Butterflies, bees and wasps, oh my.  It might be that Spring really does follow Winter.  The grass is getting greener, the air warmer, all in all it's a beautiful day today.  There are no buds that I could see on the trees, so perhaps the old ones remember how the weather tricked them last year and how painful the late season cold was.  I suspect we may still have some snow and icy rain to wade through, but even as broken as my perceptions are (as they always are when my spine, and especially the top of my spine, is this out of true) I can feel Spring starting to bubble up through my bones.

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I went out walking, camera in hand, for a while this afternoon.  It always overwhelms me how busy the parks get on the weekend.  It makes me wish for a less normal schedule, one with the occasional weekday free and clear.  Maybe I'll do that this summer when I've got faire and Renleather going at the same time.

I was talking to Cass last night at the gallery showing and she asked me if I ever feel like I'm an alien.  The question made me smile because that's been a growing sense over the last decade.  I've been exploring just how far away from normal I feel and I keep building more and more bridges back to something like the everyday.  It leaves me feeling like an anthropologist trying to interact with a tribe in the Andes.  Not so much with the smug sense of cultural superiority, more of the deep fascination combined with the frustration of the myriad failed attempts at communication on even the most basic level.  There is also a feeling of how dangerous it is not to understand which overwhelms my desire for interaction at moments.

And then sometimes it just leaves me with a feeling to observe, almost afraid to move because I feel like I'll interrupt something.  Knowing full well that just by observing I'm still interacting, still there is the desire to keep my impact as small as possible, to observe the natives in their most natural state.

I find that I'm even more that way when I have a camera.  I don't want to be noticed.  I want to build a blind and just shoot with a really long lens, capturing everything as purely as possible.  I know intimately how disruptive it is to have the giant, black eye of a camera pointed at me.  Maybe I'll buy a birding lens for my anthropological research.

It was nice sharing that moment of a mutual sense of alienness.  I'm pretty sure Cass and I don't come from the same far away as she comes from somewhere where people are graceful and lighthearted and where heads are shaped to be beautiful when bald and wherever I hale from I suspect it is not so green or so graceful, but one alien to another, it's good to have that moment.

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I checked out the book Drawing From the Right Side of the Brain on Lyn's recommendation and so far I find it to be well worth reading.  I need to find and/or make a few tools that I don't have if I'm to follow along with the text.  I did the initial three drawings, one of my face, one from memory and one of my hand.  They were terrible.  The one from memory especially.  I can tell where they tried to teach me 'how to draw faces' when I was a kid.  Terrible.

What's funny is that the one of my face... and maybe even the one of my hand... weren't as terrible as I would have guessed.

Which does not mean you get to see them.  You're not that special.

Well, okay, some of you are.  But really.