This certainly is a day worth wasting everything else.
Except this day, of course.
Windy, sixty degrees, bluest of skies.
But the point is that I've intentionally wasted the doing of so many obligations: I needed to read more of David Hume, I had a poem I've been needing to write, and there must be half a dozen watercolors left undone back up there in the house where I had gone even so far as to set up three sheets of paper, the big jar of water, and the memory of specific colors poised to wash over the daunting whiteness. So many duties, and they all have been forsaken by a walk to the Creek.
Because the wind is whipping the grasses with a certain dedicated righteousness all its own, I can't very easily take those kinds of photographs. But I carry the camera and its tripod to remind me to do what's already on my mind: slow down. A few steps at a time. Kneel. Wait. I take rolls and rolls of digital images of rock texture, color, form. Some in half-shadow cast by what's left of an angled winter-spring sun.
I love collecting images of stones. And boy do we have the stones. About an acre of dry creek-bed before you get tot he actual creek, and in the bed lie a randomness of stone species like I've never seen before. Some with fossils. Some of at least several ages of limestone, shale, sandstone, Mississipian, Pennsylvanian, streaked, solid, dark, red, white, angled, rounded, too heavy, and tossible.
Its a slow walk away from every responsible duty known to man.
Also seen: white egret thirty or forty feet high in a swaying tree, keeping balance while its snowy feathers bend backwards in the wind; kingfisher; red tailed hawk; sphinx moth; minnow; cricket frogs; water striders (Jesus bugs!); unpretentious gray spiders; damsel flies; sunning turtles; yellow sulpher butterfly; grass carp.
On a windy March day, we take photographs of rocks and things that don't blow easily. Like sky, too.
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| Stones under a shallow piece of water. |
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| Some rather beautiful sky above all these stones. |
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