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Graham Nash said, on CBS Sunday Morning, there is comfort in hearing birds chirping as he walks down the street.  Let us expand that and say nature and wildlife are comforting anytime anywhere.

Yesterday, a family of Moorhens swam by my lunch table. The adults constantly hiding the family in the weeds along the lakes edge while keeping a constant lookout for danger above and below.

Yesterday morning I photographed a mother hawk and her nearly adult off-spring.  The hawks were getting hassled by a tiny bird that I am sure had a nest nearby.  I am sure  that the hawks wanted to turn that nest into protein.  That is just a part of nature.

 

This morning I watched a young eagle being harassed by another small bird for the same reason.  However, this time the Eagle was not interested in the little birds nest. The eagle kept his eye on the water, saw a fish, dove straight down, came up with his lunch.

 

 

 

These days I see dozens of people outside walking.  The Coronavirus restrictions are curtailing their social gatherings. I see these walkers stopping to watch a bird, a rabbit, a tortoise, a baby gator, and the list goes on. 

I am sure that their pause to watch nature is comforting to them. I believe that is happening everywhere   More people slow down to see and feel the comfort of nature.  Graham Nash would be glad to see that happen.

OOPS, the walk down many streets in New York City does not include nature. Here is the fix to that problem. Some of my Grandchildren are thinking college programs aimed at a career in designing better cities with better lifestyle environments.

Ok Grandkids, here is your opportunity. Keep those natural environments viable. Keep lots of open land with lots of wildlife. Design cities so that future generations have daily contact with the nature you provide.  That will make the world’s people happier and more comfortable.  You will be a success. I like that idea!

I will show you that my comfort level is special.  Here are images of just a few contacts that I have with nature. Most of them were taken in my hours outdoors in The Great Outdoors RV and Golf Resort – the city I live in. One image is a collections of photos from Drummond Island.

These photos are just cell phone “snapshots”, but they give you an idea of what I saw:

NBC spent thousands of dollars putting together a show called “Boredom Busters” to help viewers get thru the shut-down imposed by the Coronavirus pandemic.  NBC spoke of activities and talked a lot about what you could do each day to prevent getting bored and depressed. – Yipes.  I am very fortunate to be at this stage of my life when the craziness of Coronavirus hit.  I’m retired, my job is not in jeopardy, I do not have the virus now, and other things are good for me.  I know these are tough times in the world and things could change for me over night.  So, I will write a little about right now:

We have wonderful technology. Gloria is creating a great new on-line circles of friends to replace her daily social art meetings, classes, galleries, and studios. Our families and friends host phone calls, face-time, and Zoom session to keep us in-touch. Sometimes we talk more remotely than we do when we are there.  I have my computer art and digital books.

We live in a wonderful part of the country. There is mostly bright sunshine each day.

Due to the mid-day heat between May and November, I go out in early morning and late evening – as do most people. But, not so many people out and about that social distancing is difficult.  Just enough people are out and about that you do not feel lonely.   After seeing them a few times, they become “Good Morning” or “Good Evening” friends.  That level of friendship is casual and not demanding.

The Great Outdoors RV and Golf Community is wonderful.  It is gated and safe, It has  miles of flat pave roads with mostly golf cart, bike, and walker traffic. It has a 21/2 mile nature trail for golf carts and bikes. It has unlimited miles of nature trails for walking along the St Johns river and associated swamp. It has birds, eagles, gators, armadillo, possum, bob cats, woodpeckers, osprey, owls, and more to watch and photograph.

We have to worry about hurricanes between June and October but so far in our twenty years here they have not been terrible. Our home is concrete block construction and on high enough ground that floods, so far, never reached us.  We just hunker down and deal with the clean up after. I will face the challenge of enjoying and maintaining Drummond Island in the summer due to travel and Coronavirus .

Given all that good stuff, like NBC said, we still should think about doing non-boring things.  I will tell you and show you of the three things I do most days.  It would be good if you focus on things that uniquely fit your interests.

First: With as many moves as we made over the last 50 years our garage got filled with boxes of stuff that never got opened.  Some came for my parents home in PA with stuff from late 1800’s, some from my home in Pittsburgh, to New York, to Rhode Island, to New Jersey, back to PA, to Texas, to Michigan, and now to our Florida garage.   Well, I have been spending part of each day emptying boxes.  Now I am organizing a Museum in the garage – Not sure that is an improvement over boxes but I am having fun seeing all that stuff – I will be showing you some of it in later blogs.

Second: I love to be out and about and exercise – I try to spend 3 hours a day on my  bikes, (had to replace two tires this month) do some photo taking, and do a little walking.  No golf, tennis, or pickle ball lately but it is a great option here in TGO in the future.

Third: I love to create art. So, I spend 3-4 hours a day on my computer playing with PhotoShop and writing this blog.

I found hundreds of photographs in the boxes – Each one really brought back memories. But you know me, i just had to screw around with Photoshop to make them “Modern”  – Yipes:

 

Before you look at my page here – See Dave’s signs of spring on the TGO Photo Page

 

Since I have enjoyed having animals all my life I understand that ruling regarding essential activity. – Horses need to eat!.

New subject – While trail riding, your eyes and mind can wonder.   You simply enjoy being out in nature.  You know, most often 50% of what you see while trail riding is sky  – WOW, and I am Pareidolia. A Pareidolia  sees objects in things including clouds. Study the next 2 photos and see if you are Pareidolia.

The building above houses the cafe,  community offices,  museum, and meeting room in our little TGO community.  I turned it into the barn below. But, in both photos, my purpose was to let you study clouds and see if you see what I see:

Of course I have enhanced it a a little but I see 2 cats, 4 dogs, 3 horses, and 1 unicorn. One of the three horses is sticking it’s head out of the barn – everything else is in the clouds.

 

Hey, Go to the TGO Photo Club Pages and see Dave’s display of spring birds in up-state New York.

THEN READ ON TO THINK ABOUT CHANGE!

In the last post I ask you to ponder the changes that the pandemic will bring to your life.

As you ponder, remember that business drives change.  I spent my working years getting computers to do new business things that brought about change.  Some examples: translating documents into dozens of languages, putting together all the parts needed to rebuild an automobile engine, predicting when a company needed new printers, and scheduling the vacancies in the bed and breakfasts in a town in the Texas Hill Country.  Business needs change.

This Coronavirus thing will expedite businesses need for change.

THE PAST:   Here are some photos showing changes of the past to get us thinking of changes in the future:

Today, we all carry this little thing in our pocket that lets us talk to family members anytime we want to.  Zoom and FaceTime let us see them even when they are thousands of miles away.  For me that is real change.

THE FUTURE:  Due to the Coronavirus, business engineers and designers are working in every industry to find new safe ways to keep our entertainment fun, our future daily convinces available, and our business world growing.

I am betting they will be successful and bring about future changes even faster than past changes.  Businesses will think out of the box:

Maybe instead of farmer’s market we will have a drone deliver a package of fresh fruits and vegetables to our front door each week.  A computer could put together a mixture in the package that best serves our particular diet needs.

i heard that Nieman Marcus is going out of business – suppose all mall stores closed.  Then, we customers, could tell our computer the image we wanted – I could say I want to look like that model shown in the catalog. The virtual  store could then package a set of new cloths each month for us, have a drone deliver it to us, pick up our old ones, and recycle them. We would never have to go to a crowded mall again – and we would always be dressed perfectly in the image we wanted.

Suppose golf courses opened up their cart paths to walkers, joggers, and bikers for two hours in the morning and two hours in the evening. We may all be healthier while living with this stay-at-home Coronavirus rule.

Suppose all stay-at-home families rearranged furniture.  Gloria had me do furniture rearrangement three times since stay-at-home started.  Each rearrangement is like getting a brand new home.  Furniture store owners need to change how they do business to capitalize on this “rearranging thing” that stay-at-home families do.

This battle will change us.  I have been pondering the good that will come from this battle. Here are a couple of my ponderings:

Maybe people will appreciate the less hectic life.  Stay-at-Home activities are less hectic than group activities. Group activities take you away from family per the group’s schedule, they make you compete, they make you do things to impress and please others.

I pondered less hectic “Stay-at-Home” activities that might stick with you when this is all over. You may self meditate, your may stroll with friends, you may cook and eat as a family, you may take daily bike rides together, you may eat more unprocessed  food – healthy vegetables, fish, nuts, cheese, and a little ice-cream.

Maybe we make more phone calls to our family and they to us.  Maybe we spend more time thinking what we can do, remotely, to help friends and family enjoy the “Stay-at-Home” time. 

My whole family spent hours putting together  a big order of food that they knew was very special to my taste.   They coordinated it with our grocery store for deliver to me, today, on my Birthday.  The order:  bananas, raspberries, nuts, raw cauliflower, apples, brie cheese, German sandwich meat, apple pie, chocolate ice-cream, AND WINE. Then, the family organized a Zoom session that lasted nearly an hour – like a digital birthday party with each of us in our own home a thousand miles apart.

All that really made me feel loved – It was a great way to give me a special birthday – Sure hope they enjoyed it as much as I did.

Maybe we will better relish the “Hellos” from more than 6 feet away, from neighbor families sitting on the porch.

Maybe we will enjoy our own routine and help others enjoy their own routine alone – leaving the activities of hectic crowds take a back seat in our daily lives.  That maybe the Silver Lining after this Coronavirus battle is won.

WOW – Go look at Dave’s Woodies – A series of photos I will never forget – TGO Photo Club 

Hey, I think this social distancing may save us.  

Cabin fever seems to be a problem for some folks in our TGO (The Great Outdoors) community. Maybe I have a little touch of cabin fever but not much. I am accustom to being socially distant – so I have been told.

I believe that having a routine fights cabin fever.  I have a daily routine that is much the same as pre-Coronavirus. I try to enjoy a relaxed breakfast, catching up on Gloria’s projects, classes, her painting challenges, & some times we plan maintenance projects on our house. Most of the maintenance work is done by contractors but we need to plan it and I need to find the budget dollars to pay for it. 

Then the day begins.  I try to get outside on my bike for 1 1/2 hours, them play 3 hours with photoShop and this blog. Then I do office work for and hour – for example find a way to afford the maintenance. Then I bike and hike for 2 hours.

Of course in-between I take a nap, shave and bathe, eat, talk to my family more often than before Corona – my son Jim even arranged a Zoom like audio session with the family.   I read digital books – Now reading “The accidental President – Harry S Truman”.  Then, sometimes I listen, alone, to old country western music.

Let us all figure out a way to adapt to the new way.

Being outside on the nature trails, 4 to 5 hours a day, I see Gators, snakes, tortoise, bobcats, eagles, and all kind of fish in the lakes.   While standing on the Nature Trail bridge I watch birds  catching fish for dinner.

I observed that, except for mating, most of the non-bird animals practice social distancing. You seldom see mature gators hanging out together, and bobcats hunt alone.

Snakes, it seems, only get together for mating. Not like us humans who  gather to talk, eat, drink, play Pickle Ball, shuffle board, pray, and sing.

We humans have not been gathering long though. We only developed a capacity for language about 50,000 years ago. So we have only been gathering to sing and talk for a short period of time.

Now lets look at the gators and snakes.  About 80 million years ago, the alligator appeared. The oldest snake fossil is 167 million years old. I think gators and snakes survived that long by not gathering to talk, sing, and compete at tennis.

Now birds of a feather are different.  You know they hang out in flocks. A total of 182 bird species become extinct since 1500. Avian extinctions are continuing, with 19 species lost in the last quarter of the twentieth century and four more have gone extinct since 2000.

My conclusion – If we humans learn to enjoy ourselves, and stay away from flocks (crowds), we may be around millions of years from now.  If not, our species may be like the birds  become extinct in another 50,000 years.  If you listen to TV news folks, of course, they got us thinking extinction may happen this fall.

Now take a look below – Just for fun I wondered if Coronavirus came from outer space:

At our grocery store on Drummond Island, to help the ball point pen work on our receipt, the owners tape a piece of paper to the surface where the cashier puts the receipt for our signature. 

Now remember somethings on the Island are barely out of the stone age.  The computer that prints the receipt is one of those things.  

You all probably are not aware that you may stand there 5 minutes waiting for the computer to think about printing.  I would like to visit with the cashier but she is very busy staring at the key board as if she is helping the computer in the back room talk to the credit card company somewhere off island. 

So, what do I do, I doodle on the paper taped to the surface. — You know, after one of the longer waits, maybe 7 minutes, I doodled on every spot of white space on the paper. 

Next trip I stopped to get a six pack for my evening by the outdoor fireplace. Guess what I saw there in the store.  The store owner’s  had a special place on the wall over the booze and beer where they hung all my doodles.

WOW, I thought, I can really doodle – I can really draw art  – OOPS, not so fast. Here is what some dictionaries have to say:

Drawing is a work of visual art — the result of a productive process — whereas doodling is not. 

Drawing is meaningful. It communicates something, whether form, space, likeness, action, or ideas.  Doodle is to scribble aimlessly.

Oh well, stay sane by digitally scribbling aimlessly while cooped up by the restrictions the governments has had to put in place to control the Coronavirus:

You know, in these days of change, Our happiness is controlled by our tolerance of change and our skill at learning new things.  Actually, change and learning new things are the same. If you change you learn new things and if you learn new things you change.

In general, there is a tight connection between creativity, tolerance, and learning.  It has been my goal, in retirement, to practice creativity, tolerance, and learning each day.  You see, I try to practice change each day.

Think about how things changed in the 30 years since I retired for the first time:  Changes in international travel, many corporate executives are now Mothers, same sex marriages out in the public, cell phones in every persons pocket, phone cameras with us all the time, growth in personnel finances, Zoom brings together communities of folks with similar interests from  all around the world,  internet, Uber, … Oh my .… it has been a fun 30 years for us that embraced the change. 

Now, researchers are helping Universities develop programs aimed at better preparing young people for creativity in their life and work in an increasingly changing economic and social environment.

These University programs define creativity as Five Habits of Mind:

1. Inquisitive

Exploring and Investigating

Challenging assumptions

2. Stick With It

Tolerating uncertainty

Daring to be different

3. Creative Imagination

Playing with possibilities

Using intuition freely

4. Disciplined Action

Developing new techniques

Reflecting critically

5. Work Together

Giving and receiving feedback

Cooperating – Sharing

 

Being in Corona lock-down gives us lots of time to create using our Mind’s 5 habits.   Yesterday, I even ordered my groceries, for the next 2 weeks, online and had them delivered to my doorstep!

Playing with PhotoShop is not new to me, but playing with PhotoShop to create abstract art is a change for me.  This week I’ve been thinking about abstract art by studying how the masters of art and great photographers use color and form.

FIRST:  Go see Dave Cesari beautiful photos from up north. TGO Photo Club – left column. The color and detail that Dave captured is beyond my description. Just look at his photos and enjoy them as much as I did.

THEN READ THIS:The cell phone has changed so many of us – we take photographs every day – at least I do.  

It influences how we communicate. Before cell phone photos, I had to verbally tell you of things that caught my attention, of things I loved to see, and of things I just wanted tell you about.

Now days my kids and I send text phone photos almost every day – a picture is worth a thousand words – Oh my who said that? And I just thought of this – Digital photos do not have Coronavirus germs on them – they are 100% safe..

Oh yes, with such ease to take photos – It has made each of us an artist.  Photography allows us to express ourselves through an art form. We notice a beautiful landscape,  a bird that is the same color as it’s food, or a gator hiding in the pond.  We want to capture each of them.  We are prompted to create something. The creation of an image makes us an artist.  It feels good.

Sometimes I take this thing called art creation a step further.  I start with a real photo and I create yet another image.  These new images just seem  to pop up on the computer screen in front of me.

That is a bunch of stuff/stories I wanted to tell you – It would have been difficult to do if I did not have my cell phone camera to make pictures to tell my story to you.