#NewThisDay Writing From My Photo Stream

"An important part in the winter landscape is played by the dead grasses and other herbaceous plants, especially by various members of the composite family, such as the asters, golden rods, and sunflowers. Wreathed in snow or encased in ice, they present a singularly graceful and fantastic appearance. Or perhaps, the slender stalks and branches armed with naked seed pods trace intricate and delicate shadows on the smooth snow."
- Mrs. William Starr Dana

I don’t want to wake up as early as I do; I have not slept well. Fortunately, I have this wonderful biography of the artist Ruth Asawa that I am reading; I get lost in it, let go of worries in it, get carried away by her amazing journey into being an artist and wife and mother after being sent to an internment camp as a daughter of Japanese Americans after Pear Harbor. So, I keep reading, falling asleep, waking and reading again. I go out into the cold January and the ice images are entertaining. The news of the country is compelling, distracting, engrossing, enraging and frightening and encouraging. The news of the wetlands is fresh glass, broken glass, green grass under windows of new ice, a running brook, an unfrozen river with unsafe thin ice edges; broken trees littering the leaf piled path and a sky trying to blue. I manage, indoors, to get many things accomplished: laundry folded, a poem revised, many e-mails answered and sent; a poetry peer critique and an IWWG board meeting, now bed. I observed silence when when members of congress held a televized moment of silence fo the two police officers killed during and after the Jan. 6 riot. I prepared for my Farm Pond Writer’s webinar tomorrow. And, while we’re writing together an American president will be impeached for the second time for the first time in our country’s history.