moving

Moving this blog to new website, and (in hopeful theory) updating it more often -- find me at katherinecatmull.com

earth art

Found this Friday while I was hiking in Commons Ford -- like a little mini-Andy Goldsworthy piece. Except I think it was made by ants, maybe. (Fairies?)

lost

In my experience, as someone who hikes and is easily confused, there are three kinds of lost:

1. Off the path. in my case this is usually accidental. Scary.

2. On the path, but no idea where this path is going.

3. _Is_ this a path?

in my life right now I think I am the #3 kind of lost.

At Wild Basin right now, hiking, it's #2.

totems

Monthly posts, apparently.

So at the Blanton again today seeing the Francisco Matto exhibit for the second time. It got me thinking about totems--his are weirdly thrilling for such simple things. The wall cards talked abut totems in general as "objects that serve as material links to spiritual realms." Maybe these actually do.

I want to think more about totems so I put this here as a placeholder to remind me.

flying

On the BBC podcast "Best of Natural History Radio," I heard David Attenborough say

Flying is a very energetic business, much more so than walking or running, and birds don't fly unless they have to. Indeed, they stop doing so if it's safe to do that. The process has happened in recent time on islands where there are no ground predators. So cormorants on the Galapagos and rails on Central Pacific islands have stunted wings that are no longer big enough to get the bird into the air.

But I would tweak the perspective on that and say, not that you don't fly unless you have to, but that you can't fly, unless you have to. I like that juxtaposition of wretched necessity and flying.

decorate the frame

Saw a painting at the Blanton yesterday, now I don't even remember whose, where the frame was strangely carved and painted to complement the piece. It is a small (or sometimes large) thrill to me when the frame is made and finished this way, not just in painting.

thanks

From The Gift, by Lewis Hyde:

I would like to speak of gratitude as a labor undertaken by the soul to effect the transformation after a gift has been received. Between the time a gift comes to us and the time we pass it on, we suffer gratitude. Moreover, with gifts that are an agent of change, it is only when the gift has worked in us, only when we have come up to its level, as it were, that we can give it away again. Passing the gift along is the act of gratitude that finishes the labor.