Haiku – a curious nature

Happy Winter Solstice 2025 In an Astronomical Moment

December 21, 2025

Here’s a Few Fun Facts surrounding our Winter Solstice

Did you know ……

In Latin, ‘solstice’ translates into ‘sol’ meaning the sun, and ‘sistere’ meaning to stand still.

“For only one brief astronomical moment in time, the sun stands completely still.”*

*In reality, the sun never stands still. If it did, from our perspective, that would mean the earth suddenly stopped orbiting and rotating. Not desirable!

Did you know ……

The winter solstice is often called midwinter, the longest night, or the shortest day. It refers to a moment in time in which the period of daylight is at its shortest. In the Northern Hemisphere, this always happens between December 20 and 23. On this day, the 23.5 degree tilt of the earth’s axis of rotation engulfs the North Pole in continuous darkness or twilight.

Did you know ……

Yule is an ancient pagan season rooted in Norse, Germanic, and Celtic traditions, originally celebrated around the winter solstice. It honored the rebirth of the sun, the endurance of life during deep winter, and the protective power of fire and community. Yule symbolically bridged darkness and the gradual return of light. Today’s modern holiday customs, such as candles, feasting, evergreen decorations, and gatherings, have been influenced by those Pagan rituals of the past. And today, the blending of Yule’s myth and cultural memory appeals to those seeking grounding rituals, nature-based practices, and a deeper connection to seasonal cycles.

For more fun facts about Winter Solstice, check out these past posts shared on December 21, 2022 and 2024.

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Thanks to all for following my creative adventures over the past year(s). Your thoughtful comments and likes are truly appreciated. I’m looking forward to another full year of learning and sharing information about our fascinating natural world. As always, thanks for coming along!

Wishing everyone all the best this winter season and brilliant sunshiny days in the coming year.

Parking Lot Sycamore

December 7, 2025

My search for still-beautiful Autumn leaves, half hanging, half fallen to the ground, took me to Albuquerque where temperatures hadn’t yet dipped below zero. Striking ‘gold’ in a large vacant parking lot next to a Disc Golf course, are at least 30 full-grown Sycamore trees with what looked to be full canopies of foliage still clinging tight. But for all the leaves yet to fall, there must’ve been 50x that number covering the ground. The morning breeze was causing the recently-fallen leaves to skid across the pavement in jerky movements, coming to rest in the parking lot’s gutters.

It was in these ankle deep gutter piles where the range of leaf sizes, colors and patterns were found. These 1” to 10” broad, palmately veined and ragged-toothed leaves appeared locked together like pieces from a newly-opened 5000 piece jigsaw puzzle. And, oh my! The lid to the box just blew away! Now I was faced with a dizzying jumble of multi-colored golden-yellows, burnt oranges, Ruddy duck rust, fading-to-spring greens and saddle browns. It was from these ankle deep gutter piles that I collected Autumn leaves for this project.

Lost in thought, I overlooked the white noise of the city ……. traffic mostly, constantly humming and impatiently honking ……. until a painful ringing in my ears invaded the relative calm of the morning. No longer able to think, I turned around and found an invasion of leaf blowers! Never was there a more loudly screaming, obnoxiously noxious sound. Coming closer and closer, louder and more insistent, their ear-muffled and gas-masked operators approached without hesitation, each blowing away (to where?) every bit of the “unsightly and offending” leaf-litter in their path.

Luna approving of my Sycamore leaf selection

Dang-blasted!

It finally dawned on me this Friday morning that the vacant parking lot only opened for use on Sunday’s. Not agreeable to working weekends, the leaf blower operators were determinedly cleaning up the “messy” lot for the regular Sunday crowd. I was in their way.

Saving as many fallen Sycamore leaves as my collection bags could hold, and silently wishing all remaining leaves a happy landing somewhere on a nutrient-needy plot of land, I ran for the quiet of my car.

My Fallen Leaf Project

Using Sycamore leaves collected from that vacant Albuquerque parking lot, I tried my hand at a new technique; combining watercolor layers with layers of colored pencil. Using my new set of Van Gogh watercolors, I began each leaf with a layer of plain water followed by a light base layer, mixing Azo yellow medium with a touch of Yellow ochre. The bottom leaf (which was the underside of the top leaf) was duller and lighter in color, calling for a bit of Permanent lemon yellow. Allowing that layer to dry, I used various earthy colors from my set of Faber-Castell Polychromos colored pencils over the watercolor wash, mixing and matching the colors of my pencils with the actual leaf colors. This step tended to leave some areas uncolored with the pencils, so I applied another watercolor wash with Sap green, Burnt Sienna+Yellow ochre, and/or Madder lake deep+Azo yellow medium. I finished each leaf with a Dark sepia colored pencil outline, tipped the leaf margins with Dark sepia, and added shadowing first with Payne’s grey watercolor then Dark sepia colored pencil.

12 half-pan watercolor set and color swatch

The leaves were painted on 140# Canson XL Watercolor paper

If you have and questions or comments, please let me know. If you use this combined media technique, any tips you’d like to share would be greatly appreciated too.

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I’d like to send a shout-out and my deep gratitude to Wendy Hollender, botanical artist/illustrator/teacher extraordinaire, who announced in her newsletter free access for over a week to 19 of her bite-sized video lessons. Designed as companions to her book, The Joy of Botanical Drawing, each lesson focused on a different botanical subject and how to artistically render them using watercolor and colored pencil combined. I’ve always wanted to learn this technique and gave it a try with her leaf examples and then mine. Incorporating both media into the same painting was very challenging and way out of my comfort zone.

Thanks so much Wendy, for such wonderful lessons and your fabulous companion book! With lots more practice, my goal is that some day my botanical art looks as natural, skilled and professional as yours.

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As always, Thanks for stopping by!

Draft final page with actual leaves lying on top

National Bat Appreciation Day & National Haiku Poetry Day -April 17th

April 19, 2024

Of the dozen or so celebrations taking place annually on April 17th, you might think that combing both National Bat Appreciation Day and National Haiku Poetry Day in one blog post makes no sense at all. But if you’ve ever spent even a bit of time witnessing a bat ‘out flight’ at dusk, you’d agree with me that their near-silent hunting maneuvers are sheer poetry!

National Bat Appreciation Day

A holiday celebrated each year to promote awareness about bats and their importance in maintaining healthy ecosystems.

National Haiku Poetry Day

An annual celebration to honor and promote the cultural significance of Haiku, a Japanese form of poetry.

Dedication

This post is dedicated to my good friend, Holly Silva, who finds bats fascinating. She suggested for my first celebratory day in April, I tackle bats. (Not literally of course!) Like Holly, I’ve always been in awe of bats, having seen many ‘out-flights’ of the tiny insectivorous myotis bat and little brow bat. And then there’s fruit bats! Oh my …… so hard to resist sharing my story of an amazing fruit bat ‘out flight’ Roy & I witnessed in the Australian Outback, Bats in OZ!

Bats in OZ

Talk about right place/right time scenario! We had finally arrived at a well known hot springs south of Katherine after a long, hot, dry day through central Australia. Mataranka, a beautiful series of natural pools surrounded by hundreds of eucalyptus (gum) trees. It was late in the day and we were luxuriating in the hot water, when we noticed everyone there before us was leaving. It was a mass exodus; suddenly we had the springs to ourselves. Five minutes later that we noticed the water rippling around us. We figured a freak storm had appeared out of nowhere to offload huge raindrops in just this spot. Then the “rain” became more intense, the noise became cacophonous, and day turned into night.

When we first arrived at Mataranka, our focus was on the inviting pools of water nicely shaded by the gum trees. We never looked up into any of those tall, branchy trees … we were happy to have the shade. Now, soaking in the hot water while getting pelted by “rain,” we wondered if we should haul ourselves out, recalling that the locals must’ve known this storm was about to happen (as it did every night); maybe it wasn’t safe for some reason? So wondering how big the storm cloud was we glanced up at the sky through the tree branches. That’s when shock and awe grabbed us! Hundreds and hundreds of tree branches which must’ve been straining under a great weight minutes ago were sighing relief as thousands of fruit bats (aka flying foxes) dropped from their roosts to take flight. Wing membranes spread wide, their sheer numbers blocked out the fading sun. We were speechless! Gaping in awe at the spectacle, our mouths quickly snapped shut …… you see, that “downpour” wasn’t rain at all! All of those big, beautiful bats were pooping out guano as fast as they could! Another ah-ha moment struck us (along with copious quantities of guano) as we made a hasty retreat out of the water, grabbing our clothes and sun hats, and laughing uproariously while beating feat back to the safety and cover of the rental car!

As fast as the “storm” of bats appeared, they were gone, flying off to feed for the night on a Downunder spring bounty of fruits only they knew about. Stuffed by sunrise they would return to the Mataranka community roost to rest and digest before once again taking flight while pooping on the heads of foolish tourists tomorrow at dusk!

The Post

For this post, while exploring bats’ importance in the ecosystem, to science, and while recalling all of those Australian flying foxes I was curious about why and how bats hang upside down, the types of bats and their diets, and what adaptations Vampire bats have causing them to crave a diet of blood. Much of this rabbit-trailing led to myths and misconceptions about bats, then back to New Mexico’s most famous ‘out flight’ of the American Free-tailed Bat every spring, summer and fall evening from Carlsbad Caverns. While learning, several Haiku poems materialized reflecting bat behavior.

Nighttime brings darkness
A near silent “whoosh” above
Bats! Winged wonders hunt

It would’ve been easy and fun to fill up the rest of my journal with bat facts and more Haiku, but because the celebratory date of both National Bat Appreciation Day and National Haiku Poetry Day has now come and gone, I had to stop. Maybe you’ll want to answer a bunch of your own questions about bats? Maybe you’ll want to write your own Haiku about bats in honor of this style of poetry?

Mosquitoes beware!
Cauldron of bats overhead ….
Echolocation!

Share your bat stories and Haiku, and let me know if this inspires you to dig deeper into the fascinating world of bats!