Rainy Days and Sacred Work...

Today was a typical Florida, cold front burdened, rainy, winter day. The temperature dropping all day and rain running down my window making the trees outside look like they had been painted by Monet.

 

Poplars on Epte - Claude Monet

These are the days that I feel most creative. Unfortunately, like today, I'm usually at the office, working to conserve the very things I find most inspiring... water, habitat, the Florida that I grew up in... the Florida that brings so many here to destroy it. Maybe not on purpose, but the more that come... the less there is.

Years ago when I worked for the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, a speaker came to our office... He told us that what we did for a living was "sacred work". Indeed it was.. and is today... and will always be.  I've worked in the field of natural resources conservation most of my adult life. My childhood predisposed this.  We spent countless hours in woods, lakes, swamps and rivers... We learned more from these experiences than we ever would have in books or school.  But I took it further and made it my life to experience and learn... and to teach and protect the things I love and feel most content with. It's no wonder my art and prose are so influenced by nature... I've been immersed in it my entire life.

 

Photo from freefoto.com

Fortunately I prefer to write on rainy days, rather than collage or paint... I become introspective... I feel like the rain washes the prose from my soul onto the paper.  So I try to steal moments between meetings, phone calls and comprehensive plan reviews to put bits and pieces of thoughts down in ink.  If I'm lucky or with what talent I may have, those snippets of thought find their way into complete sentences later and end up in a journal or here.  Sharing these thoughts is, in essence, sharing my sacred work... perhaps opening some minds in the process.

Photo from freefoto.com

"It is a soothing employment to overlook the pond and study the dimpling circles which are incessantly inscribed on it's surface..."  Henry David Thoreau (journal entry August 23, 1853)