Who goes there? Please leave comments so (An Aries Knows)!
Learn, from my One Word Art series, December 2005
ETA: For all its complications, I can’t regret the easy access the Internet offers. My fictitious pianist is diverting himself by playing the twenty-four etudes of Chopin’s Op. 28, and thanks to YouTube, I can listen to someone perform those as I write. So can you, if you’d like to be still and relax for about forty-two minutes. You can hear what he hears.
Heed the crow, friends.
Today is Great Poetry Reading Day, and you can learn more about it at that link. As for me, as soon as I realized this, I went right to the Houndstooth library and took out this book. I don’t know why I thought to check, because I rarely do this anymore, but I looked inside the front page and I had, indeed, written my name and the date I got the book, which in this case was 1997. I wonder what prompted me to purchase it that year, whether I had a hunger to read more poetry or I was in a bookstore, saw it, and decided, I need that!
I paged through the book randomly, reading poems, and came to a section with work by the American poet Robinson Jeffers, who I’ve always read with pleasure. Full disclosure: In 1995, I bought the book Safe As Houses by Alex Jeffers and wondered if he was related to Robinson Jeffers, but these were the days before I had the entire world of information at my fingertips. I reminded myself that just because two people share a last name… Lucky for me, one of my literary icons, Edmund White, had blurbed the novel on the back cover, and he shared that Alex is Robinson Jeffers’s grandson. Curiosity satisfied. Since I’m off-track already, I want to reiterate that it’s among the highlights of my writing and editing career that I queried Alex about submitting a story to Timothy and me for Best Gay Romance 2014, and I was delighted with his submission, “Shep: A Dog,” and really excited to include it in the anthology. If you have interest in reading an excerpt, I provided one at this old post.
Today, I relished Robinson Jeffers’s poem “Love the Wild Swan,” because I really hungered for more of the validation I got last week that yes, I am a writer, and no, I’m not on the wrong path, I’m on my own path, a path where I can and do love the wild swan.
I even crafted a bit today to showcase Jeffers’s poem in between periods of writing, all while listening to music. If you can’t read the words on the photo below, I’ll add the poem at the end of this post. The swan outline came from ColoringAll.com, and I bought that floral paper (to the right) the swan is on at the bookstore where I was an assistant manager in the late 1980s/early 1990s. I met so many good people there, one of whom, of course, was another of our assistant managers, Steve R.
I didn’t forget for a minute that today is Steve’s birthday, and as I do every year, I whipped up something chocolate in his honor (we’ll be adding a dollop of ice cream to those brownies). We love you always, Steve. 
Love the Wild Swan
“I hate my verses, every line, every word.
Oh pale and brittle pencils ever to try
One grass-blade’s curve, or the throat of one bird
That clings to twig, ruffled against white sky.
Oh cracked and twilight mirrors ever to catch
One color, one glinting flash, of the splendor of things.
Unlucky hunter, Oh bullets of wax,
The lion beauty, the wild-swan wings, the storm of the wings.”
–This wild swan of a world is no hunter’s game.
Better bullets than yours would miss the white breast,
Better mirrors than yours would crack in the flame.
Does it matter whether you hate your. . . self? At least
Love your eyes that can see, your mind that can
Hear the music, the thunder of the wings. Love the wild swan.
Thank you, Taylor, for today’s creativity soundtrack. Your lyrics mean a lot to me and to some of my characters.
Fun fact: In An Aries Knows history, I launched Button Sundays on September 17, 2006.
Lightness and darkness. Lightness and heaviness. Sometimes, I feel heaviness settle. I try to find ways to sit with it, consider it, and then let it go.
I sat outside and blew bubbles for you. Bubbles are nearly weightless. They float on air. They catch and reflect light. Their beauty is fragile and fleeting. Each bubble carries a bit of our breath with it, but the air and our bodies are quick to replenish our lungs. Inhale. Exhale.
When the heaviness and darkness come, I try to remember the lightness of you and our time together.
I tore out another reverse coloring page. I took circles from Kendra Norton’s book, and then I outlined them and as artist Andrea Nelson suggests, “rounded off the corners.”
I remember to breathe.
Happy Earth Day 2024! I have few details to provide about the creator of this art. I paid for and downloaded it digitally from the Etsy account Unlimited Extra, where it’s listed as Earth Day 2024: Everyday, Protect Environment, Save The Planet.
Every day should be Earth Day for sure. I hope you find a way to honor and provide stewardship of our beautiful planet today. I’ll shoot and add photos to this post later to show a little of Nature’s beauty at Houndstooth Hall.
Growth returning after I pruned these a few months back.
Scenes from Debby’s work around Fairy Cottage.
Some of Tim’s plants in the Hall’s front beds.
Tom always prunes the lantana after it freezes, and this one is already flourishing.
And in the other bed, this one always blooms later and is starting that now.
A peek at the tops of the mimosa and magnolia trees from the back yard.
Fun fact: I did my first Mood: Monday post on An Aries Knows on December 3, 2018. I used BluntCards until May of 2020, then used my own photos or photos from the Internet, including Wititudes, until March of 2022, when I began featuring art, until the last one on April 22, 2022.
Photo previously posted here was of the painting Books, palette knife and oil on canvas, date unknown, by Leonid Afremov.
Today is World Art Day. As mentioned on the linked site, art may be visual, written, spoken or musical.
My love of visual arts skews toward paintings more than sculpture, but that could be more of a lack of education and exposure than anything else. This blog makes it clear I’m a music lover. I’m also a fan of performing arts (movies, theater, dance), but of course, my own favorite art is written, whether as fiction or poetry, thus my choice of a painting spotlighting books.
Some of my characters in the Neverending Saga are big readers; others aren’t. But they all love stories–telling, hearing, imagining them. It only came to me slowly why these novels would likely never be commercial–there is plot, with some storylines resolved quickly and others spanning decades, but really, the novels are stories about people who love to share stories with one another.
Back in early April, the creator of one of my favorite webcomics, Life of Sharks, invited readers to submit their illustrations of the ever popular Barry, the problematic shark. I couldn’t resist the opportunity to go to my tiny sketch book and create Barry’s Mondrian period…now with a little shimmer.
Photo previously posted here was Impasto Painting Songbird, oil on canvas, 2020, by artist David Padworny.
Today is Draw A Picture of a Bird Day!
I’ve done this a few times before: first in 2010; again in 2011; once more in 2014; and again in 2018.
In honor of the eclipse which has everyone so worked up, here’s today’s 20-minute drawing. Let me know if you draw a bird. =)
April 6 was National Tartan Day. Though I’ve s-l-o-w-l-y come to embrace my sister’s research that showed our lineage is Scottish, not Irish, which I was told all my life, information given to me by my college running buddy Kathy about Thomas Cochrane, tenth earl of Dundonald, whose burial place she saw at Westminster Abbey, helped pique my interest. You can see a little of the Cochrane tartan on that button.
And you can see how that interest in our Scottish side led me to this. I still keep these dolls in their kilts on display in the writing sanctuary every day. Muses.
I misdated this post so it published on Saturday instead of Sunday. I went back and put my actual Saturday post where it was supposed to be, corrected this one to April 7, and noted that National Tartan Day was April 6. Computers and me sometimes…
Time to browse the book that inspired this weekly feature, and today I chose this prompt:
I’ve recently taken out my wee keyboard to see if I can still play any of the easy piano music I learned WAY BACK WHEN. Turns out I can (falteringly); it’d probably be a lot easier on an actual piano. The electronic keyboard really is wee, having only 26 white keys (natural music notes) and 18 black keys (sharps and flats). For comparison, a standard piano of 88 keys has 52 white keys and 36 black keys.
Still a lot of fun though, and coincidentally, this favorite old classic my parents liked to dance to is in the music book, so I took a (very slow) run through it.
Sounds better when Ella sings it.
Where would your sentimental journey take you?
Art posted here previously was of The Fool, 1997, acrylic on canvas, Rolf Eichelmann, artist.
Happy April Fool’s Day, and happy birthday to our friend Geri! I hope her day is full of mischief and celebration, if those are what she seeks.
Are you in a foolish mood in honor of the date? Did you know that Mercury goes retrograde today? I hope that planet doesn’t toy with you.
Today, instead of shenanigans, I have the first section of the seventh book in the Neverending Saga to edit: around 82 pages, so that I can pass it to my two readers for comments and criticisms. Then I’ll shift from this brooding character’s point of view to a more lighthearted character–lighthearted FOR NOW. Can’t be fiction without conflict!