Beauty in the Natural World
An excerpt from Ella Frances Sanders’ Everything, Beautiful
“If you’re not watchful, the wonderful is made mundane. But on a good day the mundane can be made miraculous.”
Uppercase 53: The Gardening Issue
Garden-inspired art and art-inspired gardening emerge from the pages of this issue:
"Tell Me the Truth"
Thank you, Mari Andrew, for this week’s edition of Out of the Blue and holding up the candle and confessing the power of what you see.
Lost Lagoon, December 11th, 2021
Words to Begin the New Year
“Hope rises out of known suffering and is the defiant and dissenting spark that refuses to be extinguished. Optimism, on the other hand, can be the denial of that suffering, a fear of facing the darkness, a lack of awareness, a kind of blindness to the actual. Hope is wised-up and disobedient. Optimism can be fearful and false. However, there exists another form of optimism, a kind of radical optimism. This optimism has experienced the suffering of the world, believes in the insubordinate nature of hope and is forever at war with banal pessimism, cynicism and nihilism.”
~ Nick Cave, The Red Hand Files, Issue #178, December 2021
All feels very cold, dark, uncertain and lonely in this moment but I believe the light will return. I’m holding onto hope and radical optimism.
A Handsome Fellow
A male Wood Duck at Lost Lagoon, November 20th, 2021
Definitely a Birb*
"A handsome chickadee that matches the rich brown bark of the coastal trees it lives among, the Chestnut-backed Chickadee is the species to look for up and down the West Coast and in the Pacific Northwest. Active, sociable, and noisy as any chickadee, you’ll find these birds at the heart of foraging flocks moving through tall conifers with titmice, nuthatches, and sometimes other chickadee species."
Source: All About Birds
One of the many cute, curious, and confident — if not bold — chickadees that was perching, flying, and foraging at Beaver Lake last Sunday. Feeding Stanley Park's wildlife is not permitted but these feathered creatures persist in seeking a hand that will feed them. I don't and won't — much as I would like to.