bits & pieces of shed/yard video.

I enjoy playing around with moviemaker, cutting and pasting the bits of video and then dragging them back and forth across each other, seeing what happens. I expect if I spent some time being precise and planning how images might interact with each other I might be able to make some interesting things with a little more polish. but I've got rocks to move and bamboo to cut and all that toxic muck to drag up out of the creek. so I'll just be contented with a more haphazard approach to video-editing, and get my husband's big rubber boots on and go play in the mud, like a contented and blissful child.

all of the blossoms have fallen from the cherry trees.

and now that the leaves are full and green, the trees give gracefully moving pieces of shade. the branches have been released from all that pink heaviness, so the wind moves through them more easily.

there seem to be robins everywhere and even a little yellow canary yesterday in the bamboo, for a sunlit moment by the creek. it's coming along.

I'm fond of the phrase "coming along", I've decided. it sounds like progress, but an unhurried kind, in tune with natural processes and principles. I allow myself to imagine a partnership between me and the water, the muck I drag up out of it, the stones I throw into it.

it's not especially late, but I'm tired and think going to bed is the most sensible thing to do.

and, seeing as how I'm in a relatively sensible mood, I think I'll follow my own good advice for a change and get a good sleep. tomorrow's supposed to be even more beautiful than today. the yard is coming along. I've rearranged the living/dining room again (still hoping for the perfect solution to present itself) and shuffled furniture from room to room. if I could just go buy what I wanted it would be easy; I've paid enough attention to the possibilities and difficulties of the room and thought long and hard about the smartest and most comfortable way to make everything work together. but I'm working with furniture brought from a much larger house in texas, and then bits and pieces picked up here and there, and so it's slower going. but more exciting, I suppose, making what I have into what I want.

there are wild white morning glories that grow like weeds (the way morning glories do) up the bamboo.

and I've decided to plant heavenly blue morning glories there, to twine in the tall stems with the white ones. and sweet peas, and maybe scarlet runner beans.

how beautiful that would be, to have the flowers dripping out of the bamboo like that, all that hot and cool colour and then the green on top like the roof of the world, and then the smell of the sweet peas in the afternoon when the sun hits hot there, that would be worth the digging and the few dollars for seeds, don't you think? I'm working hard making paths and flowerbeds, shallow ramp-like steps and all sorts of nice places to sit and look at things, or past them.

this is the mango jar upside down, lit up inside the shed.

and I took far too many pictures of it, by itself and in combination with lights in other jars. I put the camera on the fireworks setting and drew with the different coloured lights for many blissful moments during which nothing existed but the hush-click of the camera, and sometimes not even that.

this is the tulip moon.

as it rested on the window-ledge the other night. the jar makes the most beautiful wavery patterns, and I'm always happy to see a jar of mango slices in the fridge because I love the taste of mangoes and when the beautiful taste is all gone, I get the jar.

if you set the light on the bottom and the jar on the top of it, the pattern of light on the shed roof is so delicately lovely, so liquid and silvery-blue. sometimes it feels very cool and shimmering in the shed, and on those nights I dream about fishes and mermaids and things like that.

today I climbed into the middle of the bamboo and made myself a nest, and almost fell asleep there.

it was the most at peace and comforted I've felt since I don't know when. hidden, trusting the bamboo to hold me up, listening to the creek behind me. watching the birds and the sky from inside the bamboo, snugged down inside it like a mouse in the tall grass.