A World Unlike My Own: An Introduction

I'm really bad about anniversaries, have a hard time remember my own, plus birthdays, well other than my daughters, cause I was kind of an active participant. I was curious and looking back, this blog has been running since June of 2006, that's over seven years, I think, I counted on my fingers.

Of all the people who follow it, I've only met one person that I did not know before, through Her blog..

Jill Bergman makes the most adorable colored linecut prints of cute dump trucks, adorable kids, birds and the scenery around her home in Steamboat Springs, Colorado. I got to met up with Jill and her husband while they were on a vacation in the Four Corners and love to see her at the annual SCBWI conference in LA, though she did not get there last year, entering the thrilling and exhausting world of motherhood!

Now, I see, she is back at posting fun things on her blog and finding time to make some art! Meeting her, after getting to know her through our blogs- commenting back and forth- was a real perk, but most of the people following this blog, live much, much farther away then a few hundred miles and have yet to invite me to lunch, but here is hoping!

I am still amazed I have blog followers from all over the world- Finland to Turkey, England to Australia and other then Jill and those I am related to, I have never met any of them. I hope they follow this blog, not to even out the score because I posted something on theirs, but because for the simple reason what I wrote, my photographs or art moved them, it is what artist hope for.


I have never asked why, I'm guessing. I just know it's the reason I read theirs, to see some amazing art and to see a bit of the world, that is so unlike mine.

It is also the reason I write a blog centered on the Four Corners, because this place, sitting on top of the Colorado Plateau, where the Colorado river and all its tributaries cut through the red rock to make canyons that go down is not where I grew up. I grew up farther north where canyons went up between hills and mountains.

I won't speak for others, but I am inspired to write this blog and make the art I do...

 because I am really a stranger in a strange land, amazed by the people and places around me. I just can't believe I have been writing Moonflower Musing for as long as seven years!

In the next few blogs, I intend to highlight some more of my favorite bloggers, who are all not artists by trade, but who have done a wonderful job bringing a bit of their world to us through blogging and tweeting, something new I have ventured into. What do these blogger and.....what do you call a person who tweets.... have in common, well, the worlds they have so graciously shared online, have moved me in some way, so I guess they actually are all artists.

IF: Secret

This secret place is called Lost Park, off of Highway 285 cutting through the mountains, in the middle of Colorado, headed towards Denver. This isn't an actually representation of me and Jon, it is more a combination of memories, of when we lived up there while he went to grad school.
It's where, leaning against the back of his truck, he asked me to marry him and we took many a weekend drive to get away from the big city.
I remember one in particular, after circling South Park, actually the real one, which did  inspire the horrid comic series, which my daughters love, apparently  the authors of it grew up in Fairplay, a town nearby.
But the real one, is a great wind swept valley, with rounded hills in every direction encircling it and we had spent the day driving and driving, assuming we could pop out on the other side of the park and meet back up with the main road.
Rain came and it started to get dark and almost to the main road, we hit a gate, a gate with skulls and more then one spray painted "do not trespass" pictures of guns, we sat there a long time and debated- seeing the headlights in the distance marking Highway 285 in the distance.... then we turned around and in the dark, went back the way we had come, it was a long, long night getting back home!