Peregrinations

My favorite robin is an English robin. But I didn't know they existed outside of nursery rhyme books until I went there and saw one. I imagine most of us think of the little robin redbreast that sat on apple boughs in the picture books of childhood as the fanciful figments of poetic imagination. If we think of them at all. Those fat cheery little birds with a puff of ruddy breast feathers. They do not look at all like the "real" robins that are so ubiquitous in our yards and gardens. Read more about My Favorite Robin

Fall 2009 New Hampshire. U.S. Highway 2.

Read more about Burning Bushes

A flower garden of architecture. That was the phrase that popped into my head last week when I came out of the Art Institute and looked once more at the Chicago skyline. Read more about My Kinda Town

I can't swear this is Avalon - I captured this picture from another long lost website - but it looks so like the view from the top of Glastonbury Tor that I think we can make a case. Read more about Mists of Avalon

I made the statement yesterday, in response to a Facebook thread with a (fellow) atheist, that if I lived in Italy, I'd convert. I'm in it for the art, I said. This picture is one of the reasons why.

Read more about Seeing The Light

"The Greek pantheon roared out of the Lion Gate of Mycenae ..." That is from an paper I did for a class some years ago when I was writing about the submergence of the Great Goddess into the male-dominated pantheon of the Greeks. A bit hyperbolic, perhaps, but I still like the image. When I was in Greece a few years ago, I wanted to visit Mycenae, but it lay across the Gulf of Corinth and bus schedules vs. my remaining time in-country did not correlate. Read more about The Man From Mycenae

Inspired today by two bits of serendipity: A Facebook notice from Rory Stewart () that he is off to Cumbria and an e-mail from a chance met friend of the road, Scott, who has walked England up and down and sideways, and at whose invitation I took this walk out of Ambleside, Cumbria, and to whom I remain grateful. Read more about Stepping Stones

We rode down on the bus that morning, my daughter and I, from our lodgings in the ceramic museum, and debarked along the river below the Royal Mile of Edinburgh. Then we looked up. Read more about A Study in Gray

My first view of Venice. How was I to know I would fall in love? I spent less than 24 hours here. So why is it that I watch everything I can get my hands on that promises another glimpse of this city? I feel like the woman at the party who keeps watching the door to see if *that guy* is going to show up. Read more about Watercolor City