Praying Mantis in the Fleabane!

In August I planted a dwarf butterfly bush, a sterile cultivar called Pugster Blue Fragrant. While not a native plant, it cannot be invasive like its larger relatives. I got it locally at Halas Nursery and even there it was swarmed with pollinators: butterflies, moths and bees. It was pungent and had filled my car with its heavy sweetish smell on the ride home.

After all the digging and watering, I went in the house for some coffee. I looked back out the window and there was a black swallowtale on my new butterfly bush already!  For the next few days, there were always one or two butterflies enjoying the flowers.  But after a week I didn't see any. I figured they were enjoying a change of diet over in my neighbors cone flowers. I kept peeking about but no butterflies.

All summer I have been nurturing a few stands of wildflower weeds as a garden project. The weeds in question are four-foot tall forests of Daisy Fleabane and Queen Anne's Lace. While I was looking for the missing butterflies, I found three praying mantis

- mostly hanging from the stems of Fleabane by their back legs - looking a lot like dead leaves. They have a reputation as voracious indiscriminate predators, even cannibalistic. Mantises eat a lot of annoying insects. But I think they may have eaten the butterflies as well.

Nature is capricious and pragmatic. Next year I think I will let the Fleabane grow elsewhere in my yard - somewhere not in a direct line between the butterfly bush and the cone flowers down the road....

Conversation Styles Differ

Hot Air

Conversation Styles Differ .... Well that's an understatement. For some, conversation is a stream-of-thought run-on-sentence without punctuation or paragraph marks. Do you talk incessantly in ever widening circles as a way of thinking out loud? As a self-soothing smoke screen to fill up the space between you and another person? If so, this is written for you.

Some other people (including me), need to breathe and have silences in a conversation. We need a meaningful deep pause to collect our thoughts and share or to respond to a speaker. If there are no silences then we will just let the speaker go on and on.

I am listening, but I might be four sentences behind your rapid speech, thinking that what you said doesn't make any sense, seems out of proportion, relies on circular reasoning or a 'straw-man' argument, or that there are facts you mentioned which were improvised out of thin air. Or that this is the 3rd time you said the same thing. Sometimes I see an assumption you have made about me which is upsetting.

But you are six or seven paragraphs ahead of me now, chatting on all by yourself, making more statements that make no sense. So I think - there are so many disparities in this that it's pointless to bring it up any of them - so I let you go on and on and on even though I am beginning to feel beleaguered, buried under all the words.

And you wont find out for weeks that that my ex-husband is dead, or that I locked myself out last night at midnight and had to climb in through the window. At some point I might seem to be getting tense. I might quite suddenly say - "let's change the subject." or "I have to go now." I might quite suddenly, vigorously object to the last thing you said -- but the arc of it is this:

You have created a lengthy machine gun attack of words, and I have finally responded by running into an underground bunker and closing the door.

American Management Styles:

This old pencil sketch is from a series I made years ago, called American Management Styles. Wish I could find the rest of them.....

My three cats: the morning meeting

My three rescue cats from DAWS decided they want to hold a daily meeting. By feline decree, this meeting, sort of a greeting ceremony, should occur at the corner of the couch in the center of the living room every morning right after the human starts walking around. I don't know what happens if I move the couch. The world will probably end.

The two boys, Crow and GreyHawk scurry over, wind around my legs and each other, tails up, making funny little sounds, giving head butts and cheek rubs. At the commotion, our little cat-colony queen Fiji Phoebe, decides she really should participate and strolls over. She tries hard to make sure one of the boys is strategically positioned between her and the huge horrible human. She speaks to me, but usually only gets close enough to sniff my hand. Yesterday for the first time she allowed me to pet her during the ceremony. Progress!

DRAWING: from a writing exercise

I once belonged to a poetry writing group or two. This side-long looking doodle is what resulted while words for a writing exercise were being chosen. Yes, she is quite asymmetrical with hair askew -- and I don't care..... Though I often digitally clean up these little drawings, this one is just as exists in my little book of paper.

Originally posted (and in the present tense) on 8/15/2010

A certain lack of something

This was how I felt before I adopted my three kitties.

Weathered,
patched with odd bits,
a jumbled collection
re-assembled without instructions,
left outside everything to rust away.

I carry on though. Not so sure. Positive but aware of reality. Carrying memories. And a tiny spark of hope.


originally posted 8/16/2016

Art: where the broken wings fly after all

Originally posted April 4, 2008. Thought I'd haul it up here again and update it a bit to remind me.

Every person has beauty and value. Some have other unsavory aspects which obscure the beauty and value, but it's there.

Some of us are eccentric, obviously old, ridiculously odd, too fat, too thin or perhaps misshapen or unpleasant or unreliable. Some folks, though beautiful, are misshapen in ways more difficult to see - disfigurement by the constant prejudgement of others, where every word was twisted, shaded, weighted and measured against some mythical standard of perfection. Or by constant criticism during childhood where every flaw was carved up like a roast repeatedly. Or by constant underserved praise and by life passages bought and paid for by blood money rather than earned. This unhappy learning is latter replayed on others.

Sometimes people find it really difficult to get past it all. Some are like moths that have emerged from the cocoon in a jar that was too small. (See my pencil drawing above) Their wings unfolded only midway and are forever bent. Yet even in this there can be value.

Like many other resources, the past can be transformed. Rather than repeat it, and live it out again and again, rather than turn the bitter criticism or the too clever manipulation on others or measuring them against an imagined perfection, or insulting them for dramatic effect (sounds familiar in the current political scene) -- the best use of the past is to render it down into art. (Not the so called Art of the Deal,  but art in the expansive sense - whether literary, musical, visual, theatrical etc.) In that way it is an offering, and something is given to world.

It doesn't even matter if the world accepts it. It is the making of it, and perhaps the offering of it, that heals in a way that golden toilet seats and hair implants never can.

- Mar  Walker