UP AND RUNNING

Finally!

Redesigned and Up and Running!

I'm back to pondering all things nature, life and art and now posting simultaneously on my website and facebook

A Sharp Turn in the Road

Yes, I know, I have been away again.  I don't intentionally mean to drop off the radar, but at least once a year it happens.  Blogging is an interesting exercise: part vanity publishing, part journal, part philosopher ( part pain in the whazoo..) Since last Fall I have been doing a lot of thinking about the role of this weekly posting.  Over the past 3 years I have posted 262 times.  That is a lot of wondering out loud isn't it?

Maybe it was that long 14 hour ride home during Snowmagedden or perhaps it was my internal clock, but I believe I have come to a turn in the road.  It's time for some changes--and not just ones about the layout of the page. In response to that call, I am restructuring this blog and beginning April 1st will be incorporating it into my domain site, www.annpopepotter.com.  My belief the natural world exists to awaken us to ourselves will still be part of my subject matter--it is central to why I paint. But I believe that expanding to include the powerful, sometimes mysterious connections between nature with beauty, art and our humanity will bring deeper and richer nourishment for all our journeys in what Rilke called simply, "being here".

Why then, do we have to be human

and keep running from the fate

we long for?

Oh, not because of such a thing as happiness--

that fleeting gift before loss begins.

Not from curiosity, or to exercise the heart...

But because simply to be here is so much

and because what is here seems to need us,

this vanishing world that concerns us strangely---

us, the most vanishing of all...

Rilke, from the Ninth Duino Elegy, translated, edited by Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows