A Pile of Rocks

Next to love, balance is the most important thing.

John Wooden

I named my rock piles…

The Light Spirit

with a big-hearted base.

The Little Universe

Light and dark

sun and moon

sand, stone and feather.

The Bird Bath

a little white bird

found a place to land

and a bath

to cool in

The Running Man…

it’s precarious,

running.

one foot touching down,

one mid-air,

one arm forward,

one back.

Gravity and momentum

briefly

in balance

propelling you

forward

through space.

Everything changes, even stone.

Claude Monet

Balancing rocks, and finding rock balances, or cairns, of others is one of the pleasures of living near a rocky beach. Last month, while visiting Mackinac Island, I found a book called The Rock Balancer’s Guide by Travis Ruskus. It’s a meditative approach to rock balancing. I’m just learning. Some of the stones I find here, on Lake Michigan, called lightning stones (or Septarian), often appear to have images of familiar things etched into their surfaces. I love finding them and using them in a stack. It makes each rock pile like an ephemeral message from me to the universe. And great fun. You should try it!

There are a couple of updates to my schedule I wanted to share. Firstly, I'll be scaling back my blogging to once a month during the summer to dedicate time to updating my website galleries, creating prints for my physical gallery, and fulfilling commitments to others.

Secondly, for anyone near Saugatuck, Michigan, I'm organizing a one-day bookbinding workshop in late September 2024. More details to come.

I will see you again on July 19, and on the third Friday of every month through the end of October. Thank you so much for being here.

Deer’s Leap

Magic of June

In early June the world of leaf and blade and flowers explodes, and every sunset is different.

John Steinbeck

Heart of a Rose

nestled within her silky white petals

baby sunbeams reach

with tiny arms and fragile hearts

to their mother

June 5 fallen leaves caught by the petal of a Japanese dogwood blossom

June 7 Eastern Gray Squirrel chewing on a green pine cone

June 8 - A cluster of flowers on the mock orange tree, backlit by the rising sun in the front yard

June 8 - Robin building her nest in an old lilac bush by the driveway

June 10 - Cabbage White Butterfly settles on the wild herbs by the roadside

June 11 Tiny Pine Squirrel ate seeds fallen from the river birch outside the front door

June 12 - a bee sat, unmoving, near the eye of a wooden step

Spring being a tough act to follow, God created June.

Al Bernstein

It’s been a quiet week of gardening, resting and getting ready for summer here. Seeing flowers bloom. Watching the little wild things emerge and come looking for food. Walking down to the lake in the early morning. Wandering around the neighborhood. Summer will be here soon with all its busy activity and social commitments, and that will be good too, but for now I’m really soaking up the quiet.

Thank you for letting me share a few of my favorite moments of this week. Hope your week was beautiful too.

June 12 - A rainbow fragment unexpectedly appeared across the lake as I was walking back up the bluff stairs

Seeing Mackinac Island With Mom

This is our island. It's a good island. Until the grownups come to fetch us we'll have fun.

William Golding

View of the Grand Hotel and a section of the Island from a trail above

A gift

For you, we said

And the three of us pitched in.

And took our mom on a ferry to Mackinac

Island. We dragged her around from sight to sight:

forts, shops, restaurants, on carriage rides and through gardens

It seemed like we were always climbing or descending hills

Or stairs whenever we wanted to get anywhere

But mom kept up and never complained

and we laughed and said,

“What a gift”

Fort Mackinac during a cannon firing demonstration- one of the soldiers runs to get a new match to light the cannon after the first one failed

Success on the second try! The ground shook.

Arch Rock Trail winding through the woods in the Mackinac Island State Park

Arch Rock in the early morning light

Beautiful dark trillium in bloom in the Secret Garden on The Grand Hotel grounds

Bridge over a river of grape hyacinths in the Secret Garden overlooked by the Grand Hotel above

Masses of tulips bloomed everywhere on the island.

If you look the right way, you can see that the whole world is a garden.

Frances Hodgson Burnett

For those of you who don’t know about Mackinac Island, it is a small Island where Lake Huron and Lake Michigan meet off the northern coast of Michigan’s lower peninsula. They don’t allow cars on the island, so transportation is by horse drawn carriage, bicycle or on foot. If you’d like to know more about the island and it’s history, check out their website here.

If I were to go again, I would love to run the entire circumference of the Island (I think it’s about 8 miles) and spend a lot more time exploring the natural areas of the state park, which makes up about 80 percent of the island. The carriage tour was fabulous, funny and gave our feet a welcome rest. The only stop on the tour I would recommend seeing on your own instead is Arch Rock. It’s much better to see without a crowd. That is only possible in the early morning, or in the evening after the tours stop running. I would also definitely recommend seeking out the Secret Garden on the grounds of the Grand Hotel. It was magical. I don’t know what it’s like at other times of the year, but it wasn’t too crowded for our early season visit and the flowers were blooming wildly everywhere.

This was the first trip my sisters and my mom and I have ever taken together as adults, with just the four of us. Mom flew in from Texas, my sister Rita drove up from Alabama, and I drove across the state to spend the night in Lake Orion, Michigan, at my sister Becky’s house, on a Sunday. Monday morning, we rose early and piled into Becky’s car for the four-hour drive to Mackinaw City, where we took a ferry ride to Mackinac Island. It was fun right from the start. We walked and shopped, tried the famous fudge, visited historic buildings and gardens, took an afternoon carriage tour and got dressed up for dinner every night at the Grand Hotel. We played cards after dinner in the trophy room, gave each other lots of grief and laughed until we cried. We went to bed late and got up early. It was exhausting and absolutely lovely. We’re already thinking about the next trip we’ll take together.

Thank you so much for being here. See you next week!

My crew of fellow troublemakers: from the left: me, my sisters, Becky and Rita, and my mom, Janet.

No man needs a vacation so much as the man who has just had one.

Elbert Hubbard

P.S. The poem was meant to be a “shape” poem (a diamond) which is a bit of a risk because I’m not sure if the format will come through when this page is converted to email by th messaging system.