A Heron Between Here and There
The lake, a new game, a bird journal, and other dots on the map, as seen through the fog
“I draw the blue heron flying up and protecting her territory. The purest images come as I wake, and I need to catch them before they disappear.” — Virginia Hartman, The Marsh Queen
Happy Sunday!
This time of year always goes so fast. There’s the sense of trying to hold on to something that just feels a little bit out of reach, and, at the same time, it’s right there, and you have your fingers on it, but it just keeps sliding away. You close your fingers, curling them inward with the intent to pull it towards you, keep it close, look more closely, and there’s nothing there.
There are so many things we just can’t hold onto. Even things we want to hold onto are sometimes out of our control. Sometimes we are not the ones who let go.
There are photos at the end.
I have continued getting up this week for the morning light. As with so many of the small things I do, I don’t exactly know how to stop. I am a pastiche of small habits and tiny routines and attempts to hold on and to anchor. I don’t want to disappoint myself by stopping this tracking of light.
This morning was the first real slip. Having gone to sleep at three, I snoozed the alarm a few times, and then I must have turned it off. I jolted awake at seven, roughly a half hour late and almost too late. I still recorded it.
One morning this week, I put the iPad in the chair after I finished the color blocking, so that I could make a cup of coffee. Glancing down at the screen, I thought, once again, that I should really redo the overlay. It is simplistic and so bold that it feels at odds with the delicacy and softness of the twilight. But, really, standing in the kitchen in the dark, I don’t even notice. When I look out at the light, and when I paint the light in that square each day, I don’t even see the frame. I’m not looking at the frame at all. I’m looking at what is happening in the distance. What I see is the light and the color.
The frame is necessary. If you remove it, you lose the visual context, the parameters of this postage-stamp view. This frame is what positions the thumbnail in this house, in this room, from this angle and perspective and elevation. It could be better, more realistic, but the goal is to look not at the window but through and beyond.
A few days ago, I got up a few minutes late, having issued a convoluted stack of sleepy nonsensical Alexa commands that resulted in a prolonged snooze of the alarm. Even so, the colors out the window were vivid and intense. The next morning, I was up at least five minutes earlier, and already the sky was pale and milky and very much day.
The light is never the same.
For years, I have been looking at the shape of light.
A moody me on a ferry thirty years ago was trying to sort out what it meant to trace the shape of light.
This morning project continues to intrigue and enchant.
Today just a small assortment of dots. So often I might say threads, but right now it feels like there are dots, static bits and pieces rather than lengths that can be intertwined. There is stitching to be done, but this pile of bits and pieces sits aside other broken things, waiting to be caught in place, woven and blended.
The oven broke this morning. I already know it isn’t repairable. It was high on the list of things I know are going to break, but it wasn’t in the top three.
I was reviewing a map this week related to water and water data for a science project.1 The map is covered in black and yellow dots and yellow squares and yellow triangles, shape and color marking different degrees of tracking and available data. Dots.
On another day, someone shared a map after the earthquake off the coast of Northern California, which resulted in tsunami warnings. The map had small squares in pastel shades, showing the intensity of the observed vibrations in different locations. Squares.
Dots and squares and threads, slivers and slices and fragments, layers and layers of peeling paper.
The Lake
Last week, we walked at the lake. We walked the perimeter and the inner loop in a sequence of half circles that ultimately meant we had walked both the inner and outer edges. Mostly, I raced to keep up, huffing while I listened and trying to ignore the pain in my back, but it was good.
We were moving so fast that everything was a blur. There wasn’t time to look at anyone or anything we were passing. I know we weren’t really moving that fast, and yet everything was a blur.
When we first drove in, there were cars everywhere on both sides of the narrow one-way road that winds its way into the lake. We usually park on the far side, beyond the boathouse, past the second footbridge, all the way around to where the lake widens. There is almost always parking on the far side. For years, we have mostly walked on that side, with its long stretch of open sidewalk, its proximity to the pagoda and the waterfall on the inner island.
When the boys were little, we walked on the near side, a narrower stretch of lake. I remember photos of the boys standing at the edge of the water side by side, backs to me. I remember geese and ducks and turtles. I remember Pokémon Go. I remember something from the boat shop’s food window. Was it an orange pushup pop? Ice cream sandwich? How can details be so wispy, so elusive. I remember photos on the bench, a younger me, a smaller me, green bench, pink sweater, khaki pants, tiny glasses.2
This time, driving in on Saturday, we decided to take the first open spot and start our walk on the near side of the boathouse. As I parked and looked out the window, there was a great blue heron standing across the lake on the bank, directly across from the car, the grey bend of its neck, the sharp white plane of its jaw, the black stripe on the head. The lower half was obscured by a fallen tree, but this is an easy game of Where’s Waldo. You can’t not see the heron’s head and neck in that small bit of negative space between the trees and water.
Herons are not necessarily rare in this area, so much so that when they renamed the lake last year, they renamed it Blue Heron Lake. In the spring months, the herons nest here.
I have seen the herons high up in the trees where their giant nests are, caught sight of their heads, sticking out just above those nests, but I’ve never seen a heron on the ground at this lake.
It was at another lake that I used to go to that I saw herons so frequently (but also for the first time in my life). My year of observing, writing about, and drawing birds was long ago. It was such a hopeful year, a year of discovery and possibility and the blossoming of art and friendship. I guess it’s funny now to look back and realize that too was a daily. The birds were a daily.
Seeing a heron standing at water’s edge as I pulled in at the lake last week meant something to me. I don’t have to understand what it meant. It was a comfort in the moment.3
At times, I am aware of the fog. Sometimes I sense it, a blue-grey mist, almost white, but, overall, I think I lose sight of how deeply entrenched I am, how detached, how unmoored, and how distanced. I think in the early days this summer, I was looking for symbols and signs. I was hoping for those things and saw nothing.4
After getting out of the car, I took a few pictures of the heron across the way, grateful it hadn’t moved.
That’s the lovely thing about herons. They so often stand in one place, perfectly still.
I knew that I couldn’t get a close enough photo from where we were, but it was enough to snap a reminder that it had been there. It has been many months since I last saw a heron, just the tip of a head in a nest that time.
Having snapped the photo, I scanned the bank and, just a bit to the left, I saw a night heron. I said out loud how amazing it was that there was also a night heron right there to the side of the great blue heron. I pulled up my phone to take a photo, trying to verbally point it out to my son (who wouldn’t know what a night heron looks like). Shorter, more squat, but the same sharply angled bottom to the head and jaw.
As I zoomed in with my phone camera, I realized what I was seeing wasn’t a night heron. It was just a log, the light hitting a nub or branch or crown just so.
I had imagined the night heron, turned a bit of light and shadow and tree into a bird that felt improbable in that moment anyway. I felt silly. I felt the openness, the wanting.
Days later, I pulled up the photos on my phone, only two, to make sure there really had been a blue heron, to make sure I hadn’t crafted that out of light and shadow, too.5
It is hard to believe that it has now been six months. If we counted the worry lines, whatever rings are forming within me, the passage of time would be really clear. The way we count is often puzzling. It’s often imprecise. It’s often counterintuitive. Twenty-six weeks and six months don’t seem the same to me. But in the way we understand time, both of these expressions lead to the same point on a calendar.
Ravens
As we crossed the bridge the first time from the inner loop to the outer loop to head counterclockwise back around the lake, there were three ravens sitting on the back edge of a green bench in a little alcove by the water. They were still, and we were just feet away. It was a drawable moment, and I stopped immediately and tried to activate the camera app on my phone so that I could take a picture.6 At the same time, two little kids who were in front of the bench, ran screaming, arms waving at the birds to startle them.
The birds lifted.
Two of them went into the tree overhead and sat on a branch, and one flew away.
I was still trying to take a photo when one of the two flew away.
There was just one on the branch when I snapped a photo.
I really wanted that “lined up on the bench” photo. Like the heron, it meant something. That kind of moment is something to interpret, a message to decipher, to twist and turn in the light, and to hold.
Why are there not more photos from the day? I usually take so many. I think it’s because we were moving so fast. Two of the heron. One selfie of the two of us. One of vibrant lavender flowers in a tree overhead, but it’s too dark. Two of the raven in the tree. Several of a rowboat.
I was going to take a photo of the stretch of lake below me as we stood on the footbridge the third time. (I needed to stretch my back and catch my breath.) I leaned against the stone edge to take a photo just as a pedal boat came through the underpass and stopped to talk to a rowboat, initially out of sight, that had gotten stuck along the bank. The rower got it straightened out, but the boat was going nowhere fast. We didn’t wait long enough for a boat-free photo.
Like Fog on Water
I had a Neverending Story moment last week. I sat in my chair and came face to face with The Nothing. I thought I had safeguarded things. I had spent hours and hours racing ahead, gathering words with both hands. But, ultimately, I watched it subsume thousands of words, years of self. I was calm as the words disappeared, again and again, before my eyes, but I haven’t quite regained my balance. I feel the emptiness as something tangible, something that was there as a record, even if I never looked, and is now gone.
How do you regain balance in the face of nothingness, when the ground is vanishing beneath your feet and you keep shuffling backwards, an attempt to keep your toes from being erased as clouds of nothingness roll farther and farther in? I was going to explain. I wrote it all out. But really, I doubt it matters other than that it matters to me.
I don’t know exactly when I read The Neverending Story. I was an adult and not a parent yet, and I was swept away by Bastian’s story. That edition of the book, with its alternating blocks of colored text signifying the real world and Fantasia, was so wonderful, such a beautiful way to visually orient one in the shifting text. (I wish we could use colors or even right-alignment here.)
I think there have been so many things in these months that I have just needed someone to witness. And yet the doors all seem closed.
I am happy to have had, for me, a sign reinforcing the rightness of ending up at the lake (and I am grateful that I have a son who, as an adult, always says yes to going somewhere for a walk, even if it is the same lake again and again).
In the almost 2 years I’ve been writing here at Illustrated Life (on the Substack), there have been so many symbols and signs, attention and heightened awareness to unexpected messages. So many of my posts over the last year were related to looking, tracking, seeing, wondering, interpreting, and weaving personal story. So many of those moments were also attached, in one way or another, to hospitals, but also to the library and the lake and the trees outside the window. I think about the parrot mural and so many birds, especially ravens and crows.
This was a hard week.
Thank you for reading.
Amy
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Photos
Cartographers
We played a new game over the Thanksgiving holiday. I think I first read about Cartographers on Don’t Eat the Meeples. It is a roll and write game (technically a flip and write), which, with Clever 4Ever as our gateway, we discovered we enjoy as a counter to our traditional trick-taking card-based games (and cribbage).
Cartographers proved to be a good mix of strategy and fun and has good replay value. (I think we aren’t overly interested in games with an involved storyline, but other roll and write games I considered in looking for something new for this holiday season include Three Sisters, Hadrian’s Wall, Bravo!, one of the other Clever titles, and Welcome to the Moon (which is just too expensive).7
Weekly Bits and Pieces
A Bird Journal
I want to tuck in here today just a mention of this book. I pulled a bunch of books thinking that I will share some in the context of the illustrated journaling process in coming weeks, but this one jumps out as a nice fit today.
“As my gratitude and love for my backyard birds grow, so does fondness for these pages. The sketches and words are a record of my life. They contain what puzzled me, thrilled me, what made me laugh and also grieve.” — Amy Tan
The Backyard Bird Chronicles by Amy Tan is a captivating book. You probably know Tan as the author of well-known books like the Joy Luck Club, but she is also an avid bird watcher and bird artist. This book is a chronological collection of written journal entries and drawings over a period of years of birdwatching. Some of the pages are very much nature journal-oriented, with bird illustration and notes on the page. There are also individual portraits of birds, and they are stunning.
I have not read the entire book yet. I read the intro by David Allen Sibley, and I read Tan’s preface. In it, she talks about the fact that she took her first adult drawing classes at age 64. She also talks about field trips and workshops she did with John Muir Laws, and a teenage girl that she met in the process, who ended up being a friend and mentor. It’s an inspiring story.
“These pages are a record of my obsession with birds. My use of the word obsession is not hyperbole. The Backyard Bird Chronicles contains excerpts from hundreds of pages gleaned from nine personal journals, filled with sketches and handwritten notes of naïve observations of birds in my backyard.” …. “Since 2016, I have gone from being able to identify three species in my backyard to now sixty-three, and no doubt more to come.” — Amy Tan
I have flipped through, looking at the illustrations, and I’m just blown away. If you are interested in keeping an illustrated journal, and specifically interested in keeping a nature or bird journal, I highly recommend checking out this book.8
Postcard No. 3
I know people don’t always have time to click through when I link to other posts on a Sunday. Time is precious, but I did want to mention again that postcard prompt no. 3 is available—a snowflake prompt. I hope some of you not only take a look at that post but also consider making and sending your own snowflake-themed postcard.
I think I need some of you to send me a postcard! I don’t mean art postcards, just regular scenic, landmark, lighthouse, or touristy postcards from your collection or location. In order to do the monthly images that go along with the series (monthly for a year), I need a pool of postcards to play with. It would be nice to have postcards from other people and other places mixed in. If you are interested in sending a postcard, let me know. You don’t have to do anything special on it. I won’t show anything private or your address or anything else. I’m looking for generic cards, not personal art cards (for the photos).9
A Postcard Mystery
Since today’s post (or letter or whatever you think of it as) is already too long for email, I want to share one more small thing that happened on Thanksgiving day.
The day before, I picked up the boys, one from school and one from the train. When we came in, one of them brought the mail up from the basement. “There’s a postcard,” he said. And there was a postcard, which was very exciting to see. (I apologize that I have not sent any postcards.) I threw out the junk, stacked up the rest of the mail, and set it aside on the small bar. I made dinner. I cleaned up the kitchen.
The next morning, Thanksgiving morning, I was waiting for my coffee to make, my head full of cotton as I contemplated the day, the history, the sense of magnitude of passing through each of these holidays after M’s death. I knew the boys would sleep until mid day.
While I waited, I reached over to look through the stack of mail, but I got sidetracked because next to the stack of mail, sitting all alone, was a single postcard that I had not seen. I picked it up, confused.
It was also a postcard from one of you. Where had it come from? How had I overlooked it when I sorted the mail the night before? How had it gotten out of the pile to end up sitting all alone on this empty space on the counter, impossible to miss?
The small things that we do can make a difference. There are also always things, oddities, impossibilities that we can’t explain.
Made It?
Thank you for reading along! I always enjoy your comments and invite you to chime in. Let me know what stands out for you, what you think after reading, or where we connect.
By the time this posts, my mom will have just arrived for an extended visit. I am grateful that she is able to do that and willing to do that. I will be grateful for the company. Last year when she was here in December, I did some quick, on-the-fly, without-her-knowing, impromptu digital sketches of her. Looking back at those now, I’m really charmed by them and by the whole process. I am thinking that I probably should do that again. This year, more than ever, I have such a sharp and acute sense of the fact that time is always limited.
I hope your December is going well and that you are making time to reach out, to grasp, to hold onto whatever you can. Your illustrated journal or sketchbook is a good strategy for recording some of what happens in your days.
One of the things I love about keeping an illustrated journal is that it requires so little. Even so, I planned on sharing some “get-started” or “staple” tools this week, but the hours have winnowed. In the next few weeks, I do plan to give a bit more guidance and encouragement for those who want to work in an illustrated journal. I know I write about life more than art these days, but even when I am not showing my pages each week, the pages are happening.
The illustrated journal is the one project that is always in play. It is the anchor and the lifeline. I will always encourage you to start your own.
Thank you for reading Illustrated Life. Writers need readers, and I am grateful for every reader!
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That photograph reminds me that there was a time when I didn’t wear a black fleece jacket all day every day.
Some of you may recall that my son and I (sadly) disagree on the significance or symbolism of moments like this.
There is great irony to me, thinking about this now, that we read Sidewalk Oracles just a few months before M’s death. I know most of us didn’t love the book, but I think many of us enjoyed the experience of stopping and looking with more intentionality, thinking that the symbols are there if we are looking, and acknowledging and being more attuned to symbols and signs in our everyday world. For many of us, I think the book was a validation of the kind of looking and interpretation we already do, but also a broadening, a widening, and an invitation to embrace what we can’t explain.
I wish I had snapped a photo of the not there night heron. Later, I wanted to see again what had tricked my eye in the moment.
I am so rarely out of the house that I am always on the lookout for these moments that I can later draw in my illustrated journal.
I watched so many review and gameplay videos of these games trying to find one that seemed strategic enough. (We are a demanding crowd.) I wish we had discovered roll and write games when the kids were younger. If they were both still home now, we would definitely have games like Hadrian’s wall and Welcome to the Moon and probably Fleet. I would really like it if I could find some people who wanted to play games.
For nature journaling, there are, of course, several other books you should look at, especially the ones by John Muir Laws, like The Laws Guide to Nature Drawing and Journaling. His books are fantastic. But I think this book by Tan is wonderful as an example of what nature journaling and birdwatching can be if you are an artist and a writer.
I don’t think I can wrangle a whole year from the set of Pantone cards I have, a gift from a few years ago.
I didn’t realize so many would read far enough to see mention of sending a postcard I can use in creating the header images. Thank you for your generous responses. I will reply to everyone individually later, but anyone seeing this who is interested can email me at illustrateyourweek@gmail.com. Thanks!
I’d like to send you a postcard!
I often think about Sidewalk Oracles. My family also doesn’t understand what I consider “signs” but also I’m just recognizing them as glimmers of joy.
I’ve wanted to check out Amy Tan’s journal. I’m in line at the library for a physical copy. I love her novels and I love that she’s a writer and an artist.