Thursday Challenge: Summer -

"Gone Fishin'"

digital photograph by Mick Mather
- click on image to view full size -

Summer is the theme at Thursday Challenge this week. Who could resist a shady, cool stream bank and a shallow, sunny hole for the fish? I don't have a license so the only fishing I'm doing this year is with the camera. Therein lies another challenge of sorts: take a drive out into the countryside on the next perfectly sunny day ... drive until you can't see any houses and stop at the first little stream or brook you come to. Walk the bank with your camera and keep your eyes peeled ... share the results.

The view -

"Hiking Above the Great Lake"
digital collage by Mick Mather

One thing we have in this part of Central New York State is an abundance of water. Be it a puddle, slough, pond, stream, creek, river, canal or lake, there's always something wet within hailing distance. Todays post is reminiscent of some of the walks I've taken over the years mixed with visual memory of some armchair excursions to the Lakes District in the UK. So, get your canteens and walking sticks ... I'll meet you at the trail head.

Rain, rain, go away -

"Leighlund's Cairn - Another View"
stacked stone sculpture by Mick Mather

The introduction, "rain, rain, go away", is for Susupetal ... most of us who have the privilege to know her understand that she dislikes the coming of the Finnish Autumn, fraught with fog and gloom and rain. But I digress. We've had an extraordinarily wet, cool summer in this part of the world too. Lately, that fact has included a lot more rain - pushed north and east by the hurricanes in the Gulf of Mexico - that filled this little creek next to Leighlund's house. I took my camera over there yesterday to document the possible destruction of the piece but was rewarded with a perfectly brilliant, sunny day with our little cairn proudly standing its ground and diverting the stream. Next step will be to document the winds of autumn and the falling leaves that might just bury this little stand of stone.

Something a little more manageable -

"Leighlund's Cairn"
stacked stone sculpture by Mick Mather

To make a long story short, my granddaughter and I spent a good bit of time in a dry stream bed yesterday. I began searching for stones to stack and had a fairly good start on a small cairn when Leighlund walked over to it and dismantled it with swift kick of a tiny, sneakered foot. After explaining what I was up to and after urging her to help - or build a cairn of her own - I began again. Once it was completed we sat with it for a while and pondered the good work. Soon enough, however, a slug caught her attention and the moment was not so much lost as replaced with a new adventure ... for her, how to get the slug into the house as a gift for her mommy; for me, how to leave it outside and to simply tell the tale of the little slimy critter instead. Anyway, another temporary piece on display until any number of catastrophes deign to visit and undo the work ... again! :)

Observing nature and a reinterpretation -

"Stream and Stones at High Water"
digitally manipulated fractal collage by Mick Mather

At this time of year, walking outside - or even just looking outside - to experience the air, light, heat, sun, rain and the changing of the season is a nice way to relax. Free flowing thought, influenced by the environment, flashes on and off with a variety of ideas and possibilities that will need to consider the sharp corners of recurring, urgent concepts that insist that I pursue them. For a number of years I've been interested in riparian restoration of a particular creek, my intervention being that of siting sculpture within the creek itself. Not a new idea, certainly, but one that continues to insert itself into my own consciousness. This post was created in response to much of this recent thinking.