Sunset

I am a sunset kind of girl. I love the colors, the ever-changing light, the metaphor and the melancholy that a sunset can bring.
It becomes painfully obvious how much I love sunsets when I look at all the sunset photos I have taken. I will trouble you now with an entire post of sunset photos. Some are unremarkable, some are beautiful, but they all were taken over the course of two evenings at the same beach.









There are a few more photos that I want to take time with, to edit and make them into something really nice. I will post them as they are finished, but it will likely be a while.

I think it's safe to say that I am done with the Silent Summer. I have struggled to find my words lately and maybe I just need to start writing again. Maybe they will come back to me. I can't promise that I will have anything to say. I worry that all I will write are to-do lists and already-done lists. My storytelling mojo is still running low, but maybe I just need to practice it back up.
We are winding down this summer and school looms ahead, not just for the kids, but for me as well. Chris will be traveling a lot this fall and I'm not sure how this is all going to work but I know that changes are on the horizon for our family. My mind is resisting the changes and the stretching that it knows are in the near future. I am not focusing well and wrestling with the desire to keep things easy and to do only what I want to do, not what I need to do. That has never been a fight that I've fought well, but I need to try again. I am hounded lately by the knowledge that I can't do all of it. I can't do everything I want to do. Some wants will have to give sway to some needs.

Us

My Emma. Photos of my lovely Emma.




We made necklaces out of shells that we found on the beach. Emma's was...astounding. She kept adding to it. The longer we stayed on the shore, the more ornate her necklace became.




And now I offer proof that I was there. I don't usually wind up with photos of myself anywhere. I am far more comfortable behind the camera. Thanks, Alli, for taking these pictures of me and my girl. Emma saw them and said, "Mama! I look like I belong there!"

Critters

Our weekend seemed to be bursting with little critters that crossed our paths. Not all of them could be captured by my camera, namely the little kitchen mousie that was snacking around the place, but here are two that we loved:

This raccoon furtively skittered onto the beach once the sun had gone down and munched on little bits that he found in the sand.




This baby tortoise stole our hearts, though. He was making a perilous trek across the parking lot. We picked him up to move him past the danger (of course, only in the direction he was already moving). I took so many photos of him and just couldn't pick a favorite! Here are just some of them:

Water

Soothing. Incomprehensibly powerful. I love water. I'm drawn to it and I prefer to have the most water possible out in front of me. I like that it's bigger than me and that I can't conquer it - can't do anything about it. So, I can rest when that's all that I can see.

What Does It Mean?

I found these cryptic lines and bubbles to be something like crop circles - mysterious in both origin and meaning.

Sand

I dedicate this post to my friend Mary, because I am a wicked girl and I know how much she despises sand.



But it gets even better. Some of us don't mind the sand at all.



In fact, some of us rather wallow around in it, saving our sandy-hinie regrets until after all the fun has been had.

Adventures

I know I have mentioned that Emma and I were on an Artists' Retreat, but I have neglected to really say much about it. For the benefit of my newer friends and readers, let me 'splain.
My daughter is definitely a creative girl. And, well, so am I. I want to teach her how to be creative in a healthy way - to take care of herself, take time to look for inspiration, to seek adventure and find her place in this world that isn't always so friendly to our sort of girls. I also want her to have a community of creative women around her as she grows - people who understand and value the way she thinks and works. One activity I've devised that fits the bill is an Artists' Retreat. The past couple of years, we have gone to visit my friend Allison, who lives near the beach just a bit south of us. She is a writer and a poet and a Great Understander of People.
She's one of us.
So we go and stay with her for a few days. We eat interesting food that we find wherever we happen to be, we write and paint and draw and go to the beach a lot.
It's a few days of fun - connecting and creating.
We made a few really fun stops during our stay this year. An especially quirky one was the New University Pyramid Village. It's just a spot that Alli has always wanted to check out, so we did.
It's community with homes in pyramid-ish shapes and giant statues of composer heads.
I'm not even kidding.




We laughed and laughed, but we also felt super uncomfortable. I won't link to the website because it's pretty creepy, even if you could understand the poor English. It's some kind of new-age-ish European community. But still. Really funny stuff.
People crack me up.

On another day, we visited Koreshan State Park, which, now that I think of it, is pretty creepy in its origin too. But I love old buildings and crumbling structures and history, so I really enjoyed walking around.




But it was super-hot. We had just about given up and decided to seek out some air conditioning when we spied a pirate.
A real, honest-to-goodness Captain Jack Sparrow pirate.
Like any good free-spirited girl would do, we decided to follow him around a bit. I mean, the story is a bit more complicated than that, but Allison wrote a delicious poem about it that captures the whole event in far better and far more romantic terms than I could dare hope to write. Read it. You won't be sorry.



This pirate was so convincing that we spent the rest of the day giggling and wondering if he had been actually the real Captain Jack Sparrow. Upon close inspection of the photos, it has been determined that he was not. Sigh.

But that doesn't really matter, does it? We met a pirate. He told us we made his day. End of story.
The only reason there is no photo of me with the pirate is that I was pretty sure I couldn't PhotoShop out the lake of sweat that had welled up in my clavicle. I am a very vain girl, it seems.

(yawn) More tomorrow. I have spent this entire day playing with photos and I am ready to do something that doesn't involve a computer.