The Freedom to Create

The Gilded Path One of my daily pleasures is to make paths in the woods which are located out my back door. I walk them alone or sometimes with my daughter who climbs the trees. We take our goats in the woods so they might enjoy the tasty morsels of  foliage. While raking the paths I take notice of tender new plants that emerge after a winter's rest. These new sprouts change the direction of my path. I have a particular spot that I seem focused on so I began doing a pencil study. The path The log from a dead tree (located on the right) serves as a watering trough for the animals. The tree itself had been a fallen tree and has since birthed a new tree. I love to watch the light play through the leaves onto the paths. Initially, I thought of creating a watercolor from this sketch which I had started. Rather than allowing the painting to take me where it wanted to go I was the one controlling the painting. I stopped. Placed it aside and took another prepa...

Hold His hand. Let us walk together. Every breath filled with sweet perfume. Each step is pillowed by the soft brown earth. Your hand gently moves the lavish green curtains to unveil yet another turn. Beams of sunlight gently guide you, lead you. Breezes carry joyful music sung by the choir of birds. Close your eyes. Experience a feeling of completeness as you slowly immerse yourself with the surroundings.

We found a stick today (actually it was yesterday). Th e sun was shining, a gorgeous near 60 degree day. Jaime and I decided to take a stroll through our surrounding woods with the camera to see what we could find of interest. There is always something happening in the woods. We saw that the dried up creek beds were filling with the winter thaw of the ground. That was fun for Jaime as she had just gotten some high fashion water galoshes to go splashing around in. Give her a mud hole and she's a happy camper. The bed of the woods is covered with fallen leaves from fall. We have been raking and making trails to refurbish our woods. We also came on broken limbs from trees that were clean as a whistle, cleaned of all their bark. Jaime and I have been collecting these for later uses. As we strolled through nature we came upon this enormous tree which was still firmly anchored in the ground. Must be nearing 30ft. tall. The amazing thing with this one is that it was cleaned right up to t...