Feeding the heart: the layers of going home.

For breakfast today, I am slicing into this beautifully decorated loaf of sourdough bread, picked up at Socorro Farmers Market on Saturday. The baker is an amazingly talented Chilean vendor, who can be found under the name Sweet & Bread (@sweetandbreadfc) on Instagram. Not sure how to link to Instagram in this blog, but her journey as a self taught artist of bread is worth looking at.

I stopped by the market on my way to a little walk in Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge where currently winter colours flame and flare in the landscape. Random stone hearts were also a feature: a thing my eyes do when out in the wild.

Is the rest of this heart buried or is this a seriously deformed heart of stone?

Imagination and metaphor finds a way to define the shape of what’s hidden.

Being in a landscape, under sky, helps me with holding presence.

It’s a looking breathlessly (oh! The detail of line and colour!) even as one breathes deeply kind of thing.

While at the wildlife preserve, I visited the desert arboretum for inspiration for my garden planning.

A fine collection of garden art is displayed in this area.

Of course I gravitated towards the creatures reborn from old rusted junk metal.

Repurposing old metal seems to me a medium especially suited to desert landscapes and a xeric garden style. A welding course has been on my to-do list a while now.

Provision has been made for attracting live inhabitants amongst the mesquite, chamisa and yucca of this space.

At the time of my visit, the air was loud with bird calls, the undergrowth a rustle and chirp of avian presence.

Happy birds everywhere.

The visit to the refuge was a few hours of immersion in colour, shape, form, line.

Sky above, earth below.

Refuge indeed.

Being light.

Seeing light.

The layers of going home.