A California Visit

A walk on the Berkeley pier with my friend JAC offered this view of San Francisco's skyline on cloudy, cool day.  Painting with new friends in a watercolor class in Sacramento, taught by Kathy Lemke-Waste, provided an opportunity to paint a little differently than usual. The topic: Bugs and Butterflies. 
Thanks to California's commuter trains, traveling from the valley to the bay area was a breeze!

Food for Thought

"Through our speech and our silence, we diminish or enhance the other person, and we narrow or expand the possibilities between us. How we use our voice determines the quality of our relationships, who we are in the world, and what the world can be and might become."
Harriet Lerner (p. 96)   A Unified Theory of Happiness   by Andrea F. Polard Psy D.

Art and Travel Slideshow

Special thanks to my nephew Lou for collaborating with me on this project.  

Check it out!

It's a planting day!

Dancing and singing,

Blessing the return of the light,

Into the moist, dark earth I drop  sweet peas.

The Songbird

In a delicate woodland singing is heard.

I'm calling you back.

I'm calling you back.
I.
The train along the tracks. There out the window a dream is passing.
You had been my home. Sustenance.
When you returned to go through old boxes of memories,
I watched from another room.
It was you there with me. Kisses.
"It's all right to go on," you said.
"What was the hospital like?" I asked.
You couldn't remember,
Just stood near the rack of old clothes and the box of  photographs.

Outside the window, darkness.
The rhythmic sound of tracks, a heartbeat.
Heading home.
The mist rising.

II.
She stood in the middle of the room on the worn linoleum floor,
Yellow with age now.
Round she turned,
Her hair grey.
What was this place?
How had she got here?

Outside the kitchen window the yard.
Darkness gathered and fear took her.
It shook and rattled. It dove down deep.
Interior recesses. Into the cave of her small body.
It lodged there. Cowering against a black back wall.
Refused to budge. Hunkering down it shivered.
In its tiny fist a small hard perfectly round rock.

III.
Spring coming.
All the losses stacked up and dissolved in a mist,
Everything blown open,
The wind crossed over,
The window opened,
Circled round joy.

Pure, recognizable, ancient, old as the world itself.
Both places, all things.
A bird took up its song, started out in the yard to sing.
She crossed the floor to the window and stood looking out.
Something in her unraveled.
The sky alive all blue.

Opening the back porch door, she went out into the garden,
In her apron pocket, seeds.
She turned the moist earth, opened a small dark space,
And dropped a seed, perfectly round, into place.