The ancients knew of a land enchanted that offered endless possibilities. Where wonder wandered unfettered and awe was accessible always. Its locus was buried deep in a camouflaged mass of grayness, a complex, convoluted landscape of mountainous rifts, sheer escarpments and unfathomable valleys, yet capable of shape shifting to mirror flatness at will.
The curious who ventured beyond the facade of its off-putting grayness and immersed themselves in the craggy depths of its energy-pregnant atmosphere were rewarded with vast experience and perceptions. Experiences both beautiful and mysterious as they explored its limitless horizons and places within places. Places such as Mogadore Rune.
The secrets buried in the belly of Mogadore Rune were as diverse as the cold, wet Norse seas and hot, arid Arabian desert. At its heart was a ruggedness, fluidity and serenity that coalesced into a fascinating mystical landscape. Stars glittered from sage green skies, rocks and mountains pulsed like lava lamps and as the sun rose from whichever direction it chose, the light beams from stars reflected on its pale tangerine chromosphere. Caverns drenched in light beckoned to be explored and became brighter rather than darker the further in one ventured. Just breathing induced feelings of endless possibilities to all who drank in the potentiality of its rarified air.
The bounty Mogadore Rune offered went unharvested by many – those unwilling to delve into the off-putting grayness of its facade. They did not reap the benefits of the magic it possessed or the beauty of its limitless power.
As is want to happen, as time beyond measure passed and the ancients were long gone from the memories of most, new generations of people came and went too. New people always brought new ways of doing and new ways of communicating. Those that were bent on exploring beyond the off-putting grayness still experienced Mogadore Rune’s limitless possibilities, its wonder and awe. Its magic and beauty still existed, never to be depleted.
Yet no one, not even the ancients, would ever know one of its best kept secrets. That the place called Mogadore Rune was once, long, long before the ancients, known as Cerebral Rune.
I’m seduced by dead leaves, hard rocks, and naked trees. It’s no new thing but is a lasting thing. Apparently, however, it’s an odd thing. Few I know are as beguiled. Fewer still embrace the starkness of winter’s alluring analogous neutral grays and browns. So what makes me curiously different? 
visible deep into the wood. Pesky gnats, mosquitos and ticks are inactive. The dead leaves crinkle and crunch under foot, a mysteriously endearing sound. Lingering leaves, bloodless yet still clinging to their limbs, as with American Beech and oak, rustle their swan song in the wind.
Fortunate to live in Connecticut on nearly 10 acres of wood atop a rise with no view of neighbors, I’ve become keenly aware of this preference of mine that is atypical, where winter’s wood resonates over that of summer. Summer’s keeps much of its self hidden behind its thick cloak of green. Open space is swallowed and the eye is deprived its
The transition to spring is fast approaching, poised to knock on the door. I’ll be all right for awhile into its early stages. The tiny buds 
uninterrupted green.
I’m a habitual and organized sort, traits I wear with ease. They minimize life’s wrinkles,
Unreasonable cold paid us a visit for a few weeks. It was so cold I swear I could see the bitterness in the air. Relentless, sharp-edged wind aided and abetted the snap. The cold causes my shoulders to scrunch upward in a futile attempt to keep my ears, neck and the rest of me warm but only succeeds in providing my massage therapist more knots to knead. 
Yet the rhododendron leaves had plumped up again. I had one of those self-gratifying moments of brilliance realizing that the birds and rhododendrons react in opposites to the same effect. During the frigid cold the rhode’s elongated, magnolia-like foliage looked sad, shriveled and folded in on itself, much like my scrunched shoulders in the bitter weather. The Titmouse and other birds had feathers fluffed and puffed. Both of them in their own different way, coping and thriving despite the natural roll-a-coaster dips and rises in temperature. Nature’s inherent creative solutions to changing stimulus.
There’s concern over my toenails. It’s not made the nightly news yet, but there’s a palpable unrest. Gratefully, the problem isn’t fungal. Scary, scaly green babbling blobs with pencil thin legs are not lurking between my toes or under my nails.
But, there has been and continues to be a move for color change.
Eventually I resorted to buying and bringing my own polish every appointment lest the choices available to me at the salon be reduced to offshoots of only pink and red, a direction it was approaching.
My pedicurist didn’t seem overly awed by my bold move, so I admit to some smugness when it garnered a remark from a stranger who, out of the blue, told me I was daring to wear such a color. Imagine, me, daring, when all I sensed ran through my pedicurist’s mind was a big, bad, boring.
Life isn’t lived in a straight line or at an even pace. My life with creativity is no exception. Hiccups happen and send it off on tangents. The occasional yawn spawned by a slump seemingly stops its forward motion. Divergence off the “beaten path” does have merit, however, as does pausing to reconnoiter. Frost knew the value of “taking the road less traveled” – both can offer new perspective.
I love lined paper for writing. The neat and tidy in me likes the way it keeps my written lines orderly. I’ve tried journaling on blank pages but it doesn’t feel right to me except for visual art. Those notebooks were lined, but plain and unexciting. Somewhere along the way I bought a fancier journal with a suede-like cover. Immediately my writings seemed more precious, imbued with more importance in that attractive book. Probably the clothes-make-the-man effect.
I suppose all these journals are like specialty shops, each one offering, or in this case receiving, unique insights. The visual beauty of all of them makes my happy heart sing.
It’s August and the doggone heat is on full blast in Connecticut. We had a record number of days in July over 90º and August apparently wants to follow suit with temps closer to 100º. Will somebody, please, call off the contest! 
It’s two weeks since the Summer solstice occurred, a revered event even if not a Hallmark occasion. The longest light day of the year signifies the astronomical beginning of summer in the northern hemisphere. For me, it’s more about the amount of light the summer solstice provides. The more the better.
a Catholic, I remember as a young girl being drawn like a moth to the devotional candles at the front and either side of the altar. All that twinkling mesmerized and invited me to have a reason to pay money to light an unlit candle or two on the votive devotional candle stand. The twinkling radiated from rows of red votive candle holders on a metal rack, the rows ascended and slanted upward like stadium seats. I slipped the coins into the slit in the money box that was attached below the stack of candles.
The lighter, a long wooden skewer-like stick, called a lighting taper stick, was stored with one end buried in a container of sand. The taper stick was used to borrow a bit of flame from a lit votive to light the ones I chose. It was ritualistic, made me feel privileged and was fairly potent magic to my younger self.
The sources of light are varied. There are paraffin votive and pillar candles lit with a traditional match, battery operated waxed, flickering LED candles lit by the flip of a switch, miniature lights on strings – some with purple chili pepper covers – tinier still lights on thin copper wires,
can lights that cast a wash of illumination upwards onto the wall, string lights with decorative shades, 26-point Moravian star lights, a plug-in table light for accent lighting, not to mention favorite utilitarian table lamps – and that’s on the inside of the house. In winter the inside also gets adorned with several strings of electrified luminaria lights, à la the more traditional candle in the lunch bag lights prevalent in the SouthWest at Christmastime.
Even I have been touted by some as being a particularly thoughtful person. But, because of the duality of things, that attribute has its less-remarkable side. Sometimes I think I think too much about things I have no control over or that aren’t worth my time.
My approach, however, seems to be in keeping with my Myers-Briggs Personality Type Profile. I’m an ESFJ.
for “Thinkers”. 
It was the February/March 2015 issue. Although familiar with Cowboys & Indians magazine, having a subscription to it for over a decade, this publication was unfamiliar. My love affair with the West quickly had me thumbing through it. Flashes of images from Pages 82 – 86 gave me abrupt pause. It was specifically the image on the bottom of Page 83, Gino Hollander’s sketch book that arrested my skimming. This artist rough sketched in a style much as I did. Another image showed he painted horses, too. I needed to know more and paid the eight dollars to bring Gino home so I could get to know him better
Cozying up with the large, glossy magazine, I read about this 90 year old artist originally from New Jersey. Right from the first paragraph of the article written by Marla Cimini, I knew I had found a kindred spirit. “According to American artist Gino Hollander, the act of thinking is completely overrated when it comes to creativity. ‘Painting is not a thinking affair. It’s rather a sense of doing. I simply work instinctively and intuitively.’”
“The process” is a big buzz term in the art world. Like so many specialty areas, jargon specific and often unique to those endeavors – nomenclature – is the language used to describe activities within those disciplines. Usually you can find a corollary word or words in another field or every day speech that means the same thing. As with the medical profession’s term “stat” (from the Latin, statim), in layman’s lingo it means “now” or “quick”.
In meteorology, “Polar Vortex” really means freakin’ frigid – less sophisticated, perhaps, but to the point and just as accurate. Somehow, language in vocational and specialty fields has evolved to have their own way of communicating, conveying a sense of exclusion and not unlike having to know a secret handshake to enter or, in terms of language, understand. I continually find it fascinating the myriad ways we have to describe the same thing.
I do my best to verbally describe the how-to but it doesn’t thoroughly convey the entire number of steps involved in the process. It is labor intensive, almost tedious, yet, rewarding. There’s something about the hands-on manipulation of the paper – the tactile, intuitive determinations on what painted papers to use and where, and the physical adhering of the paper to canvas I find compelling. 
hands-on technique of creating abstract paper collaged art. Then, one day, I stumbled across an old article from an issue of Artists Magazine I had saved that featured a woman who created a cheetah image using paper collage. Her technique intrigued me. Re-finding the article coupled with my disappointment over my lack-luster success at brush painting a horse image propelled me to do my own style of paper collage. It was worth a shot. The Great Grey was my first attempt. I was pleased, got a “WOW” from Steve when he saw it and was pumped to do more.
Several years ago I decided to do a piece of art as a gift for a dear friend who had a special soul mate, her Golden Retriever, Lucy. Lucy had graced Elaine’s life since Elaine had rescued her at 7 months old. Lucy came with a skin condition that, through Elaine’s efforts, was successfully healed. At the age of nine, Lucy developed lymphoma which cut her life shorter than expected. 
“How old would you be if you didn’t know how old you was?” asked major league pitcher Satchel Paige. I like his query, even with its murdered conjugation, because it evokes another intriguing question – who would you be if you didn’t know who you were?
fiction. It was such a simple, wise thought I recorded it in my Quote Journal for safe keeping and future reference. L’Engle said, “The great thing about getting older is that you don’t lose all the other ages you’ve ever been.” What an intriguing, gratifying and legitimate concept, I thought.
book of familiar nursery rhymes. From Goldie Locks and the Three Bears, Jack and 
Jill, The Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe, The Three Pigs to Mr. Nobody who supposedly did the mischief in everybody’s house. Mr. Nobody had to have gargantuan shoulders. He was the fall guy for all the mishaps perpetrated by those too cowardly to confess. 
As a bona fide tom boy as a girl (and even now), I much preferred playing cowboys and Indians to amusing myself much with dolls. In this life, though, we reside in Connecticut. We absolutely love the West and our hearts almost ache with love for it but, for a variety of reasons, are settled here in eastern, not even western Connecticut. There’s no bucking the Fates sometimes and the winter weather here is way milder and much shorter. All coins are two sided. Nevertheless our hearts are torn between loving New England and our other favorite place 2,000 miles away. The solution – we’ve created a Western oasis in New England. Our nest is lined with the trappings of things we love about the West and Southwest. We play as if we are there and are pleased. It’s like having our cake and … 
Stories entertain and affect. They can explain the unexplainable, make sense out of the senseless, and if lucky, make us feel connected. I believe we all crave connection and a sense of belonging. In some ways that seems odd since we ARE all connected. It’s an ecological fact. Yet facts don’t always satisfy the human mind and rarely the heart. John Muir knew of the law of connection.
He said, “When one tugs at a single thing in nature, he finds it attached to the rest of the world.”
can enhance our feelings of hope and redemption making it easier to swallow. The closing scenes made me believe that by his telling a story scarce of facts, Mr. Holmes finally was able to feel more connected.
As in love as I am with non-perfect, wabi-sabi things, symmetry and proportionality rules in other areas. I’ve come to realize we’re all contradictions at times. It’s a human thing.
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