sunshine planters with great expectations

I started watching Dicken's classic Great Expectations last night on PBS. It is hard to grip the English cockney at first, but you soon tune your ears into the brogue. It is beautifully set in England; the characters delightful and engaging ringing true that the Brits are truly masters at their theatre craft. I look forward to the upcoming episodes.

But it is the new sunshine and light that invigorates me. Last week, I decided to do some experiments with old soil and work it with flower seeds that we didn't use from last year's planting. We get some beautiful sun and heat in the front rooms of our home suggesting a greenhouse space and we have often used it in the past for starter plants. It is very early in the year to plant though but I decided to test it out anyway with a few of my pots. After two days, all of the pots have sprouted with tiny green sprigs. These modest beginnings are religiously observed every day with optimism and happiness.

This time of year reminds me too that I have five weeks left of college classes; soon to resume three months of working full time in the studio, focused reading and upcoming summer trips brings great openness to my psyche. This May, I will traveling to New York to see art and family with an old grad school buddy from Los Angeles. Ken and I will be doing our annual research for our trip abroad to China for next winter(which is yet too far away.) I have an artist in residency to teach in Xi'an, the funerary home of the Terracotta Warriors and Horses. We have been wanting to go to China for some time; the art dense, deep, centuries of brilliant ceramics, contemporary art and the exquisite forest steppes landscape shaped by dynasties of the old and new will be sensational. We caught a whiff of this sensibility last year when we travelled to the northern area of Sapa, Viet Nam which bordered China. I felt like I had been transported into another time realm.

My planting brings to mind the things that I have yet to do, the possibilities of new things to see with surprises and changes. All this cultivating is done with careful tendering, watering and good sunlight, not to mention the work that brings the joy of fruition.