Know what I love? Yosemite. That place is so stinking pretty! Here are some pictures to prove it.
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| This here is Mirror Lake. If you keep going up the mountain on the top right of the picture you'd see Half Dome. |
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| This is Gabriel learning the fine art of planking. Not bad for his first go, right? |
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| Hippie Home School Class Photo, May 2012 |
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I guess I should explain: I went to Yosemite with Sandy and her Hippie Home School peeps. This is pretty close to our regular group, though we don't always have Sam (older dark-haired boy in the center), and we don't usually have the three littlest Pettus kids except for cool field trips, and for art I've got a fist full of other kids all together. But this is the core, or it has been. This will be the last year for this group-- next year there will be some changes as the individual families adjust to fit their individual needs. That also means I won't be teaching art again. I'm not very disappointed about it, to be honest. I've been down the road, I've seen all I want to see. Time to go somewhere else! Like John Muir headed out of San Francisco, I don't much care where I'm headed, as long as it has some wildness left in it!
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| Emma, Sam, and Eli braved Bridalveil Fall; they were soaked. |
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| Gabriel really is that cool. |
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| Fern Spring. The water was literally like glass. What a beautiful place! |
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| Sandy took this one; Indian Paintbrush. Isn't it wonderful? I don't know if she could have planned that shot any better! |
I've been reading a lot of books lately, mostly about the natural world. I've read a few about weeds, some about bees, I've borrowed several from the library about wildflowers and birds. I've read a lot of John Muir lately as well. (That guy was brilliant! I just want to hug him.) Then I spent a little time in the Yosemite Valley. I'm still too asthmatic to go
hiking into those granite hills, and yet-- what a place! Just meandering the Valley floor made my brain explode!
After Yosemite I took some small, winding highways north toward Tahoe and then across the Nevada and Utah deserts to go to a friend's wedding. I didn't know my world, the one I live in, the one just right out my door, could be so beautiful! My heart practically broke as the sun set over the rolling green hills of California's central valley, and then I almost lost it again as a fat, white moon rose over a snow covered basin high in the Sierras. Wow! How is it possible I've been so close to such beauty and not seen it? I want to absorb every drop of golden sunlight, every stroke of silver moonlight. I wish it were possible for me to actually bathe in the flickery light reflected from all the pools of water in all the world. You know? As if somehow I could collect some of those piercing little glints of light off the top of the rivers, lakes, streams, and seas of this world and stuff them into the bathroom faucet. But it's all too flighty for that, isn't it? I guess I'll have to go out into the wide world and collect them one at a time. Probably better for my retinas that way.
Anyway. That's what I've been up to.
Oh ya. And Happy Mother's Day! You know I love you, right Mom? See because, I just do.
