A new moon starts this new year.  The first day of the new year is always so shocking, one can't quite believe that another year is over, a new number must be written.  It is like the first day of school, when all your books are beautiful and waiting for your thoughts, everything you will learn, there are no mistakes yet, no attempts at erasing, nothing crossed out, nothing judged.

We found the gym closed this morning so I went on a lovely cold ramble through the glittering meadows, with my ghost-dog Molly, where I marvelled at the frozen pond, surprised two white-tailed deer who fled leaping and bouncing across the crackled-icysnow field, and then met a host of bright piping robins popping off red berries against a blue-and-white sky.

Each day I will choose (in no particular order) two noteworthy things to write about and illustrate, one man-made, the other natural.
Today, the first choice is a tree. Well, trees. Matthew, who studies Biology, told me that a tree technically makes itself out of air.  

My dad's father, my Gramp of the twinkly sky-blue eyes which live on in my son, his great-grandson, lived in England.  Because we lived continents apart, I didn't really know him very well, but loved the fact that he never went to church with my grandmother, and once told my father that his god was the god of nature and the earth, of plants, of swallows nesting under the eaves, and quoted Dorothy Frances Gurney's poem as his life's philosophy:



The kiss of the sun for pardon,
The song of the birds for mirth,--
One is nearer God's heart in a garden
Than anywhere else on earth. 

The man-made object is a window.  Recently I spent a day cleaning out my room, (needs much longer than a day, I discovered) and found the notes for a presentation I made on Visual Literacy at a Linguistics Seminar in 2000.   
To quote from this talk: 
"When I was an art student I was obsessed with paintings of interiors with windows.  I love windows, the idea of them and the visual aesthetics of them, the fact that there is always a view from a window, even if it is just another wall, with perhaps another window.  

I think that life is like the room you are in, and education is the window opening, the sun coming in, the sight of far vistas, the feel of the breeze on your forehead.  It is something more than what you experience in the room before opening the window.  As a teacher I would like to believe I am an opener of windows." 

This is one of the paintings I did at Art School decades ago, which lives now in my dear friend Maureen's house in Australia.