The aesthetic is above all my element

A good book brings me back to myself, for better or worse.

A good book either makes me better or want to be better, or enables me to see how awful I am and how funny, or better yet, as a pathetic but functioning human being.

Some artists make more studies than they make art, and some artists make more art than they make studies, and then some other artists only make art and some others only make studies of art.

Watching Rossillini's film, "The Flowers of St. Francis" (1950) last night, I'm inspired by a language I don't understand. The brothers, in what became the Franciscan order, refer to both sentient and non-sentient beings as brother or sister, as in 'brother tree' or 'sister water.'

I admire the ecology of the language, it makes perfect sense, it denotes both a healthy human approach to the natural world and the dire circumstances we now find ourselves in, having taken unfair advantage of the earth for centuries.

Colin Tudge's "The Tree" (Three Rivers Press, 2005) is a sweet little book that earns the right the more I read it to be called either brother or sister, as you could call a tree either brother or sister.

A wildflower, found while hiking in the woods near Tomales Bay, can only be called 'sister wildflower', don't you think?