Cornelia Konrads' installations

Tuesday's Treasures:

Nature and art:

Cornelia Konrads builds structures that look caught mid-collapse — logs, branches, doorways suspended between forming and dissolving. She calls it "a moment of catastrophe." A moment of wonder is more like it.

Thanks FB

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Katharine Hayhoe brings this to our attention:

London's Ultra Low Emissions Zone... has helped that notoriously smoggy city clean up its air. Now, a new study shows the improvements in air quality have actually helped children's lungs grow larger.

Researchers at Queen Mary University of London found that both the size and health of London children's lungs improved following the introduction of the ULEZ in the city: proof that climate action is also a health solution.

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Happy September! My favorite month, no, maybe that's October!

Maggie Vandewalle - Rabbit, Rabbit.

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Sharing with Tom's Tuesday's Treasures

It's September!

 Somehow this beginning of the month is harder for me to write about.

I've been procrastinating, and now it's here. 

Don't know why, because Autumn is always my favorite month...fresh crisp air and leaf colors...kids going back to school, a new year in a way.

I've never felt it was the dying time...but maybe it is. So perhaps I should be embracing the dying of things. After all it happens to all of us, and even more often to our various appliances. I'll think of the term for that soon. Planned obsolescence. 

Mt. Pisgah, Blue Ridge Parkway 2013

The cycle of life. That's a term which we can all relate to. Think of the song Circle of Life in The Lion King.

And a bit more artistic, I found this source of all of Van Gogh's works, on Open Culture.

Very timely when considering how many of us become somewhat (or more) depressed with wintertime greys and low light levels in the northern hemisphere. Seeing such beauty expressed on canvas by a man who clearly had a rather depressing life, gives a bit of joy to me.

OK rabbit rabbit. I'm all for increasing the amount of good luck in everyone's lives!

Baby bunnies raised by my son's family in CT several years ago.

And Happy Labor Day...celebrate as you choose.

September is here!

Today I have the memories of shuffling through piles of leaves, and the wonder of raking them to the curb where once upon a time someone would light them and stand watch as the smell of leaves burning flavored the cool dry air. Maybe last enjoyed in the 70s.  No more, no more.

Well, we will be able to shuffle through leaves if we just take ourselves to a wooded place. I'm pretty sure my sons and grandchildren will have jumped into a pile of raked leaves - waiting to be put into big bags for pick-up by some civic truck or another.

These days the best use of fallen leaves is to chop them up and use them as mulch wherever you wish.

A tunnel on the Blue Ridge Parkway in 2023

It will be another month (mid Oct.) till we're at the peak of leaf color season. The tree above had it's picture taken Oct 23, 2023.

The other major thing for my life is that school has started, with several trickle-down effects. First the pool has closed so more parking is available for us seniors when we come to lunch at the Lakeview Center. Second, I need to avoid being behind school busses at around 2:30-3:00 most afternoons. Also avoid shopping at that time, when moms hurry around the aisles getting last minute preps with school age kids somewhat under their eye. Not always. I just avoid the situations.

While American politicians seem interested in the sizes of crowds they attract, here's a crowd of followers of His Holiness the Dalai Lama.

His Holiness the Dalai Lama addressing the capacity crowd of 15,000 at the Hallenstadion in Zurich, Switzerland on August 25, 2024. Photo by Manuel Bauer.

Yesterday I decided to stay home rather than go to the market to sell some pots. Not sure if it was a good decision, but I do tend to move to more conservative decisions these days. My health continues to be a very important factor. Today I'm going to enjoy Sarah Vekasi's talk about Cultivating Joy at the UU Church. She's an Eco-Chaplin with Buddhist training...and a potter!

Today's quote:

We live and we die, this is the truth that we can only face alone. No one can help us, not even the Buddha. So consider carefully, what prevents you from living the way you want to live your life?

HH the Dalai Lama

September song

Such lovely weather. But that's not all that's good in my life right now.

I spent Sunday afternoon sitting on the desk greeting people who visited the Red House Art Gallery. The weather might have been the reason there weren't that many visitors. And they whizzed through so fast, it was as if they had looked for a specific thing and not found it.

The other gratefulness I'm feeling is that my health is being pretty good. I'm taking naps as needed, and eating pretty well.  I've got a chest c.t. scan this week, keeping track of my lungs for my pulmonologist. Bronchiectasis - needing to cough to clear mucus frequently.  If the coughing weren't so noisy I could go where people are more often. As it is, at least once a day when I'm out, I have to remind people that I'm not catching, it's a chronic cough.

So I'm patting myself on my back for having slowly, and with lots of breaks, been able to walk to the lookout on top of Mt. Mitchell last Thurs.  Yay me.

I love September. It used to mean (way back maybe in the 60s) going back to school.  Nowadays it happens in August everywhere.  But rejoining the scholastic community has always been exciting and rejuvenating for me. I'm still taking Spanish, though it's not quite as hard as it could be, not having a teacher but just a bunch of seniors trying to enjoy what they can learn, while many times we can't remember even English words! Well, now that's become more important, in case I ever find myself helping shelter someone who ICE is looking for. So now I want to be able to say a few important things.  But I know some members of the Spanish class would want ICE to arrest illegal immigrants, so I won't be practicing those sentences in class!

There was one summer that I quit my job and spent 3 months traveling and camping with my oldest 2 sons over 10,000 miles. A lot of driving for me (at age 32). But other than that, I haven't had "summer off" or "summer vacations." I would work through summers. And when I retired...well, I have vacation time every day, but I volunteer almost every day.

Goodness this has gone on and on!