This is an article about Andean Condors. I had the great fortune of working personally with one and he and I were secret sweethearts. He would come close to me edging over and hiss in his wheezy kind of way. His pink fleshy skin would turn crimson and he would throw out his gigantic wings in display. This would be accompanied by him bending his head down coyly and turning from side to side with his wings outstretched. I would murmur endearments to his masculine display and scratch him on the head. I miss working with him, he was a character. Above is a picture of him. A looker, no doubt.

Leftover shell

That is it, I draw myself up to my full height and say no more. So I will work and remember at last, to dream on my own.

I had such a great painting day yesterday and am hopefully about to have another today. The kind of talk that starts you in one place and leads you along to another. The ones where dreams are born and intense wonderings are aired. Ah well, it is not so bad, I will have one with the brush today.

a bit of memory

Sweet Apollo
how I miss you today

Twas the Night Before Christmas

and the cat already found her presents and opened others just for fun...

They got to unwrap presents early

She got a new toy to enjoy

Too Much Fun was had

Happy Holidays, whatever you may celebrate, may you enjoy friends, family, and good food.

Corby with a treat

I run around like mad
picking up handfuls of birds
and my tenderness
which after all is not made of water
asks the water for a face

-From Zbigniew Herbert -I Would Like to Describe translated by Czeslaw Milosz and Peter Dale Scott

Northern Hawk Owl today

Whatever is real casts a shadow.

-Jane Hirschfield

Solitary Dancer

todays gaze

Swan showing a little leg

I feel as round as this junco today

I am having one of those "fat" days where my pants are tight and I feel rather bleh. You may know the days, where the hair is just not so great, and well the self-esteem is not the best. So I am in the grocery store and a man walks by with his cart. I don't really look at him but I do notice that he is looking at me. I walk by and carry on in my search for something glancing back once more (he is still looking). Then suddenly I hear a loud metallic crash as his cart slams into a pole.
I tried to be polite and not burst out laughing, so I walked away. Oh honey, even on bleh day I guess I got it still. I am still laughing about it even now.

Snow Dog

The snow is really lovely and falling all day in these big giant flakes. I tried to get some pictures but snow is really hard to capture in a picture. I have been like a bear in a den all day, slowly making progress on my painting. I am listening to old folk songs on Pandora so the feeling sweet and cozy. Snowstorms are great when you don't have to go anywhere.

Watching for the storm (red fox)

We are supposed to get 20 some inches of snow tomorrow. I will post pictures if this really does manage to happen. People were stripping the shelves in the grocery stores like a bunch of maniacs. It was rather festive in a way.

Have them pick some new music to your taste at Pandora.com a great place to hear something new since radio generally stinks.

I have to remember that there are always times as I create a painting where I dislike it. It is kind of a given, dislike and then fix and then more dislike and further fixing. Hopefully they do not end on a sour note. It is the discipline of keeping the focus of the original impetus for the work that always reinvigorates the process of creating it. Sometimes I find myself going beyond the reason and when I do that I have difficulty finding the hook in a work that held my attention. My mind races ahead of my clumsy hands and wants to keep finding more and more things to paint. I have to have more patience and calm my focus to get back where I need to be. I am endlessly starting things and then as they go on I grow impatient with the subtle details needed to convey the work I am on. Oh, just be done I want to say impatient to express the next charged idea. I have to go back in and find the beauty of the painting even in its clumsy adolescence. I can be so steadfast on some things, harboring terribly strong crushes for years, patiently conveying a concept to someone who is confused, waiting for the perfect moment with a bird to get a photo, and so I must be this steadfast in my work and not be so ready to jump away from it. Mature painters can do that, sit with a work for years. I will be more patient in all things, see I can wait. I must take my time on things and not always want to rush rush. I cannot live like the world will be over tomorrow. I must have more hope and trust.

the 66 birds of Christmas

Vermillion Flycatcher

Twilight White Ibis

Letter [Persephone to Demeter] by Rachel Zucker At home, the bells were a high light-yellow with no silver or gray just buttercup or sugar-and-lemon. Here bodies are lined in blue against the sea. And where red is red there is only red. I have to be blue to bathe in the sea. Red, to live in the red room with red air to rest my head, red cheek down, on the red table. Above, it was so green: brown, yellow, white, green. My longing for red furious, sexual. There things were alive but nothing moved. Now I live near the sea in a place which has no blue and is not the sea. Gulls flock, leeward then tangent and pigeons bully them off the ground. Hardly alive, almost blind-a hot geometry casts off every color of the world. Everything moves, nothing alive. In the red room there is a sky which is painted over in red but is not red and was, once, the sky. This is how I live. A red table in a red room filled with air. A woman, edged in blue, bathing in the blue sea. The surface like the pale, scaled skin of fish far below or above or away—

Fleeing Commorants

The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I WILL arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made:
Nine bean-rows will I have there, a hive for the honey-bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the mourning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

W.B. Yeats

Osprey

If the Rise of the Fish

If for a moment
the leaves fell upward,
if it seemed a small flock
of brown-orange birds
circled over the trees,
if they circled then scattered each in
its own direction for the lost seed
they had spotted in tall, gold-checkered grass.
If the bloom of flies on the window
in the morning sun, if their singing insistence
on grief and desire. If the fish.
If the rise of the fish.
If the blue morning held in the glass of the window,
if my fingers, my palms. If my thighs.
If your hands, if my thighs.
If the seeds, among all the lost gold of the grass.
If your hands on my thighs, if your tongue.
If the leaves. If the singing fell upward. If grief.
For a moment if singing and grief.
If the blue of the body fell upward, out of our hands.
If the morning held it like leaves.

-Jane Hirschfield

I watched her, she was still beautiful in her ice blue jacket and skirt. Her hair was long and silver and hung free about her head, in a sense a defiance of all of the young girls in the laced up green dresses. She was the mother of the groom and stood with her husband in her orbit. He was gentle-faced but horribly overweight. He could barely move as the square edges of the tux cut into his fleshy jowls and wrists. I wondered at it, how he could have snagged her as she floated in the room, greeting the guests. I do not know their story, their romance or what she is really beneath her ice blue dress. I created my own as I sat among the guests at the table. I wooed them with my happy artifice and they did not know any difference. Oh lovely, lovely, she and I may be sharing the same dark dance; a facade. Who knows; but last night I wanted her to be an ally. I could see my life clearly placed before me in her, and I shuddered at the banality of it. Her son the groom was flushed and happy with his gorgeous but slightly non-emotive bride. She was young and elegant, a dancer in her white dress and long veil. It all seems so surreal she told us as she came to our table. The flowers were red roses with white lilies and orchids, their gentle scent came to us from the middle of our tables. As if summer had not left us in this dark winter evening, a warm world far away from the snow and ice. The magic beckoning me to some other place and some other history. The dancing began and I wanted to join them. All of the young women and men throwing themselves into the music with a jubilant abandon. No, I was matron, condemned to sit in this chair and dream of moving myself to the undulating music and losing all of these dark thoughts. So I smiled but wondered at how quickly I have become one of those who sit pounding at the bars of this cage of convention.

She fell, the white haired groom's mother. As the blood red of the rose in her stopped beating. Her heart had given in and the fun turned to horror as death plucked her up. The dark December was upon us as her daughter in the beautiful green dress screamed out her name. Mother, wake up, a chill over the room and confusion. The DJ calling for a doctor or someone to help her. Suddenly action broke out over the lethargic room, was it minutes before it happened? Seconds? It felt like forever she lay there on the floor with her heart stopped. Luckily someone performed CPR. The very exclusive country club did not have an emergency defibulator, which might have made all of the difference. We were told to go to the next room, all of us dressed and silent except for one drunk fool. The bride sat heavy in her dress, face etched as she discovered that her day of joy would always carry this weight. The groom sat by her side, as helpless as his father who stood mutely over his wife. I did not look at this scene, knowing I would not soon forget it since my mind grasps and holds pictures. I did not look as they wheeled her out to the ambulance and as her daughter the bridesmaid crying held her daughter and went to get in a car. As the bride walked out next to me, her makeup creating lines where the tears had fallen. Knowing that tonight was not part of the fairytale that it was meant to be. She put on her coat, resigned to her wedding night at the hospital. We all left silent, as we got our coats. That will not be me and I begin to rip down the bars of this cage. I am so shaken I cannot paint well today. I feel so damn mortal and I hope for the bride that the silver haired woman is ok.

Dead seabirds in Europe due to starvation, read it here

Edwin Dickinson "The Fossil Hunters"

owned by the Whitney Museum of Art

Tundra Swans/one swan watching

Unnameable Heart

The cricket who
kept me company three days
has fallen silent
I don't know where.

There are so many
lives of which I know nothing.
Even my own. It moves now
through my fingers towards yours
and I know nothing
I can say that will name its heart.

A boat drifts far out
on the river below the mountains,
and below it
the fish, the great fish
that the one in the boat has come for,
swims in the shadow.

Perhaps the cricket is there, inside the fish.
Stranger things have happened.
I have looked everywhere else
for my lost companion.

From here, the shadow looks small,
but to the fish it is huge.
Range after range of mountains,
and still the old painters
found a place
where two could walk together, side by side.

-Jane Hirshfield from her book The Lives of the Heart

House Sparrow

Bird That Comes Just Before Our Kiss

A nest held by the cup, by the curve
Of our two throats. Each composed wing; to behold
That arrival, that settling

Into air between us-how she might grow
Tame, how she might eat from our hand! A sound came
In a slight way, but to draw back until

Each feather came into view, the hammer
Of the tiny heart, the underlidded eye,
Became what we did not do. The nearby

Of everything braced as if to ask was it enough
We had come this far. To look up even once
Was to lose the bird and what is made

Out of nowhere and nothing, the open place,
The sudden shape caused by what closes in.

Sophie Cabot Black

Snow on the head is the new black darling...

Character isolated by a deed
To engross the present and dominate memory.
Players and painted stage took all my love,
And not those things that they were emblems of.

Those masterful images because complete
Grew in pure mind, but out of what began?
A mound of refuse or the sweepings of a street,
Old kettles, old bottles, and a broken can,
Old iron, old bones, old rags, that raving slut
Who keeps the till. Now that my ladder's gone,
I must lie down where all the ladders start
In the foul rag and bone shop of the heart.

From: The Circus Animals Desertion, By William Butler Yeats
fits my paintings perfectly as of late.

It begins with just a gentle echo of hope as I run my hand over the unprimed canvas. I can feel it as a whisper, this one, it says. It comes as a dream, a hush, a faint little voice. This painting comes to me so quietly and I think it may give my heart a voice.

Tree Sparrow

Didn't see the Bohemian Waxwings today sadly, but had some good looks at old favorites, such as this tee sparrow. His foot was covered in ice that he was trying to thaw by sitting on it and pecking at it occasionally. He did not let me close enough to catch him or else I would have thawed it for him in my hands and given him more of a chance at survival.

Reddish Egret

This gorgeous bird is on the 2007 Audubon watch list.

84 things you can do to help the planet, right here

Angry Chickadee

I am so dissatisfied with my paintings tonight. I feel no magic in them and it is a crushing sort of heartbreaking feeling; like gasping for air. They never can get there, where ever the hypothetical there is. I feel like I am constantly reaching and never grasping. I want lightning to strike so that I can rocket out of this hum drum feeling with my painting. I leave them and look at them and find them wanting. It chokes me up with despair that I cannot achieve what I want. I am crazed with it, pushing and pushing until I am bleary eyed. Damn I feel good about them for a moment and then rip them apart with such a harsh critical gaze. They almost need to run from the abusive thread of my thoughts which dig holes in them and criticize their softness. I want to fall through them to the other side of what they should be. Or is it me that is lacking? Feeling less and less like I belong where I am. Jealously watching those who have so much more time to squander while I squeeze out every second of the day. I am tired, disappointed and sad. It doesn't mean I won't keep going, but it is beginning to feel rather pointless. I will always be the painter that I am, the woman that I am, and etc. For a moment I wanted a bit of magic instead reality sits its dull fat ass on my soul.

Ones to watch

Ok, the 2007 watchlist is out on the birds. The scope of the list is terribly large and has me very concerned. I am glad I have been fortunate enough to see many of the birds on the list.

Ferruginous Pygmy Owl

The Painter

I am in love with you Gauguin
as I look I feel the tender passage of your hands
I sit at your table
and no years separate our gazes
I look with an intimacy at your exposure
in paint left permanent
after the force that moved your brush has long left.
The emptiness unites,
my eye travels over orange, red, cold edges of blue,
It leaves me with a longing to know you
the heat of your gaze and edged callouses of your hands.

-By the Corbyhawk herself

November Apple

Like poetry or any other creative enterprise, painting is something that is worked out in the making, and the work and its maker exchange ideas and change one another. The ideal image of the work is blurred and hard to picture, as if it weren't quite there, or as if it were something seen out of the corner of the eye. If the artist tries to turn and look at it directly, it vanishes.

What Painting Is -by James Elkins

Hawk Light

Below,
the Earth-pelt
dapples and flows
with slow bees
that spin
the thick, deep jute
of gold time's going,
the pollen's
traceless retreat;
kingfishers
enter their kingdom,
their blue crowns on fire,
and feast on
the still-wealthy world.

A single, cold blossom
tumbles, fledged
from the sky's white branch
And the angels
look on,
observing what falls:
all of it falls.

Their hands hold
no blessings,
no word
for those who walk
in the tall black pines,
who do not
feel themselves falling-
the ones who believe
the loved companion
will hold them forever,
the ones who cross through
alone and ask for no sign.

-From November Angels by Jane Hirshfield

with one eyeing the other...pine grosbeaks

Wildflower honey

I believe the birds and bees

Gathered round the hemlock trees

They brought their finest offerings

Flowers grown in early spring

To the boy destined to roam

They gave the sweetest honeycomb

And he’s wild flower honey

From the hills of Caroline

Every little kiss from his sugar sweet lips

Taste like wild cherry blossom wine

I close my eyes when he sings

And I can hear the mountains ring

The whippoorwill in his sad song

I smell honeysuckle growing strong

Like an evening summer thunderstorm

From the South sweet and warm

Cause he’s wild flower honey

From the hills of Caroline

Every little kiss from his sugar sweet lips

Taste like wild cherry blossom wine

Then the women swarm around him

Any time he comes to town

I hope and I pray that fate will find a way

To make it my turn next time around

He travels with his gypsy band

Stealing hearts throughout the land

The boys all like his rowdy songs

They tap their feet they sing along

While their women love him young and old

They’ll think of him when the nights get cold

Cause he’s wild flower honey

From the hills of Caroline

Every little kiss from his sugar sweet lips

Taste like wild cherry blossom wine

Then the women swarm around him

Any time he comes to town

I hope and I pray that fate will find a way

To make it my turn next time around

Yeah I hope and I pray, it’s my lucky day

And it will be my turn this time around.

-----Wild Flower Honey by Marie Burns recorded by the Burns Sisters Band
(I went to their concert last night! You can take the girl out of Ithaca but you cannot take the music of Ithaca out of the girl)

The Blue Door

I have painted all day to the point of isolation. I do not want to go anywhere see anyone just be melancholy and paint it out on her face. I see this weird continuum in this work, a glimpse of the paintings yet to be in certain passages like hints of some future. This one sits on the edge of promise and she gives it to me here and there. As if she represents both the clumsy past and the near future. She almost has music in her as I grow more confident. Almost a synchronicity of color as her legs edge out to lilac. I feel the past and future so clearly that I have an odd disjointed feeling when I look at her. I almost cannot look at her. Did I do that? Where was I there and there? Almost like bringing intimacy to a stranger; this painting is troubling me. I am so close and will spend lifetimes to get there, wherever there is. The mystery of where I am trying to go in each work or what is it I am really trying to say. How can I even know my own compulsions? Why have to paint one so badly but not others? I am gazing at the long tunnel of my future life, the one you cannot know but seek so badly to know. What is it? What does it hold? Who will be in the spaces of the future? All I feel is endings but as I look at this work I want so much to know that there is time, and the ending is superficial. I have such hope it pains me in so many ways it would be easier to settle on nothing at all. Somehow I cannot, somehow I am driven to keep painting and traveling despite the obvious destination. How strange to find my own inconsistency startling and the clarity of my choices so unhidden by subjective speculation. I am so melancholy with the passing of time and my foolish desire to have what I cannot, still even now. What magic does he have that keeps me so struck by him? It is the same reason that this figure holds the string to what is and what is yet to be. She is one of the fates then but the string is not woven, but cut and piled. A life removed from the warp of all others.

Happy Thanksgiving

"and as the huge birds rose from the lake into the air, it seemed as if an aerial regatta were being sailed overhead; the swans, each with a wing-spread of six or seven feet, moving like yachts under full sail in a mirage where water blended with sky and tricked one's vision.

-The Trumpeter Swan is an even larger species than the preceding... but the voice of the well named trumpeter resounds with a power equalled (sic) only by the French horns blown by red-faced Germans at a Wagner opera. "

Birds that Hunt and Are Hunted by Neltje Blanchan published in 1904

Dinner for gulls

A greater black backed gull has a yummy fish

Ah, love, o history, forgive
the squandered light and flung-down rags of chances,
old choices drifted terribly awry.
And world, self-portrait never right, receive this gift-
shuffling, spattered, stubborn,
something nameless opens in the heart: to touch
with soft-bent sable, ground earth pigment, seed-clear oil,
the rounding, bright-fleshed present, if not the past.

-Jane Hirscfield

So I have a temporary thing put on my cracked tooth and soon it will be all fixed up. Tonight however after all of the drilling and etc it hurts bad. I am trying to eat some toast since I managed to get some lunch today but no dinner. Ouch. I will be looking like a chipmunk tomorrow for Thanksgiving, lovely. Which is a major pain in the rear when you are hosting it. I do not mind cooking, I enjoy it really, but I have art to make. I should do some drawing tonight but I think I may just put on my pj's and curl up with a book and some aspirin.

thump thump thump my head is pounding. I have a cracked tooth that I will be having fixed tomorrow afternoon, an expensive little problem. So tonight I am going to bed after I take some aspirin. Sweet dreams my dears. May you have glorious visions of other worlds.

Robin

words words words

Lots of words tonight.

"and it leaves one nothing but the role of spectator in life watching life go by-having no part in it but that of spectator which of course is diverting but not satisfying to the soul of one who longs for a human place to be." Marsden Hartley

"You see the battle to be recognized as the same has been an endless one and I realized recently that indeed I am not the same. I am of it but always removed on a separate canvas. I watch and record and in that the reflection I am not an active participant." The Corby from writings about my painting (I wrote this a few hours before encountering Hartley's comments, a weird coincidence)

This troubles me greatly, what are we looking at if our future does not include a literate free-thinking public? Read about it here
When I was in high school I would take a sick day when I could and spend the day reading Rilke, or Hugo, or Stendhal. I guess I was an odd teenager.

You know you love my orange legs

Handsome Drakes and Sultry Hens

So I am trying to not think about something I did that I probably shouldn't have done. Instead I went out and about this AM despite the chill. It was a sunny morning and beautiful along the lake shore light wise. The cool wind, in the 30's; made my face all numb and rosy. I love the smell of the water, the sinking pressure of the sand below my feet and the birds I find there. No redpolls but still a large gathering of handsome mallards, the drake's heads glowing in the light. The swans made a cameo fly over but did not stay. In the other park robins and cedar waxwings were abundant. They were feasting on fat scarlet berries. The light was bad on the tree they were favoring or else I would have had some very lovely photos. An immature red tailed hawk sailed around looking for a meal. As he passed all of the birds would sit very still and wait for him to disappear before resuming their feast. Again no redpolls, only some purple finches. I am hungry to see the elusive evening grosbeaks that are erupting this year and should be around. Still no luck, but if I find them I am hopeful about a dream I had coming true. Silly but hey, read my description today. I am about to resume my painting after this break. I forced a no painting day yesterday to get myself hungry for it again. It worked and I feel quite successful right now. Night falls already but at least I did feel the air and sun today. It sets me right to be out with a small taste of wildness, fills my soul with memory.

Thrasher Eye

POEM HOLDING ITS HEART IN ONE FIST

Each pebble in this world keeps
its own counsel.

Certain words--these, for instance--
may be keeping a pronoun hidden.
Perhaps the lover's you
or the solipsist's I.
Perhaps the philosopher's willowy it.

The concealment plainly delights.

Even a desk will gather
its clutch of secret, half-crumpled papers,
eased slowly, over years,
behind the backs of drawers.

Olives adrift in the altering brine-bath
etch onto their innermost pits
a few furrowed salts that will never be found by the tongue.

Yet even with so much withheld,
so much unspoken,
potatoes are cooked with butter and parsley,
and buttons affixed to their sweater.
Invited guests arrive, then dutifully leave.

And this poem, afterward, washes its breasts
with soap and trembling hands, disguising nothing.

Jane Hirschfield

Response To Art

When we go to museums we do not just look, we make a definite response to to the work. As we look at it we are happier or more sad, more at peace or more depressed. A work may stimulate yearning, helplessness, belligerence or remorse. The cause of the response is not traceable in the work. An artist cannot and does not prepare for a certain response. He does not consider the response but simply follows his inspiration. Works of art not purposely conceived. The response depends upon the condition of the observer.

-Agnes Martin -Writings

Impetus for the fall

With this hand
with this brush
I paint you
the highlight of your cheek
the luminosity of your eye
the sensual bow of your lip
moist from a tongue touch
the open akimbo of your legs
inviting me in
the pull of your sweater violet shadows
the line of your arm
to your perfect hands
the color of crimson at the tips
with this brush
I could touch all of you

-The bad little Corby

sleeping duck

They all will find their way
They all will go
And I am walking circles in a dark room alone

Hey hey hush now
Hey hey heart don’t break
I want to see your face fall
When you hear my name

Hey hey don’t find your way
Hey hey don’t wait
Hush now there’s your answer
You cannot fight your fate

They all will find their way
They all will change
And I am painting circles
On a silence for my shame

-a little Corby wrote me

Ring around the rosies
pockets full of posies
ashes ashes
we all fall down

oiled birds, check this blog here

I wish the idea of time would drain out of my cells and leave me quiet even on this shore.

-Agnes Martin "Writings"

Well I managed to rein in the face I was painting, although I am about to tackle the eye. One is just sitting wrong and I cannot live with it. I am too picky for my own good.

I am spotted today, literally all over. I am allergic to some medicine I was taking and now I look like a bizarre human dot to dot. It is really wonderful considering that I had drop in house guests and I do have to be in public tomorrow. Just call me spotty, or rather I should change my name to Dottie. Ah well at least I can still laugh at the silliness that is my life. Let's all hope that tomorrow it fades away and I am back to my normal less animal print self. Ahh... the Glamorous life I lead.

arrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrgggggggggggghhhhhhhhh!
Do you want to know how "romantic" art making is? Well guess what? Today it is not. I am trying to be zen, happy, enjoy myself and it is just not happening. I want to take this crappy piece of ass painting and throw it and all of its trickery out the god damn window. UGH. When I need to get things accomplished I dither and dither forever on a face that well looks like a pumpkin with drugged out eyes. Perhaps tomorrow I will remember I can paint, because today I am beginning to wonder. My effortless passages are only achieved after hours of steady revisions, looking for that one bit of perfect color. Some people can just do that I am sure and I am wondering why I work so damn hard anyway. Perhaps I should think about abstractions and not pumpkin heads. Perhaps I should quit for the night but I generally have a policy to not stop until I have a good resolution. Perhaps slightly upturned noses are generally problematic and should not be allowed. Perhaps I should shut up and continue painting.
Tah tah my lovelies.

I do not love you as if you were the salt-rose, or topaz,
or the arrow of carnations the fire shoots off.
I love you as certain dark things are to be loved,
in secret, between the shadow and the soul.

I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.

From Pablo Neruda' s Sonnet XVII, Between the Shadow and the Soul

I am loving this silly little blog, it makes me laugh.

Fallen

So I am leaving the conditions-and the final results to something beyond myself. I drew a strong lesson from one of your letters where you said-"don't trouble over the future or the past-but work"...

-Mardsen Hartley in a letter to Alfred Stieglitz from "My Dear Stieglitz"

Well behaved women seldom make history.

-Laurel Thatcher Ulrich

Have I mentioned in the last 5 seconds how much I love painting. Nothing this week can even compare to the quiet thrill I am getting as I work today. I tell you though bloggers, that I am so glad this week is over and a new one begins. Perhaps we can all start over anew. Death cannot help but change you, no matter how unwilling you are to let it claw its way in. So here I sit painting and trying to make sense of what cannot be understood. I have lost faith in my dreams, they are only painted wishes a heart makes with no prophecy in them. Little lies, but sweet lies indeed, so beautifully marked on the canvas.

Which one lays golden eggs?

A man and his wife had the good fortune to possess a goose which laid a golden egg every day. Lucky though they were, they soon began to think they were not getting rich fast enough, and, imagining the bird must be made of gold inside, they decided to kill it in order to secure the whole store of precious metal at once. But when they cut it open they found it was just like any other goose. Thus, they neither got rich all at once, as they had hoped, nor enjoyed any longer the daily addition to their wealth.

Much wants more and loses all.

The Goose That Laid the Golden Eggs- by Aesop

waiting

I want to be brave, I want to be brave
But the night goes up in flames
The courage we need
A fury to tame
This madness, madness, madness

No more,
will I count the dead
Bending gathering words
I should have said

When the night falls
It scrapes its knees
We watch the houses on fire
And she says to me
I want to be brave, I want to be brave
But I don’t think I’ll love again
The dark is so deep
I’ve lost my way

Sarah Slean -Madeline

turning away

ASSING stranger! you do not know how longingly I look upon you,

You must be he I was seeking, or she I was seeking, (it comes to me as of a dream,)

I have somewhere surely lived a life of joy with you,

All is recall'd as we flit by each other, fluid, affectionate, chaste, matured,

You grew up with me, were a boy with me or a girl with me,

I ate with you and slept with you, your body has become not yours only nor left my body mine only,

You give me the pleasure of your eyes, face, flesh, as we pass, you take of my beard, breast, hands, in return,

I am not to speak to you, I am to think of you when I sit alone or wake at night alone,

I am to wait, I do not doubt I am to meet you again,

I am to see to it that I do not lose you.

Walt Whitman-To A Stranger