Recently, Becki and I participated in a workshop in field sketching at a Chilton nature center. Before we even began, the instructor explained that her intention was not to make better artists out of us, but instead to make us more aware of the beauty and detail in nature right at our fingertips. We were to consider this a practice of mindfulness and suspend our expectations for something we could frame. Becki is an excellent artist. She had a strong aptitude and interest in art in school and went on to major in art in college. When it came time to support herself and her family, she leveraged those skills but worked in commercial printing companies where the devil was in the details and there was no room for creativity. I was a bit intimidated to be taking this class with her, knowing that I would not have the skill to in any way approximate the quality, not only of her pen and brush strokes, but also her eye for composition and color. I should not have wo...
The author is no one of significance. Just a person who has time to reflect that life looks and feels different today, and writing might just be a way to help him sort out whether the world has gone to hell, or whether advancing age has a way of forcing a new perspective on you.