My friends and family are well aware that I am a project person. This BLOG is a project that began in the last couple of days of 2006.  The BLOG project plaited together two or more other projects that had begun many years before that. One was a photography commitment which began January 1, 1987, when a friend suggested that I take a picture every day in the new year to go with my daily journal writing.  In the summer of 1987 Margaret and I relocated from New York to San Diego.  At the end of that year, I wasn’t ready to stop doing the photo du jour.  I’ve always taken more than one picture every day, but one of them is designated THE picture for the day. Last week’s project gave me a new appreciation for the camera in my mobile phone. With the old snobbery dissipated about the superiority of SLRs, yesterday I was casting around for a new project.  Before I heard the news out of Boston, I had thought I would begin to think about and write about what it means to be an American and to what extent I am defined by who my birth certificate and my passport say that I am.  I didn’t have a plan, but I knew that what I had in mind would be a long term project, not something that I’d accomplish with one day’s thinking and writing... or perhaps even in a week or a month... or a year  I thought I’d develop a strategy which would lead me down a path that might bring me to a door through which I would pass and find a clearer understanding of who I am and what it means for me to be who I am. The project will keep me thinking... even though I’m not at all certain I will post all my writing on the BLOG. They are not the horrific kinds of explosions that happened in Boston yesterday, but my thoughts, especially on the subjects of politics and religion, are sometimes expostulations unsettling even to me.

I’m not quite ready to begin.  The Boston incident unsettled me.  Notes from trusted, very dear, long-time friends about my BLOG pictures and writing yesterday have changed my mood... brightened my spirits.  I am reminded of my favorite Robert Frost poem.  It is short ... just one sentence... impossibly simple and complex at the same time, which he wrote after the death of his young daughter in the middle of a cold winter night on a Vermont farm.

The Dust of Snow

The way a crow

Shook down on me

The dust of snow

From a hemlock tree

Has given my heart

A change of mood

And saved some part

Of a day I had rued.

All of the photos today were taken with my cell phone.  I've seen the color markings in the first one every day when I cross a street coming home from my bike ride. They jumped out and grabbed my attention today.  The solitary little weed that defies reason by growing out of a crack in concrete is the subject of a very a special landscape. I like it and the three palm bark images in black and white.