A brittle embrace

Click on the pic for the twining details...

Cold Spring, New York

Pink / Riddled

Blasted heart

I puzzled over this (found while out wandering last weekend) until I realized it was evidence of fire and flood -- the grey colorless wood, washed over by a creek surging past its banks; the almost crystalline heartwood, transformed by a lightning strike.

Happily floating

I'm traveling, off floating like a leaf on the ripple and flow, but will post as I can the next few days. Have fun, y'all!

Indecipherable, with lichen

Another one of those that's best large -- please click on the image.

Twigs and stumps

Found exactly like this.
Some Andy Goldsworthy-esque phantom left it for someone to discover.

Objet Trouvé Op Art

Shoal Creek / Saturday afternoon

Photo Friday: Stillness

Rusty Hensley

In Florence, Texas

Concrete changes

365 days. 576 posts. One enormous "thank you" for an experience that changed, and is still changing, me.

One year ago, I was double-dog-dared into setting up a blog. How could I refuse? Posted mostly from an archive of my highly unpublished poems, along with a desultory photo or two.

Because of your reflectivity, your attention and feedback, your support, I kept posting. I started drawing again. I began taking pictures deliberately, with the kind of attention I applied to drawing. I spent increasing time in the meditative practice of really looking at things.

Here are just a few of the things I've experienced:
Visual arts transcend language barriers; people in far-away places can smile and share their delight at creative efforts even in the absence of a common written or spoken language.

Brilliant poetry flickers all over the Internet, and those who write and share it, who pursue it with love and passion and a firm work ethic, inspire me every day.

There is work shared that may not move me -- but how moving that people are reaching out to share it.

People who I've never met, people whose "real" names are unknown to me, have been stalwart friends of my creative growth -- what stunning generosity of spirit that is!

So, thanks for coming by to see my blog.
I hope it fuels your own creative energy.

Peak experiences story, <150 words

Out of the chute

—all the rosin in the world will do no good unless the wrap’s tight, sumbitch pinned my leg, rock rock rocking good he’s moved—

“Okay.”

One
Something shines, sky or fence, piledriving but he’s
Two
rolling now big gator rolls like to get me hung up
Three
no way I’m going down in the well you sumbitch
Four
spinner spin but I got hold of you, don’t you fade
Five
sky now blur now spin tight into my hand pull
Six
fight it fight dammit change direction change don’t
Seven
snap me back no DQ not this time almost got you
Eight
covered—

—glad to see arena dirt if I get all eight seconds, score could put me in some money but there’s easier ways to earn it’s something else that gets you in and out of that chute.

The road to Angel Springs

Chile pequin and rust

Green and sparkly

Sardines

That last time in airports

Jet Lag

I’ve lost the heading and there are no more seats going home,
conversations abrading around me until the air—that thin ocean—
tethers to a deeper ache than mere homesickness, grows leaden
with every woven fraying strand, every place becoming nowhere.

Disoriented, my compass rose petals dropped among a bramble
of chrome armrests and regulatory voice-overs, the locus here, and
there, and somewhere else again, my center gone centrifugal down
to some other destination where contrails skywrite a cuneiform of
time-mist-vector that detains the setting sun, prolongs the moonrise.

Lagniappe

An unexpected surprise, those starburst sparkles. The lake made me think of Homer's metaphor, "wine-dark sea."