soil

I am an art teacher with a master’s degree—trained by brilliant professors who believed that art could do more than decorate walls. I offer safe spaces for teenagers to grow—nourishing soil where their imaginations can take root. And yet… I am assigned to hallway duty. This is compulsory education, after all. So I sit—posted like a sentinel—watching young lives stream past. “Get to class,” I say with a smile and a nudge. The system wants attendance; I’m hungry for presence. Armed not with a whistle or clipboard, but with a pen— my scribble’s soft insurgency. The hallway stretches out like a geometric hymn. Columns and corners chant structure. Teenagers swirl past—half-formed galaxies of limbs and laughter— their orbits chaotic, their gravity pulling time forward. I begin to draw. Not their tardiness, but their motion. A shoulder. A blur of sneakers. A tilted head chasing freedom. Feet flickering like seconds. Each mark a pulse. Each smudge a breath. My paper becomes a seismograph of seeing— trembling gently through the mundane. This isn’t about making art for a frame or a feed. It’s about refusing to leak away in the fluorescent hum of obligation. It’s a quiet mutiny against the clock. I do this on long car rides, too (passenger side, mind you). Letting the lines grow wild, jagged, and unapologetic. Not for polish— but for presence. This is how I remember I’m still alive. Still growing. Still watching. Still choosing to see. Because sometimes mental health looks like a piece of scrap paper, a moving pen, and the simple, sacred act of marking time with wonder.

The forest nearby is full of baby banksias growing in poor gravelly/sandy soil which they do better in. The little one was growing on the edge of a gravel road.

Studies in Photoshop. https://leglessmermaid.blogspot.com

It's actually a rifle.

Flight of the bumblebee The lifecycle begins in spring, when rising temperatures awaken a queen bumblebee that has been hibernating alone in the soil. The queen will have spent the entire winter underground, using up reserves of energy stored as fat in her body. When she first emerges, she feeds on flowers, drinking nectar to gain energy. She will then begin to search for a suitable nest site. Frequent nesting sites include holes in the ground, tussocky grass, bird boxes and under garden sheds.

Finding edges is a conversation between values. That sounds political. Like Ruskin's observation that drawing is soiling the paper delicately.

I did this mostly from the imagination.The perspective is a bit off,but I still like it. Its of a peat bog in Ireland. A peat bog is similare to a marsh except the mud or soil solidifys, and then it can be cut for fuel.

"Seed, Soil, and TLC." My first attempt at scratchboard.

I am quiet and sharp, strong and calm. I learn from the trees, I become the tree, I nurture the soil while it gives me back, and let the energy flow throughout the universe. I am a master, I am a slave, for the existence of them before me verifies my frivolous character in this game.

This is one of my patriotic environmental posters. Protecting the environment in any way is a patriotic act because it safeguards the quality and beauty of the land we live on.