It finally was nice out again today so I dressed up in my new Adidas gear that I haven't gotten to wear much yet and took a 2 mile walk. Decided I looked cute enough to doodle a selfie.
After a gorgeous sunny day in the garden, the wind picked up in the late afternoon. Too windy for a walk, so I drove my son to the GG bridge for his nap and stopped at the welcome sight of St. Ignatius on the way back.
I watched a virtual wildflower walk yesterday, and it reminded me that it's spring and beautiful things are happening quietly all over the place. This is a plant emerging from the snow at a hot spring in Mammoth on a Valentine's trip just before I found out I was pregnant.
Inspired by the wonderful tutorial by rafy A, you can find it here: https://youtu.be/JM-esQnGIhQ
Camera photo source: https://www.pexels.com/photo/aperture-black-blur-camera-274973/
Forest and child source: Unsplash.com
Everyone thinks that they love will have a happy ending, but those are the lucky ones. What about those who have their heart played just to get the pleasure fulfilled. What happens to those who kept promises but never fulfilled them, just forgot them like they meant nothing, no memories of them were made, it had nothing to do with them. This picture that I developed at this stage of a person's life shows that they don't ask for nothing beside a happy ending, sitting together and enjoying each other's company. What was the need of stealing someone's heart, use them for your own desires and then just throw it away? What did they get at the end? It was easy for them to make promises, gaining their trust, building hopes but harder for them to prove it. Day by day the pain kills them inside but to the world they are nothing more but alive and energetic, but who knows what’s happening from the inside, when they are just trying to live each day until death comes. At this moment of time no one can heal the cuts, them deceitful memories by the one who once said they will never hurt you or leave you. But I guess one day everyone does leave you, maybe today or tomorrow. She was told to forget him because he was nothing beside a memory. He wasn’t worth it. He walked away from her, but maybe she was too caught in his memories.
Sometimes, a good goodbye is also a fresh hello.
As we wrapped up our "Sacred Spaces" paintings, I asked our student teacher to design a one-day project—something playful, earthy, and engaging to ease the class into her care. She brought mud. Literally.
Using mud and simple stencils, students pressed images—flowers, insects, wings—onto the sidewalk behind our school. There's something timeless about making marks with the ground itself. It felt ancient and immediate at the same time.
These prints won’t last long, but maybe that’s the point. A fleeting image, a shared laugh, a new hand guiding the next phase of learning.
Art is about making marks. Not all of them need to be permanent.
A Brief Pause at the Edge of Becoming
It seems I am always seeking a place to sit—
not just to rest the body,
but to settle the soul.
Yet even in stillness, Gary Brecka’s words whisper:
“The quickest way to old age
is the aggressive pursuit of comfort.”
So I do not stay long.
I walked until I found a picnic table
beneath a canopy of bare-limbed trees,
branches like open hands waiting for green.
The blue spruces nearby—
stoic, unchanged, whispering that some things endure.
I sketched.
Not perfectly. Not for anyone’s praise.
Just a mark to say: I was here.
Alive in this in-between.
Waiting. Listening.
Not for leaves—
but for something truer than comfort.
Thank you for joining me in this small noticing.
A moment borrowed from the rush.
A table. A tree. A thought.
A gift.
There are only a few lovely large pine trees near my home in the Southwest of Western Australia. This little sprig was found on a walk where there was only the one pine tree in amongst the other trees.
Warm and cool winds mixing and blowing over sand ridges. A memory from living on the edge of a desert in Western Australia. Sometimes, walking the early morning the air is still cool in the shade of the trees, but the moment you step out into the sun, it is already hot.