Enjoying the Wild Life (more the wildlife): Wings, Nests & a Stubborn Foot
There is something quietly electric about early spring along the water. The light shifts. The reeds rustle differently. And if you are patient and still enough, the world reveals itself in ways that stop your breath entirely.
This season has brought me two gifts I did not dare hope for.
The first: our local bald eagle pair has a hatched egg. I have been watching that nest for weeks — a great, shaggy basket of sticks wedged into the highest fork of a Douglas fir above the lake’s eastern edge. Then, last week, movement. A tiny dark head visible when the wind shifted the parent just so. It is almost too much to hold.
“There are moments when nature hands you something so rare, so unscripted, that your only job is to witness it and be grateful.”
The second gift arrived more quietly. A swan has settled into the reeds on the far side of the lake. She sits low and still in the cattails, a perfect white curve against all that deep green. Nesting. Patient. Magnificent. I have been watching her through binoculars from the bank, sketching fast in my field journal — trying to catch the way her neck tucks, the angle of her wing at rest.
I will confess there is a bittersweet edge to all of this right now. A sore foot has grounded me in ways I deeply resent. The trails I would normally be walking — the ridge path, the marsh loop, the long way around the north shore — are off limits for now. Rest says the doctor. Rest, when the eagles are nesting and the swan is in the reeds and the spring light is doing impossible things to the water every morning.
It is a particular kind of frustration that only artists who work from nature will truly understand. The subject is out there. You are not. And patience — the very thing nature asks of you — must be turned inward instead.
I adapt. I sit closer to the water than I usually would. I work smaller and faster. I let the limitation sharpen my attention, which is, I suppose, what limitations are for. The sketches have been different this week — looser, more urgent. There may be something in them worth keeping.
“The trails I love are waiting. Until then, the shore is enough. It has to be, and somehow, it is.”
Spring does not pause. The eaglet will fledge. The swan will raise her cygnets. And I will be there — boots back on, sketchbook in hand — to witness as much of it as I possibly can.
In the meantime, I hope you will come see what this season has been inspiring on canvas. I would love to share it with you in person.
UPCOMING SHOW
2nd Saturday Art Walk
Friday, April 11 · 2:00 – 4:00 pm
Rancho Murieta Country Club
7000 Alameda Drive, Rancho Murieta