Extraordinary Beauty

A friend of mine posted this on his Facebook page and I was captivated. Photographed at the largest aquarium in the world, it is utterly sublime. The divers on the floor give you an idea of the scale of these magnificent fish. Enjoy.

Kuroshio Sea - 2nd largest aquarium tank in the world - (song is Please don't go by Barcelona) from Jon Rawlinson on Vimeo.

Aspen buds hold tight for spring...

Magic happens... I was so intently focused on getting the buds in focus I didn't see what was going on with these magnificent icicles... Perhaps I couldn't have seen it until the shutter was actually clicked. Regardless, my lovely and talented painter neighbor saw the photo and wondered how I got those colors. But I didn't, I said. They were just there!

Recently I came across this quote from the late photographer Minor White. It is timeless, and I feel describes beautifully the moment above (at 1/500th of a second), and indeed encapsulates so many of my photographic experiences.

No matter how slow the film,

Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.

—Minor White

Snow Day for Parlez

What do you do when it's snowing snowing snowing, and all the creatures are buried and there's nothing to hunt? You go into the bathroom and start climbing...

You find a really good spot, high up and warm, and you stay there and keep an eye on things. And scare away the spiders with your shadow.

Pearls Pearls Pearls

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HEARTS°º©©º°HEARTS°º©©º°HEARTS S A L E !!!
Spoil yourself, and/or someone you love.

Hearts,
The Pearl Girl

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Etsy Buy Handmade PearlGirlPearls

Blue Skies

Walk the middle road and you will see

there will always be blue sky behind the clouds

A walk today after a big wet snow.

Listening to Mozart's Clarinet concerto I looked up and saw

a young Red Tailed hawk looking for lunch.

He moved perfectly to the music, slowing above me, hovering on a note;

as if the Adagio was made just for him.

Such majesty.

Happy New Year, New Moment, Blue Moon

If you will stay close to nature, to its simplicity, to the small things hardly

noticeable, these things can unexpectedly become great and immeasurable.

If you will love what seems to be insignificant and will in an unassuming manner,

as a servant, seek to win the confidence of what seems poor, then everything

will become easier, more harmonious, and somehow more conciliatory,

not for your intellect—that will most likely remain behind, astonished—

but for your innermost consciousness, your awakeness,

and your inner knowing." —Rainer Maria Rilke

Full Moon in Blue, Santa Fe, New Mexico. ©Elsa Kendall

Once in a blue moon is here, December 31st 2009. What makes it so special is that it comes not only on New Year's Eve, but is ushering in a brand new decade. To learn more about this phenomenon you can check this link.

Inspired by a meeting I recently had, I've been revisiting a book I've not looked at in a while, the poet Rilke's "Letters to a Young Poet". It is a treasure indeed. There are so many parts worth quoting, but this seems appropriate for now.

How could we be capable of forgetting the old myths

that stand at the threshold of all mankind,

myths of dragons transforming themselves at the last moment into princesses?

Perhaps all dragons in our lives are really princesses just waiting

to see us just once being beautiful and courageous.

Happy New Decade

New Year

New Moment

A limited edition of this print is now available. For information please click here.

Happy Winter Solstice

Look closely to see Parlez's special greeting.

Click here to go to the treasure.

Wishing you all a Blessed Winter Solstice and nature's beginning of a brand New Year!

The Winter Solstice: Astronomically marks the beginning of shortening nights and lengthening days.

Interpretation varies from culture to culture, but most hold a recognition of rebirth.

Birds of a Feather: Amazing Crop Circles

Just browsing through the wondrous etsy.com pages and came across these images of crop circles taken by a chap in the UK. They are both from 2009. This first one looks a lot to me like peacock feathers. I have long been a fan of these amazing feathers, not only for the colors of the exquisite eye, but also of the symbolism that accompanies it.

The second one looks very much to me like an owl, another favorite bird of mine. Both of these were made this year, and the jump from geometry to geometric birds is quite something.

Truly amazing, both!

There are a lot of naer-sayers about the crop circles, but I ask you: who could possibly do this on a tractor in the middle of the night?!

To see more of Steve Alexander's work, you can click here.

Vivaldi: The Painter

Villa Tempietto Barbaro, Maser, Italy. Designed by Andrea Palladio Photo: Stefan Bauer

This morning I've been listening to BBC Radio 3 on line. What a gift. There is a special on Vivaldi this weekend. We all know The Four Seasons, often played a great deal this time of year, but I knew little else about him. I had visited areas where he lived and worked, though, and was fortunate enough to spend time at this amazing villa on a hot summer day, after a lunch with a friend and a lot of chilled Lugana. It didn't detract from the experience at all; the Veronese frescos are still vibrant in my inner eye, and the beauty of the villa (partially still inhabited) is timeless.

If you are interested in spending an hour with Catherine Bott speaking with the wonderful conductor Claudio Scimone (who at 75 says he's much more enthusiastic now than at 25) at his home in Padua, Italy, click here. A lot of illuminations with response to the counter-reformation, universal liberty for all, and how music replaced words that could never be spoken without fear. All interspersed with some wonderful selections from I Solisti Veneti, a group from one of my favorite regions in Italy, that has specialized in showcasing the work of composers from the Veneto for the last 50 years. It will be available for one week.

Vivaldi is a great painter of music. His bright colors remembers the sky of Tiepolo, and his dark colors are the colors of Tintoretto and of Tiziano. Even if these artists were living before Vivaldi, Vivaldi was playing their world. The simplicity of the architecture of Palladio is the simplicity of Vivaldi's shape, and it's also the great weapon for which Vivaldi conquers the whole world.

—Claudio Scimone

If we could use only weapons of beauty and mystery...

Allegory of Wisdom and Strength, c. 1580

Paolo Veronese

Jeanne's 12th Annual Craft Fair Saturday December 5th

To view larger, please click on the image.

You are warmly invited to Jeanne's 12th Annual craft fair at her home on Saturday from 10 am - 5 pm. Louise (wearing the hat) and I will be there with more hand-made items: crochet hats and fingerless gloves, and Pearl Girl jewelry. Lots of great eats and hot chai as well, and other wonders from some gifted artisans.

521 Del Norte Lane, off of Paseo de Peralta, near the main Post Office at Federal Place. Paseo going west, past Scottish Rite Temple, right on Grant, over the little bridge, left on Rosario, first right on Del Norte Lane.

Between the Worlds

~Dusk is neither night or day~

I love this idea... The same can be said for dawn.

Sunset at the ninth hole, Quail Run, Santa Fe, during a wedding celebration.

The flowers on the arch are real, and were just gorgeous.

Wisdom

I was walking past a little area of our shed and saw this. The innate wisdom of the creatures is just stunning to me. How does this friendly spider know how to make such a wonderful web? Most have seven different glands for each type of filament they need to create.

I had my suspicions but just found out for sure that, "The tensile strength of spider silk is greater than the same weight of steel and has much greater elasticity."
For more fascinating info on spiders' webs you can click here.

"Without love, wisdom's birth is impossible.

For wisdom is knowledge correctly applied through the construct of love."

HAPPY HOWLIN-EEN!

Ed visited recently in Santa Fe. We went to a matinee of Where the Wild Things Are and then stopped by a little early pumpkin carving party at cousin John's house. Bet you can't tell where our inspiration came from... :-)

Musical Fun

FUNNNNNN!

. . .endurance requires real internal work,

a daily flexing of spiritual muscle that is grist for the mill of the Gods,

grinding slowly and growing our beauty.

—Judith Gayle

“True strength is delicate”

“True strength is delicate”

so said Louise Nevelson, a Russian-born American abstract sculptor.

She had 88 years to experience and share this lovely thought as well

“I never feel age. . .

If you have creative work, you don't have age or time.”

~We are each of us the divine painter of our own Master piece~

The painting above is by one of my favorite artists who happens to live here in Santa Fe, Carol Anthony.

The egg altar is in the home of my dear neighbors, Lola's parents.

And the robin's eggs are the creation of one of the many wondrous birds who live(d) here in our neck of the woods.

America's Best Idea

"I only went out for a walk, and finally concluded to stay out till sundown,

for going out I found, was really going in" —John Muir

A new film by Ken Burns premiers this Sunday on PBS. It's called "The National Parks: America's Best Idea", and is an epic, six-part feature that took five years to film. Excerpts have been shown on PBS and the cinematography looks outstanding. For a look behind the scenes click here. It is so beautifully done, as usual with his work. He just keeps getting better and better. It runs in two hour segments, Sunday through Friday. Enjoy~

A Quiet Corner in My Neighbors' Garden

I think this qualifies as a shhhhh, Secret Garden...

Where do you go when it's 90º in the shade?

To the shade... next to your favorite cat mint bush... and wait for a bit.

Maybe do a little day dreaming... maybe wait for someone to come by and give you some rubs.

Hunting the Hidden Dimension

I was looking through ASMP's website and found this photographer's work. And then this amazing image. I shamelessly copied it to my desktop to look at again and again. And then I decided to share it with you, giving him full credit.

You can view it larger here by clicking on it. If you would like to see more of his work, please click here.

This image seemed to illustrate to me the kind of brink on which we all currently stand; in the midst of a vast unknown, full of peril, full of possibility. It looks like White Sands, NM, a bizarre configuration of gypsum sand in the middle of a desert basin. I was there in December once and remember the distinct feeling of strange as I took off my shoes and wiggled my toes in cool, white sand without the sound of ocean waves.

Things are not always as they seem, and that is a blessing to understand. Our minds are so limited, and such tricksters! Speaking of which, I was enthralled to watch Nova on PBS this last week, from which the title of this post comes. It was on fractal geometry and you can watch the whole thing here. I loved seeing how many dried and true mathematicians poo pooed the work of Benoit Mandlebrot several years ago, and literally told him he was nuts. Einstein was right, "Great spirits have always encountered violent opposition from mediocre minds". Mandlebrot wrote The Fractal Geometry of Nature, and I look forward to checking that out. Here's an image from it from Wikipedia (where else?)

I am vastly under-qualified to explain it so best to check it out for yourself but essentially "A fractal is generally "a rough or fragmented geometric shape that can be split into parts, each of which is (at least approximately) a reduced-size copy of the whole." Suffice to say: it is cool!

In the program a physicist by the name of Nathan Cohen was interviewed. He was a Hammer (a Ham radio enthusiast) and a professor at Boston University in 1988. His landlord forbid him to put up an antennae on the outside of the building. By chance, Cohen went to a lecture by Mandlebrot and became intrigued by this work. Long story shorter, he went home and pondered the problem of the forbidden antennae and decided to try something out on his own. Instead of taking a line of wire, he took that same line and bent it to look something like this:

It worked. It worked better than a traditional antennae. It worked so well he continued to explore it, and in the mid 1990s obtained a patent. His work has contributed to the evolution of cell phones. You can read more here.

What has an image of a person doing the yoga tree pose in the middle of a 'beach' in the middle of a desert, have to do with fractal geometry and a man who was told no, and took the no and moulded it into something exceptional? I cannot explain why to you in words, I just know it does. I also know that when we are confronted with no's and cannot do's, with apparent limitations in our perceived physical realities, that inherent in this is a great, big, fat uncollected blessing. It is unknown, and it may seem perilous. But it is full of possibility.