Tag Archives: whales

a little more 2024

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Taking a photographic walk down memory lane for the year and there are three of you who might want to join me.

Quinn turned 17!

I hatched some eggs!

I went to Galveston, saw dolphins, drove boats.

Jazz band went to state!

Rich and I went to New York! There were fireflies.

A family portrait was taken at Oregon Country Fair by a kind stranger.

I went tidepooling! (I plan to do much more of that in 2025.)

I went to Kodiak twice… love it there. Fin whales were my favorite wildlife sighting, but there were many contenders for that role. Practiced my new boat skills. Backed the boat trailer down Anton Larsen Bay ramp successfully!

 

I did not take gratitude for a grade. But I am grateful for this year!

 

 

 

banner day

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This kind human is a sophomore. He spent our labor day hike dispersing dandelion seeds because, “every living thing deserves a chance to grow.” I made a wish on each seed, in similar words, but my wishes were all about him.

Also, today we sign closing papers to buy the dragon house. A long-held dream comes true.

 

Honorable mentions:

I am halfway through semester three of my program, and still loving every 4am writing session. On a sunny day back in January, I typed one of my essays on Great Grandma Rew’s typewriter and submitted it to a zine called Selkie, and I recently received word that they’ve published it! I will share how to get copies when they become available. My first published essay, hurray! In a zine named for mythical females who zip in and out of sea-suits to live in both realms, on the theme of “disobedience.” Sounds about right!

I started my permanent job in July. I’ve filled out what could be the last round of new hire paperwork, for the last set of changing benefits, and the waves of relief are still washing over me, and I expect that will keep going for some time. Three pay periods in, I went to Kodiak, Alaska, for field work. A new place to fall in love with. (They have otters there!!!)


rock greenling


penpoint gunnel


giant Pacific octopus



humpback!


uh-oh


Salmon for breakfast, and second breakfast.

Sending love to all the mama bears out there with cubs snuggled close and the otter mamas with their pups swimming off and away.

killer whale week

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It’s been a big week.

This week I got my start date for my new job (July 5th), I finished my second semester—my first half—of my MFA program, and I saw killer whales in Yaquina Bay!

 

I managed to take a few terrible photos, and some rather poor videos, which I will cherish forever and always. How I love them. I spent an entire thirty-page submission writing about them during first semester, so it seemed fitting they would come help me celebrate the day I reached the halfway point! I tried to clip many frames of blurry, empty water, and skip to the pertinent parts, but apologize for causing anyone seasickness with my shaky cinematography.

 

This one is longer and retains more shakiness, but also shows an eye patch a time or two, which was completely awesome to see. I was fairly close. You can’t hear it in the video over the wind, but from where I was standing, I could hear their exhales each time they surfaced!

After work, I grabbed my camera and husband for a bay road drive date and he got to see a couple of them, too.

 

All of which is to say, a lot is going on behind the scenes, but I’m still here, and I still write things.

~rainbow mondays~ reflect

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We’ve reached the end of the rainbow for 2020 so I’ve rounded up the last photos of the year.

Two days of perching on my whale watching rock produced one whale, and many rainbows.

Roses were blooming for Christmas again!

A few of these were taken to document how high the bayou rose during our recent big rain! The handsome, bearded man in the photo has spent nine years with me and 2020 has kept me mindful of how lucky I am!

Black oystercatchers

Harbor seal

Snowy egrets! I have never seen them flying in formation before!

Moon on the bayou above, and sunrise on the bayou below. One year ends and a new year begins – always a time for reflection, and possibly even more than usual this time around. It is a time I think we will look back on and with the clarity of time passing, be able to see how we grew. It was painful growth, full of a grief that somehow made me more grateful. I never announced a word for 2020, though back in the beginning of the year when I was meditating on mediocrity, I did have the lightness of butterflies in mind, the flux of tides and cycles. My concrete goals for the year were to grow more flowers for butterflies and a few purple vegetables, to go to the beach more and drink more tea, to not try to be everything for everybody. I did not envision that this extreme contraction of our lives, this hunkering down into self is the context in which I’d be carrying out these goals. One of the things I’d like to remember for this year is finding out that going inward allowed me to, paradoxically, expand in ways I wouldn’t have guessed. Though very much still cocooned, I believe I am emerging in new and exciting ways.

I have not arrived at a word for 2021 yet, though there is something resonating for me with navigation, with orienting. Discerning the best course to steer my little ship. I’m not sure what that’s about yet, or where I’m going with it (ha!) but I think there will be time to figure it out as the year starts to unfold.

violets are purple

roses are pink

they just call violets blue

because it’s hard to rhyme with purple, i think.

 

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

tender and mild

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I am placing this image of nine-years-ago Quinn drawing a whole bunch of baby dinosaurs “standing on the floor of the egg” here to signify that there’s a lot of writing going on, gestating behind the scenes. The sun ball lamp might be my egg incubator, and I am waking up early to keep up with the words that bubble to the surface after each long winter’s nap.

I do not want to neglect my blog, and it seems like just the venue to wish happy holidays to all, from here at a safe social distance. I considered using this as my holiday card:

but then I realized I don’t have my stuff together enough to send cards. It was just a snapshot of another “one of those days” that we have all had approximately 365 too many of this year.

It’s the end of 2020 now. I usually choose a song lyric each year, but there isn’t a “bleak and weary” Christmas song, so I chose tender and mild. It’s been mild leading up to Christmas, cold but clear, so we got to see the conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn, almost. A few days before, and two days after, above the melted sorbet horizon. The word tender certainly fits how our hearts are feeling – battered, bruised, sore, vulnerable.

The holidays are serving as an anchor point for some in a year that has felt awash in a swirling sea of time: You Are Here. For me, these holidays are so bizarrely different that they do not serve me that way exactly. I have calibrated time for myself according to the signs of seasons even more than usual during 2020. The nesting robins placed me squarely in spring, while the nest is now filled up with curled, brittle leaves, so I know we’re closing in on winter. Mushrooms, even, helped me orient, and I don’t know the first thing about them. Yet, just seeing them popping up all around me secured me into autumn. Thinking of their work beneath the surface of things to make available in the soil what the forest needs to absorb next year is a sustaining thought.

To no one’s surprise, I took myself to the edge of the world to perch on a rock and try to find a migrating whale. I did find one (the white puff in the upper left, above). Moving along at a good clip, but paradoxically, for me it was another anchor, another sign to mark the season. The gray whales are headed south to celebrate fecundity and renewal, to circle around newborns, tender and mild, in warm lagoons.

(Laguna San Ignacio 2001)

I hope these photos from an adventure long ago to said lagoons will make you smile, finding you snug and healthy in your homes for the holidays.

(Laguna San Ignacio 2001)

Merry Christmas friends!

 

~rainbow mondays~ nourish

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~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday morning

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed

~thankful thursday~ in which we sing the last verse

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11/23/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 23

today i am grateful for a full day to relax and cook only with my microwave.

 

11/24/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 24

i am grateful for color; the rainbow veggies of market, the orange and yellow leaves of the vine maples, the red violet of my strawberry-beet smoothie and my rose elixir. i’m a rainbow person, but red violet-colored lenses help me see the world with an attitude of gratitude.

 

11/25/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 25

today i’m thankful for animals, who remind me that it is important to play.

 

11/26/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 26

last night after a wonderful spontaneous mid-day date of doing nothing, which turned out to be some of the very best something, watching seals and whales play in the ocean surf, rich and i watched christopher robin. i was reminded how grateful i am for winnie the pooh. i loved pooh as a kid, and i remember re-reading pooh when i was a teenager and realizing there was more substance layered in those stories than i had realized. which paled in comparison to how i felt when i started reading the same book to my two-year-old, who gobbled up chapter after chapter. when he had reached the limit of his attention span, he would shift into incorporating pooh stories into every aspect of his imaginitive play. we played pooh sticks whenever we found a nice bridge over a stream, we hauled piglet up to the letter box, we found a new house for owl, we pounded eeyore’s tail back on, we hunted for heffalumps and woozles. the hundred acre wood took up a good percentage of his internal landscape from an early age. i of course had tears rolling down my cheeks over the movie last night, not necessarily sad ones, but the ones that have everything to do with the inevitability of little boys growing up.

 

11/27/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 27

i am grateful for all of the twinkly lights bringing light into the lengthening darkness.

 

11/28/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 28

today’s facebook memory was an all-photo post about dolphins from gratitude 2016. it reminded me of my gratitude for their existence in this world, and how they’ve been a symbolic guide for me this year. i chose the word “streamline” for 2018, and of course, there is no better mascot.

i wrote about this on my 40th birthday, as the days were lengthening rather than the nights, and as the first trilliums were blooming, rather than the last blossoms drooping.

“…in a more metaphysical sense, streamlining is a term that makes me think of the ways i spend my life energy, and ways i could conserve it more efficiently. dolphins have been friends of my spirit for more than half my life now, and provide the perfect mascot for becoming more streamlined. some of the definitions of the word focus on how the motion of the fluid around the object is smooth, or the condition of being free from turbulence; however the more i think about it, the less it has to do with the status of the flow of life around me, and more to do with shaping myself in such a way that i present less resistance to the flow.”

this was only part of what i wrote, but i’m focusing on this excerpt because out of all the ways i intended to use this year to streamline, the part about getting out of our storage unit and finally getting all the way moved into our house was not the part i achieved. however, i think i’ve improved on the part about presenting less resistance to the flow. so i’m grateful to my spirit friends who’ve helped inspire me in that area this year.

11/29/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 29

it’s penultimate post day! it really flew by this year, it doesn’t seem possible that november is already coming to an end. it seems like i’ve only just begun to notate the things for which i’ve felt grateful recently. some of the ones i may not yet have mentioned:

i am grateful for saving 13% on my groceries today because my fairy mother-outlaw snuck a handy coupon onto  my passenger’s seat. best outlaw mother in all the land.

i am grateful to feel like a real adult, depositing my little supplemental income paychecks from my farm job into my son’s savings account. i think the two dudes doing their banking were slightly jealous that he has almost earned enough scottie saver bucks to get the light sabre!

i’m grateful my husband is always burning holes in his clothing so my sewing machine motors don’t seize up due to lack of use. mending isn’t my favorite sewing to do, but for that smoking hot guy i’ll gladly zigzag his clothes back together. i am also grateful to have learned a useful skill set such as sewing from a panel of very talented women while i was growing up.

i’m grateful when the sparks only burn the clothing layers, not the man. (he barely notices, but still.)

i’m grateful for kitties! and wood stove fires!

okay, maybe i’ve mentioned some of these before, but are you sure it was this year?

finally, i’m grateful my son comes home to me tomorrow. i’ll give you three guesses what we’ll be having for dinner on gratitude day 30!

11/30/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 30

gratitude is powerful stuff. three years of doing this have taught me that gratitude is a self-perpetuating spiral; i keep being pleasantly surprised how many times the words just flowed, because the feelings were so easy to access, because… practice. you get to where you’re just so darn grateful for gratitude.

but now it’s time to sing the last verse of the song for this year. the part of the song where it all comes together metaphorically and the sound waves ripple through the air to touch your heart, and though it has the same melody as before, there are several strains of harmony woven in now, and when you get to the chorus, you reach down to your toes to send the last few notes up a third or a fifth or an octave. you take it higher, you take it on home. you know, that part of the song.

(30 days isn’t long enough if i haven’t been grateful for music yet! good thing we’re squeezing it in before the finale.)

this is where i stall briefly in writing today’s gratitude, because PRESSURE! because finishing a song is something to take seriously and anyone with a perfectionist side can find this to be an obstacle. i believe i finished day 30 sometime in january last year, but i promised myself i’d end on time this year.

so i have been thinking about it for days, and i can’t think of a better way to close the circle on this 30 days than by coming back to where we started, with a certain navigational aid called Buoy. Buoy was stationed in one spot in the sea, but sometimes when he was ready for a nap, he would travel in his mind down the long chain that anchored him all the way down to the sea floor… each color of the rainbow would fade away as he dove deeper, until only those creatures who could create their own light dwelled…

“then down the chain. to the seabed. and there, rooted in the depth of the Sea, Buoy felt a humming. a hum that seemed to come from deeper than the Sea. it reminded him somehow of the song of the Whales. but he did not hear this song. he felt it. it seemed to be a part of who he was. he did not understand that it was he who was a part of the song.”

thanks for singing along, friends.

~thankful thursday~ snails, whales, puppy dog tails

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11/8/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 8

there is the usual ebb and flow of the gratitude juice, modulated by snags in the fabric of my experience that focus my gaze inwards, and then disasters both natural and unnatural that draw my gaze back outward again. each time the latter occurs, the gratitude surges forth, for all that i have, the health and safety of my loved ones, the ease of my ordinary life. today i feel gratitude for opportunities to be the rainbow in someone else’s cloud, or the buoy on someone’s horizon, in keeping with my theme. and i feel so grateful, in turn, for the buoys who shine their light to me, out on my own horizon, the friends who shine by reaching out and loaning me their ruby dog, the friends who shine at me across  cyberspace and cheer me on, the friends who shine from down the road to make a plan to get together. i wish to use my own light to reach someone else’s gaze from out on their horizon in those same ways.

i’m also grateful for clear nights filled with starlight, and for the miracle of star names that are still lodged in my memory.

11/9/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 9

today i am grateful for date night on the bay front, for wood stove fires built by the husband i’m dating, for his sweet gestures like starting my car to defrost on a chilly morning, for the way he makes me laugh over his “gratitude” that he did not having to read yet another really long post on day 7 (the night off). i am grateful for him always taking the time to read what i write, and for knowing it means pretty much everything to me (and that he checks this and every other box on a wish list i made 8 years ago). i am grateful for how good he smells and how diligently he sweeps and vacuums me off my feet. i am grateful for his amazing popcorn and the lessons he teaches my son and the way he snuggles the kitties so well that they run to the door to greet him. i am just so darned grateful for every second i get to spend with him!

 

11/10/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 10

grateful for rainbow food for the eyes, soul, and body.

 

11/11/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 11

i am grateful for the way my fairy dog pulled me outside and down the trail this morning while the sun was streaming through the trees and the frost was just starting to melt. i’m thankful for the reminder to sniff out paths i might not have gone down in a while, to remember to wander and stop and appreciate. while standing and pondering and letting her sniff, i decided to picture a fairy dog in my mind, tiny enough to wander down the paths of my neural circuitry, but powerful enough to pull me out of well-worn grooves that may not serve me, and into lusher, if more challenging, terrain. i’m thankful that there are always new ways to look, and for getting to see rainbows in the frost.

 

11/12/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 12

i am grateful that today i got to see some whales.

“’i see them!’ cried Buoy.

closer they came. moving the water with their magnificence. the sweep of their great flukes a metronome to their song.

when they were finally very close, Buoy spoke.

‘hello, Whales!’ he called.

‘hello, Buoy,’ said one.

‘who do you sing to?’ asked Buoy.

‘we sing to the Stars,’ said the Whale.

‘why?’

‘to let them know that we are here, and that we are watching still.’”

~ excerpt from buoy, by bruce balan

11/13/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 13

this kid. the greatest teacher of my life. would rather be reading his self-chosen geometry textbook than doing his algebra homework. would rather be building a new magic deck than playing a sport. demolishes seaweed snacks in 30 seconds. huge feet attached to lanky legs. sorts his blankets into 3 separate piles while he sleeps: one sheet, one grammy quilt, one fuzzy owl blanket. has a birthmark on his back in the same spot i do. has 21 teeth. doesn’t want to take a bath, but won’t get out once he’s in. loves pancakes. loves nachos; ergo, belongs in this family.

 

11/14/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 14

gratitude for the st. john’s wort/vitamin B-C-D/iron/rainbow salads or whatever component of that is giving me enough energy to make it through these long/short days and not feel as much like my gratitude gland is shrunken this year. on the contrary, right now it feels more difficult to choose one thing to write a gratitude post about, the gratitude rolodex of my mind offers up too many to choose from some days!

11/15/18

~30 days of gratitude~ day 15

i’m grateful that my boy comes home to me tomorrow, in time for a nice week off from school!

~rainbow mondays~ every little thing is gonna be ok

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this will be less verbose than some, but it is time to reconnect via rainbow…

rainbow: portrait of the artist as a tidepool…

rainbow: dahlias and hydrangeas being the rainbow.

rainbow: anemone and seaweed being the rainbow, too!

rainbow: heck, even a double-trailered coca-cola truck on a highway in idaho is being the rainbow. or at least, reflecting the sunrise.

 

red: oklahoma hummingbird sipping on some texas hummingbird sage.

red: by the way, rich and i just got back from a road trip to oklahoma!

red: some of the 67 quarts of tomatoes i have already mentioned from summer days of yore.

 

orange: dahlia beginnings in an enchanted garden.

orange: an enchanted garden from which some transplants have been shared with my own garden, like these wonderfully prolific helenium.

 

orange: my own garden is becoming increasingly enchanted over time…

 

orange: more flora and fauna, they are ok.

yellow: from the hick-a-rew daisy crop.

yellow: dahlias just beginning…

yellow: dahlias in their full glory, keeping the bees busy.

yellow: this is a special hollyhock, grown from seeds sent to me years ago from my friend in durango, and what a delight to find out they are the most delicate pale yellow imaginable.

yellow: black eyed susans, another delightful surprise that took until year 2 after seed planting to flower.

green: the rainbow terrace garden still reads mostly green, even in the height of summer. something about oregon… don’t mind that husband person with some sort of tool in his hand lurking in the upper right hand corner.

green: home sweet bayou hammock.

green: summer ocean productivity in abundance.

green-blue: heron taking flight on a lovely tidepooling excursion.

blue: whales surfacing in the surf zone during same lovely outing.

blue: one thing that is very definitely ok about oklahoma, is that they have blue butterflies there.

blue: this one perched for me in the amazing “gathering place” in tulsa, a community wonder.

purple: speaking of communities, a large village of sea urchins.

purple: mostly purple, but one red.

purple: glad to see these glads.

purple: swallowtails meet on the butterfly bush. “hey, do you come here often?”

purple: purplicious, to be exact, but also leaning a little bit towards red violet.

red violet: flat bride has been wanting me to grow stargazer lilies since i was very young, and i am happy to say they came back healthy and thriving in their second summer in the rainbow garden.

 

~rainbow mondays~

a splash of color on monday

a photo study documenting the colors of the spectrum: the balance points between light reflected and light absorbed