Shakespeare liked that phrase, so why not? Let me tell you how this conglomeration of images came to rest here. One of my adult students was helping someone move a table. When she reached underneath for a grip, she felt something warm and fuzzy. Turned out to be a bat. She became enthralled with the bat. At first a feeling of fear and revulsion, but then she noticed it was cute, like a mouse with wings. She ended up writing a nice essay about it. When I read the essay, I was reminded of a time, many years ago, when I was introduced to bats by a biology professor, and that I had done some drawings of a particular rare bat (above) that we caught in the mountains of New Mexico. It is known as the Great Spotted Bat, or
Euderma maculata. The drawing below shows which bones in a bat's wing are homologous to those in a human arm, or most all mammals for that matter.
While retrieving my bat drawings from one of my old nature journals, I started thumbing through the pages and noticing that on impulse I had made lots of entries over the months that were not strictly "nature journaling" as it's commonly known to be.
This painting of a Western Swallowtail Butterfly was originally intended to be a page in a children's calendar I was designing. As happens so often with me, I switched my attention to several other ideas before I got to the fourth page of my calendar, and I never returned to it. I liked the butterfly image, though, so I've kept it for posterity.
There might seem to be a nature theme here - things that fly, or did fly - but it won't last. The above ink drawing was originally designed to head a "letters to the editor" column in a magazine I used to edit. I've saved the original and used it for several other publications since then. But then on another page, totally unrelated to anything else in this particular journal, are the instructions for finding the
square root of a number. Passing through 8th grade before the age of calculators, we had to learn how to do this. It was actually fun. A few years later, in Advanced Algebra, we learned how this algorithm was derived from the binomial theorem, which was also fun. I think my 8th-grade math teacher knew she was planting a seed. We learned about Pascal in that process and that polymath has entered my life through many different avenues since. During one rainy day, many years ago, my brother and I, using analogous methods, figured out an algorithm for finding the cube root of a number. It was very cumbersome, so we reverted to the slide rule or cube root tables which in those days were in the appendix of most math books. Since the advent of pocket calculators, most math books now come with appendectomies.
On another page of this same "nature" journal, I found a reminder of a day when I showed a high school student a quick and easy way to "prove" that the sum of the angles of any triangle is 180 degrees. As I continued paging through the journal, I found more nature drawings, like this feather of a Stellar's Jay. I also found occasional batches of text that are not fit for publication.
Then I found some ink drawings of my drawing and painting tools. These images were incorporated into a business card I designed for myself over 30 years ago when I was trying my hand at a graphic design business. In other words, it's a nostalgia piece. I glued it into my nature journal. At the time I did that, there was a reason, but I've forgotten what it was.
I've set aside another half dozen or so images from the same journal that I'll post later. If I were to make a stretch and say there's a reason for posting these it would be because today I was uninspired to take any photos and thought that with the weather getting colder and my drawing and painting tools gathering dust, maybe it's time to resume these enjoyable habits - drawing and painting. It'll help me slow down and get past the immediate gratification provided by digital cameras. I also think my current re-reading of Thoreau has something to do with it. That guy really gets under my skin!
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