Happy Vernal Equinox!
My chickens are starting to lay more eggs again as they do every Spring no matter before, during or after a pandemic. I love my chickens and I love their eggs (fast and easy to cook in a multitude of different ways, high protein too) but sometimes I overdo it and eat so many that I have nightmares about them (The eggs, not the chickens.)
Today something about the pandemic and personal space….Have you noticed that people are more comfortable at a greater distance apart than pre-pandemic? (You know, the “six feet apart” rule.) Sometimes I need to lean in closer to hear someone, especially if they are wearing a mask, and I occasionally sense a deep discomfort on their part. Am I invading their new personal space? I wonder if that will change again as the pandemic winds down. On the other hand people are craving physical closeness more than ever. An odd coexistence.
That’s all for now. See ya’s tomorrow.
A run of cloudy days. My mother, a New Yorker born and bred, who never lived anywhere else until she moved to Vermont for the last year and a half of her life used to look up at the sky and say “Look at those clouds! The skies are so beautiful here in Vermont”. She said that almost every day she lived here. And I agree.
After a brief digression for Purim, back to my pandemic journal.
Oh and here’s a self portrait of BaaBaa and me
Another small digression from my semi-chronological pandemic years. Tonight is the start of the Jewish holiday of Purim where we read the biblical story of Esther and how she saved the Jewish people from destruction (once again). It is a joyful holiday with costumes and carousing. I always think of it as a Mardí Gras like celebration in a still somewhat cold and often gray month. But remember, Spring is not far behind.
These are shadow puppets I made to dramatize the story of Esther. I don’t have a video of the actual puppet play so I am just posting still photos of the puppet scenes.
THE END!
HAPPY PURIM!
Ahhh, the Ides of March! Beware (especially if you are Caesar…otherwise it’s not so bad!).
In the dead of a pandemic winter, what to do? You guessed it -take another workshop! This time, Winter Ecology through the North Branch Nature Center. One of my most favorite places on earth. The workshop was on Zoom but we were encouraged to go out and explore the winter world outside. I know I’m supposed to be able to identify the plants I saw but I can only name a few – Rudbeckia, Burdock, Queen Anne’s Lace. Much more interesting to me though to know about their structures, their life cycles, how they survive and recreate themselves. Guess I’m not much of a scientist (at least not an IDer type scientist). Oh well, I still like taking the workshops…and the photos.
Here is a photo collage I made of my photos of winter weeds. Their seeds are dispersed in a variety of ingenious ways: blown by the wind, catching a ride in an animal’s fur, swallowed but not digested by birds or other small animals then released in their droppings. Some are scattered when a creature just brushes by them. Some explode.
And here’s a poem:
Borne On the Wind
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How I wish I could lighten up,
Be like a milkweed seed
Borne on the wind to land and take root
Wherever Nature may please.
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There would I grow upright and strong,
Host to a hungry one
Who’d eat it’s fill of me and then
A chrysalis become.
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Soon the Monarch would emerge
Hold fast to my stem and wait
For it’s wings to dry until it could
Fly eagerly off to mate.
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My fragrant flowers turned to pods,
The pods dried up and when
From each two hundred seeds burst out
Borne on the wind again.
Moving right along around nine months into the pandemic and almost halfway through the marathon. I haven’t exactly been chronological (I am about as non-linear as one can be) but I have been attempting to go in a somewhat temporal order…
It was Thanksgiving, the first one during the pandemic and for the first time in my life that I can remember I did not make or attend a Thanksgiving dinner. But I had been going to a workshop – watercolor painting in nature. So combining Thanksgiving and watercolor here is what I came up with. (Not exactly what my instructor had in mind but hey, chickens are part of nature aren’t they?)
Time for another silly video. While pandemic cruising the internet I found Elena Faverio…or maybe she found me. She is a performance artist who was doing a fundraiser for Black Arts Futures, an organization that supports artists of color. She was asking writers/performers to write a “playlet” based on responses to her prompts. Kind of like the old Adlibs game we used to play when we were kids. (Remember Adlibs?).
She gave us nine prompts, one at a time, and a few minutes to write in response to each prompt before going on to the next one. Here are the prompts she gave us:
A gift
Did I ever tell you?
An unanswerable question
An unexpected sound
A joke
A simile or a metaphor
You know what they say…
An animal
A race against time
Here is my piece of writing in response to her prompts…very stream of consciousness…Read by yours truly. (I guess I didn’t need to say that as I’m sure you will recognize me.)
Writing from Prompts
https://youtu.be/2prXg3ISDMI
The holiest Jewish holidays fall in autumn – the Days of Awe they are called. Usually we gather together in Synagogue to observe them….but not in the fall of 2020. A few friends and family members gathered at Groton State Forest instead. We invented our own ceremony. Each of us went out into the woods and fields to collect objects from nature that spoke to us of the significance of the holidays in some way. Then we gathered together to speak of what we found and make an assemblage of our findings. Here is what I found:
Not in the order they are in in the photograph but:
Something who’s tiny blossoms announce summer’s end.
Something that has died.
Something that takes sustenance from a dead thing.
Something whose seeds can root and create new life.
Something that nourishes us during the lean times.
Something to cushion our fall.
Something that surrounds and protects us.
Something for life everlasting.
And something that announces “Hineini! “Here I am. I am here.”
Blessings!
Well I seem to be riffing on hearing and listening so maybe it’s time for a soundscape. Here’s the backstory.
One day when I was a kid living with my family in an apartment on the first floor of a fifteen story apartment building in a housing development in lower Manhattan I was looking out our living room window. There was some grass planted there and a few trees. I saw this really strange bird hopping around in the grass. Surely not the pigeon or sparrow or even the occasional robin or starling I was used to. I got all excited and called my mother over. She got all excited too. Neither of us had any idea what it was or what it could possibly be doing in downtown Manhattan. It had a long needle like beak, a round belly, longish legs and the funniest bobbing walk you could ever imagine. My mother called the Audubon Society (no Google then folks) and they told her it sounded like what we were seeing was a woodcock. That was my introduction to (New York City style urban) birding….
Fast forward five decades or so and here in Vermont I still love birding and I have always had a special affection for the woodcock. Every spring at dusk I go out searching for woodcocks hoping to catch a glimpse of their awesome mating dance. The problem is, they’re really hard to see at dusk. So here is a video that is basically a soundscape, not much to see. You might just want to close your eyes and listen. See if you can catch the “peenting” of the woodcock or the winnowing of the snipe. Those are both sounds they make with their wings while doing their mating dances. Sit back, relax and enjoy.
coppsky 