Murano Italy (Art Glass)

My wife and I just got back from a trip to Florence and Venice to be met by a big snow storm. While visiting Venice we took the water bus to Murano the island of the glass blowers. We collect art glass but we did not buy any there. The number of stores was overwhelming and the quality varied wildly.  According to signs in some shop windows lots is imported rather than produced locally. One rule of thumb we adopted was to avoid shops with glass clowns in the window. Murano is lovely, a sort of mini Venice and well worth a visit even if you are not shopping for glass. Instead we visited the glass museum. 

https://museovetro.visitmuve.it/en/home/

Then we ate probably the best meal of the trip while sitting next to the canal people/dog watching and visited a church that boasts, as well as the normal saintly bits, dragon bones. My wife and I love to visit old churches when we travel and this was a beautiful example with a two story Byzantine exterior.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/dragon-bones-of-santa-maria-e-san-donato

As on our previous trip we bought our glass at the shop of Vittorio Costantini in Venice. His wife Graziella is also on hand to chat with visitors and display the pieces they have for sale. (his personal collection, also on view is incredible). They are two of the nicest people you could meet and his lamp work sculptures of birds, fish, insects and other denizens of the microcosmos he finds so fascinating, are outstanding. 

http://www.vittoriocostantini.com/en/home-2/

Murano Museum 

Florence 2019 (There and back again)

"He saw clearly how plain and simple – how narrow, even – it all was; but clearly, too, how much it all meant to him, and the special value of some such anchorage in one’s existence. He did not at all want to abandon the new life and its splendid spaces, to turn his back on sun and air and all they offered him and creep home and stay there; the upper world was all too strong, it called to him still, even down there, and he knew he must return to the larger stage. But it was good to think he had this to come back to, this place which was all his own, these things which were so glad to see him again and could always be counted upon for the same simple welcome."

from The Wind in the Willow

by Kenneth Grahame 

Venice 2016

And Polo said: 'Every time I describe a city I am saying 

something about Venice.” 

from Invisible Cites 

By Italio Calvino

Dorothy Badlands

"out there, inaccessible
to grammar's language the 
stones curve vastnesses,
cold or candescent
in the perceived 
processional of space."

Stone's Secret
Margaret Avison

Ant and flower, Dorothy

Love: as though the stars
rushed in upon a void, and in extinction
left a flower.

Disintegration in a Dream of Love
D.G. Jones

Dorothy Alberta

"unconscious of the hand of time

that makes all things vanish, all fade,

all suffer change.

And they live today as if they were forever,

when they are here only for a day. 

And I observe, and I am like them

only for a day "

from Early Morning

by Louis Dudek

https://www.ghosttowns.com/canada/alberta/dorothy.htm

Dorothy Alberta

"INTO my heart on air that kills 

From yon far country blows: 

What are those blue remembered hills, 

What spires, what farms are those? 

That is the land of lost content, 

I see it shining plain, 

The happy highways where I went 

And cannot come again."

from A Shropshire Lad

by A. E. Housman 

Warblers

"One brilliantly cold Alberta day
the teacher wrote on the blackboard
'1928' -- for the first time. Everything was changing "

from A Seed of History
by Margaret Avison

One advantage of having an overgrown weedy tip as a yard is the number of birds in this case warblers that stop by during migration. 





In one hour, I photographed one or more of the following Yellow-Rumped Warbler, American Redstart, Wilsons Warbler, Hairy Woodpecker, and possibly a Yellow Crowned Warbler. One problem with the current software programmers love for updating software that was actually working fine, means most of the photos from that session are now lost. I am not taking credit, it is all on them. Just saying.



"Do not think for one minute it is the Poem that matters.
It is not the Poem that matters.
You can shove the Poem.
What matters is what is out there in the large dark
and in the long light,
Breathing."

from Let Me Make This Perfectly Clear
by Gwendolyn MacEwen