite smitten, painting a number of them on pottery.

a detail of the same work

and another

I don't remember how I got the fine line in red. I'm pretty sure I would have used an ink, possibly an acrylic ink, though I don't know why it would have run into the wet watercolour though now that I think about it, it did used to revive with water.  The bleeding (ugh, I didn't want to use that word regarding the red) works though, adding an extra dimension.

Here is another drawing in the sketchbook I've been working in at the kitchen table.

Drawn in black Derwent Coloursoft pencil- a British product with "colour" spelt English style with a "u"- and Black Pitt Pen.

The White is a combination of Sharpie Paint Pen and Ranger White Opaque which is hardly opaque and needed several applications. The green hair is done in various Winsor & Newton pigment markers. Oh, and a Gold Sharpie Paint Pen for the background.

So are you ready for August? Psychologically I mean. Or does it matter to you? The passage of time startles me when I stop to think about it, its effects and consequences. My mind dances around history, both my own and that of the world's and the myriad of personalities and characters that have peopled it. Archaeological digs indicate climate changes and geographical shifts. It's always moving this world of ours, this planet, this reality. It's so easy to forget as we become consumed by our narrow focus on what is of immediate importance, but that doesn't make this trickling of change cease its relentless erosion/life force  of kinetic/static energy.

The irony of meditation, of ceasing all doing, all engaging, all thinking, 

is that it is the only way to keep up with this ever-changing life we've been given-

by being present with all that is.

What a miraculous thing to do.

breathe