The change of season brought out a lot of new work for me. Observation, exploration, introspection, plus, a weekly activity that has grown increasingly important to me, which I haven't shared with anyone before...

I read poetry to my dog on Sunday mornings.

We've made it through an impressive stack of books over the past few months. Mack nods in and out of sleep but if I stop reading for any reason he opens his eyes to see why. Poetry is meant to be read out loud and shared. I'm so thankful to have his ears to fill with poetry, the morning sun warming his fur.

At the moment, we are reading The Collected Poems of Theodore Roethke, a Michigan poet born in Saginaw. In this particular section of the poem, A Field of Light, he uses the words, "The lovely diminutives," which is a good way to describe the the things that usually interest me the most and help me create anything.

I invite you to read this passage out loud:

Listen, love.
The fat lark sang in the field;
I touched the ground, the ground warmed by the killdeer,
The salt laughed and the stones;
The ferns had their ways, and the pulsing lizards,
And the new plants, but still awkward in their soil,
The lovely diminutives.
I could watch! I could watch!
I saw the separateness of all things!
My heart lifted up with the great grasses;
The weeds believed me, and the nesting birds.
There were clouds making a rout of shapes
crossing a windbreak of cedars,
And a bee shaking drops from a rain-soaked honeysuckle.
The worms were delighted as wrens.
And I walked, I walked through the light air;
I moved with the morning.

***

Go to Gallery.

New paintings in my gallery! For me, new groups of paintings don't always necessarily feel like a series, but these seven do. They all share an 'automatic' black brushstroke with accompanying haiku about the seemingly automatic things that happen in the natural world, especially in spring.

I've been reading a lot of poems by Jane Kenyon in the past month or so. She was born in Ann Arbor (where I live now), went to school here, and lived here until she met the poet Donald Hall and moved to his family’s ancestral home in New Hampshire to work and write poems.

She dealt with depression throughout her short life and was forthcoming about it in her poems. In the final words of her long poem, Having it Out With Melancholy, she describes the reprieve that nature can provide from the darkest depths, if even for a moment:

What hurt me so terribly
all my life until this moment?
How I love the small, swiftly
beating heart of the bird
singing in the great maples;
its bright, unequivocal eye.

To me, the word 'unequivocal' gets at the essence of the matter here. For humans, it can be harder to access that feeling—seeing things clearly, without hesitation, fear, or doubt.

It does feel like flight.