Category Archives: Nature

When Progress is Invisible

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my painting of a dove on her nest in our grapefruit tree

my painting of a nesting dove

I painted this mourning dove one year as she sat on her nest in the grapefruit tree in our back yard.  She watched me as I took the pictures that I would use for the painting, but she didn’t stir, didn’t leave the nest. She sat on those eggs for weeks.

And all that time she was mostly doing “nothing.” More than that, the things she was sitting on, her eggs, also seemed to be doing nothing. All that time she spent sitting there when she could have been flying around or walking about looking for seeds or taking a shower in the sprinklers with her dove friends… instead she was sitting up there on her eggs which did not seem to be doing a darn thing. For a very long time, no change whatsoever registered in those eggs, at least as far as the dove could see. And yet… amazing, profound, complex, rich changes were occurring behind the façade of the thin white shell.

She might have been tempted to give it up. I mean… 15 to 18 days of sitting there doing nothing at all? With only brief time outs to feed and get water? I doubt I could do it for even 2 hours!

And yet, lately God has been using the dove analogy with me as regards my working on Sky.  There’s been a lot of time where I can’t see any changes occurring… I was getting no ideas, I’d go in to write and couldn’t seem to think of a thing, couldn’t keep my mind on the work, couldn’t get anywhere. Stuck.

But a couple of months ago, He sent me the dove analogy courtesy of Elisabeth Elliot’s daily devotion site. Not only as the analogy regards the book, but even more so as regards my spiritual life. I love the idea that growth is occurring, unseen, unnoticed, behind the scenes, where I can’t feel it, can’t measure it, can’t realize it. Even as in another unseen place, He is orchestrating the pulling together of different elements of character and plot and setting to produce the next scene that I will eventually write.

I could freak out and get impatient and condemned and anxious or I can be still and trust that He’s at work even when it seems He’s not.  I know this, because He’s told me that it’s so:

“For it is God who is at work in you, both to will and to execute for His good pleasure.” ~Philippians 2:13

“Faithful is He who calls you, and HE will bring it to pass.” ~I Thessalonians 5:24

I just have to believe it.

Slowly Returning

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single rose small

 

I think.

At least that’s the plan.

I’ve been “on staycation” for about two months now, with posting here pretty sporadic.

A lot of stuff has happened. Most recently the shingles came back to my eye, and for the last three weeks I’ve been dealing with that, complicated by the fact that I seem to be reacting adversely to the antiviral the doctor wants me to take.

We had a wedding here of one of “our own,”,that is one of the members of our local congregation, a young lady who happened to be one of the students in my Sunday School class, and went on to become one of my dear friends.

Friends and family came in for the event, and such things always cram a lot of things into a very short time, where you spend days after recovering, not only from the simple exhaustion of late nights, longish drives and lots of talking, but having your head and heart full of wonderful moments that surface in a disjointed parade of memories afterward. (See my Introvert post, Static and the Need to Recharge, about needing to “process” the sudden high-volume of “deposits” that have been made into your soul)

At the same time as this was happening, my hubby was away elk hunting, and I had full charge of walking Quigley. (I don’t usually walk him every day — we take turns.) Hubby returned successful, so then we had, well, A LOT of meat to deal with. YAY! (We were completely out of wild game and I detest store-bought hamburger, and am not much fonder of ground turkey…) He did most of the work, but the kitchen and refrigerator were commandeered for about a week, I think, which was… distracting at a minimum.

Then there was the matter of my car failing its emissions test, twice, and various  trips to the repair shop, until finally it was decided that we could get a waiver on the whole thing. And all of this pretty much happening concurrently.

So it’s not really been the most “restful” staycation, and it’s not like I’ve had nothing to do but play… though I have managed a bit of that.  In fact, I actually went on 2 Artist’s dates!  And  yes, a month ago or so, I picked up the next Artist’s Way book, Vein of Gold, and started working through it…  only to stop not far in as the Lord took me off in another direction… but that, I think, is for another post.

In fact, I’ve already written a good deal more than I had thought I would. I just wanted to take a tiny step back toward regular blogging, and here I’ve got a full-sized post already. 🙂

Fingers of God

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tornado funnels

I am sort of a weather junkie and in the course of following the tornado outbreak in Oklahoma last Friday came across this video showing multi-vortices in the tornado. They form within minutes as you can see, come down, touch the ground, then dissipate. Watching it made me think of the fingers of God… how they can come down and touch something spot on… not random, but, as with all else under His wise and loving control.

The story that broke today about the three very experienced weather chasers who were killed on the same day and in the same area where this tornado was filmed, just reinforced the fact that none of us can ever have all the bases covered when it comes to knowing what’s going to happen. Two of the three men were renowned among the meteorological community, having appeared in Discovery Channel and National Geographic presentations on their work.

Tim Samaras worked out of Colorado and his first interest was research —  getting information needed to figure out how tornadoes are formed and behaved. Colleagues described him as “a veteran researcher not a thrill seeker” and a stickler for safety above all else. Yet even he, after 30 years of tracking tornadoes, found himself caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Apparently he and his team were  heading east on a side road along I-40 following the El Reno tornado some ways to the south as it plowed eastward  as well, following a straight track as it did so. Then suddenly it took a sharp turn northward  to I-40 itself, then it jogged east again to follow the interstate. When that happens the tornado can strengthen in power and size and, as one colleague put it, “you find yourself part of the tornado” and there’s no way to avoid it.

Anyway, to see Funnels Drop from Cloud near El Reno click on the link below:

http://bcove.me/nspje3up

Recon

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swaths of gold small

If I am to liken writing a book to fighting a battle, or preparing to build or whatever, it is important that one count the cost. To do the recon first. If you send soldiers out into the field and tell them okay, I want you to explore all this region and map it for us, since we have no map, and I want you complete that in three weeks – that would be a ridiculous assignment. No one knows what’s out there. A more reasonable assignment would be to send the people out to map for a particular period of time. Then evaluate what they have and decide the next step. External factors may demand decisions be made on less than complete information, whereupon the outcome becomes far less certain.

Might need to have a number of recon assignments before you are ready to launch any kind of operation.

In book writing, you never really know the terrain until you’ve actually written the first draft. You can stand at the edge of the unknown territory and see there’s a mountain there, a valley there, a canyon there. You can surmise what you will find, and you can estimate a route. But until you are actually down there and walking through it, you cannot know how it will go, where it will go, what you will encounter, etc. So I think it is time to plot the book, try the first trip through the wilderness and see where I end up.

Vulnerable to Distraction

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In the middle of when I was supposed to be writing last summer, I saw these bees and decided to run out and try to get a picture!

Well, today, I’m sorry to say that in the middle of doing an “Open Ended Writing” about the book, my hands suddenly went AWOL, started typing the keys to open my email and the next thing you know… I was checking email.  Even as I asked myself what in the world I was doing.

Worse, they went on to type in the commands to open Internet Explorer and…. alas.

Half an hour later I recovered from my fit of rebellion. Even then I had to ask myself if it was really bad. I am very interested in the news these days, and I’m not exactly sure why. If it was just some military guy committing adultery I know I would not be interesting. But this thing with Generals Petraeus and Allen and the Lebanese socialite who has a psychologically unhinged identical twin sister, and the FBI and drop boxes… all erupting three days after Obama was elected to his second term… is so weird, so bizarre, so… unbelievable on the surface… there just has to be more behind it…

But I digress. Sort of. Because all this is perhaps an example of behavior the post I’m about to reblog gives explanation for. Finally!

I was searching my old blog to see if I’d already posted something on a related subject, and found the following post, dated 2007. Since it specifically applies to the need to reduce the distractions in my life, I found it helpful to revisit and decided to put it up again, as another step in the movement I’m making back to seriously working on the book.

Vulnerable to Distraction

Over the vacation, my friend Ed Willett’s science column noted an article on how older adults are more vulnerable to distraction from irrelevant information. Well, being an older adult, that caught my eye at once, though I don’t think it was irrelevant information!

Aha! So there is a reason why I’m so distractable these days. The study, conduced by Canadian scientists at the Rotman Research Institute at Baycrest and the University of Toronto, “has identified changes in brain activity that begin gradually in middle age – and which may explain why older adults find it difficult to concentrate in busy environments and filter out irrelevant information.”

So it really is age that allows my son to concentrate with music blaring, and me to be totally distracted by it. I used to be able to write with music, but only if there were no words. In the last few words I’ve had to go to total silence, because even the notes distract me. Or worse, sometimes the music generates “scenes”, which seems like it would be a good thing, but isn’t because it’s usually not a scene anywhere near to what I’m currently writing, and it’s always the same scene. So even if I write it down, every time I hear the music, I go back to the same scene and whatever I was doing breaks off.

I digress. Apparently there are two regions in the brain’s frontal lobes that shift into a “seesaw imbalance” (not sure what that is) — causing older adults to become less efficient in inhibiting distracting information.” Instead of focusing on the task at hand — reading, for example, or, writing one’s book — we are unable to resist the sudden thought that we need to go check the mail, or we should see what is on so and so’s blog today, or how dare such and such reviewer make those comments about my books last year.

As younger people concentrate on a task, activity in the region that is associated with concentration increases while activity in the region associated with thoughts about yourself, what happened yesterday, or what’s going on around you decreases. As people age, the activity in the second region doesn’t turn off so easily, and the activity in the region that governs concentration decreases.

By the time we reach 65, it gets really pronounced. So the researchers recommend that “Older adults should try to reduce distractions in their environment and concentrate on one key attentional task at a time. It may be as easy as turning down the radio when reading, or staying off the cell phone when driving a car.”

A cell phone would be a disaster. I can’t even talk to my passengers when driving a car, because I get way too engrossed and who knows where I’ll end up. On more than one occasion I’ve found myself driving home when I’m supposed to be driving somewhere else.

But this does affirm the importance of reducing external distractions and internal ones as well, since it’s not just external monitoring that happens in the region that won’t turn off. Which fits right in with my decisions to start simplifying my life again.

You can read the full article about the study here.

Seagull Makes Video of Sunset

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Perhaps you’ve seen this already, but if not… A seagull snatched the camera from a tourist in San Francisco and filmed the sunset over the Golden Gate Bridge. The tourist ran along the shore following the gull as best she could and found the camera on the sidewalk where the bird left it, then uploaded the footage to You Tube.

Pretty funny, I think. It’s clear it was taken by the bird, as well.

Stag Party

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Here’s a jaw-dropping video about elk in the city… My hubby has hunted elk, even been charged by them. We used to go to the White Mountains on camping trips to listen to them bugle and confront each other. They’re huge, powerful animals you don’t mess with.

Well, apparently some of the folks in Estes Park, Colorado didn’t get the memo. Take a look:

An Acorn Becomes an Oak

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Photo by by MunstiSue

Pastor Farley has been using the metaphor of an acorn becoming an oak as an illustration of our spiritual growth in many of our recent lessons… particularly to show that it’s painful and confusing. The acorn has to be buried in the ground, and then it swells until its hard shell cracks and splits, and pretty soon roots are coming out. And the acorn’s going, “Roots? What are these? I’ve never done roots before.”

And after a while maybe it says “Okay, I get it, I’m gonna be here underground with my roots and this dirt and I’m okay with that, I’m getting the hang of it, here.” And then suddenly there’s a stalk and its pushing upward and there’s pressure and leaves flying about and just one thing after another, and pressure here, and no pressure there and wind and light and rain… If all you are is a little acorn, it’s pretty dramatic. All of it is something it never had or was before.

And so it is with us as we grow into the new life Christ has given us. It’s really not at all like the old life and the old ways of thinking… particularly this Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil thing — The more I think about it, the more profound this teaching seems to be become. The Tree of Life, which is the thinking that goes with New Life in Christ is really absolutely foreign to anything we ever thought before, anything the world thinks, and even to the parts that feel so good and right… but aren’t.

Anyway, I love the acorn metaphor , so when Pastor Farley mentioned that CBS has a photographer that did a video of time-lapse photographs showing this very process I had to go and find it.

Pretty cool!  Here it is: