Sidetracked Charley

BP has admitted that its latest effort to stem the flow of oil into the no longer pristine waters of the Gulf of Mexico has failed. They claim to have another plan to implement but if we all pull out our best plans first and BP is down to attempt four or five then what is in the future is not good. The sick jokes are now popping up: BP's new oil clean up method - birds and furry animals. And a website is taking bets on which will be the first fish, bird or animal of the gulf to go extinct because of this. I hope not the brown pelican. I love pelicans. I am not sure why this particular event of all the horrid things going on in the world today is so troubling to me. Maybe it is the greed of BP and other oil companies. Or all the short cuts we now know they took to expedite the flow of oil and make this spill more than just possible but probable. Or that our country has no power to oversee these oil shore leases because of concessions made by Bush II. Or that BP has been able to ...

I was remarking to a friend recently that the month of May was lost. I am shocked to find that in a few short days it will be over. By lost I mean in the scheme of the normal flow of my life. There was vacation and visit from friend and then the death of my brother-in-law. So while I was totally aware of the explosion and sinking of the Deepwater Horizon on April 22, 2010 I have come late to the total scope of this disaster. In fact, it is only within the last couple of days as the reality of the volume of the oil spill upon the waters of the Gulf of Mexico has reached the news, despite BP's efforts to minimize coverage of this event, that I am becoming fully aware of the horror of this. It isn't just the pictures of the oil slicked dying birds, or the soiled beaches I have walked upon in better days. It is the screams of the earth as the ecological microcosms of salt marshes and bayous are chocked off from oxygen and life which are such a disturbance in the force for me. ...

Some days I really don't feel I make a lot of direct progress: Sort of like a crab that walks sideways through the sand, first scuttling one way and then the other. Yesterday was like that. I seemed to be going all which ways and not making my way any further up the shoreline. Spinning wheel days. But as I was making a shopping list for a previously unplanned trip to Taos this morning I began on the back side to list my accomplishments. I got all the trees and bushes around the house watered I got the Smokey Thyme (only 6 to go) and the purple flowering ground cover planted I have a definite plan for two 14 x 46 inch horizontal paintings (perhaps I should finish the others) Laundry and the last of the suitcase unpacked Tended to pet sitting duties including talking to two new clients Interviewed a possible long term renter of the apartment Looked through Utah pictures for more ideas to paint Made a chicken salad to nibble on the next couple of days Admittedly I did not m...

I think I am having re-entry issues. First there was the vacation in Utah. Then I returned home to have my friend, Dianne, stay another week to help me finish up the furnishing of the rental unit.  Then she left and I thought I could get back to some semblance of normality and my sister called to inform me her husband, Alan, had just died. Below is a typical image of him on the vacation. I have lots of images with him and my sister. I find them every time I go through looking for a particular picture I want to use as a basis for a painting. Like this one. Or this one. And yesterday after I returned from the memorial service I had all the telephone calls to make to those who asked to be notified how it went. And then this morning I got the calls from the people that somehow had not heard but were wondering if I had returned from my vacation yet. I had asked my neighbors to watch the fur kids and water some plants on Saturday. It did not look when I had returned that either...

What I shall always remember about J. Alan Baker is how much he loved my sister. I always told her she got one of the last good ones so I was not even going to bother to look. He was not only good to her but good to her two kids, Patrick and Mary. And he was a grandfather to end all grandfathers to the six children of Pat and Mary. The back country trip up Lavender Canyon was the last of our road trip this May and we all had fun including the Rubicon. We all laughed when Alan lost his shoe in the wet sand of a narrow canyon he scouted before we went through gingerly. He took more photos than Deb and I so being able to take one of him was special. I stood back and photographed them together on more than one occasion like this one where they paused in the middle of Musselman Arch. The whole trip seemed like a last adventure on some level. But as the eldest I was more concerned I would not be this way again. This was the ritual tripod photo. One of those happy moments on a back roa...

There is an arch in the ridgeline, just left of center, in this picture. It was one of those surprise treasures discovered when focusing entirely on something else. We had been looking for arches in the main Lavender Canyon but in the West branch I had begun aiming at recording just the colors and formations of the walls. It was so narrow and the walls so tall. I loved the pinks and yellows and the lavenders and the rolling shapes. I have taken those colors into my appointing out of the apartment. Now the goal is to take the forms and sights into my paintings. But rather like looking for arches it is difficult to look for creativity. I have done all the "tasks" connected with painting. I have the canvases stretched and the sizes of them marked out on my sketch pad. I have gone through those pictures among the thousands that stand out in my mind and printed them out in 5 x7's to inspire my sketching. Now it is time to center myself and find the arch when looking for so...

The frenzy of getting ready for a road trip and then the frenzy of this particular tip followed by getting home and hitting the ground running, as it were, has been exhausting. But there has been something calming about returning to some sense of normal routine. But after the time away they do seem a bit strange. But isn't that rather what vacations are all about: to open our perspective and stretch the envelope just a bit. A friend of mine mentioned the Zen in the photographs I have been posting after my Canyonlands adventure. And in culling through them and uploading to FlickR and posting to my blogs and Facebook I began to slow down just enough to see that aspect. I would have loved to have set on the bank of Lavender Creek and just sketched and meditated. Or contemplated for hours the reasons for the folds and crevices and hallows in this rock face. But during vacations we are trying to cram so very much in to so very few days. It has only been upon returning home that I ...