Ranch Ramblings: Day Two

Guess who got a buffalo skin rug in her cabin today?  I'm still not sure how I feel about standing on a buffalo's dead back hide.  Run to the Hills by Iron Maiden immediately ran through my head.

I couldn't sleep last night, I was too excited for the morning to come.  And man did the start of the day deliver - literally -  the ranch manager delivered eggs and a pound of ground buffalo meat.  Uh…yes please.  

I took a few walks, began a few abandoned attempts to make work, and tried to take a few naps.  I'm overstimulated and having a bit of difficulty channeling it.  I've been most focused when exploring and taking photographs so I'm going to stick with that for the time being.

Nature is perfect.  It has already set the bar for greatness.  Attempting to recreate it while smack dab in the middle of it is impossible.  I don't want to regurgitate the hickory nut I saw on a walk to a sheet of paper or canvas, for example, because a hickory nut has already been created to perfection.  (Weird choice of words but I mean that last line both literally and figuratively.)  Now, how would I, Layla, translate a hickory nut?

It was only fitting that I read this line before hitting the hay, "…nature is a chaos of forms and colors and shapes and forces, and the various ways in which that chaos has been untangled and made legible should never be taken as nature's truth but rather as nature's possibility within a human imaginary."  The Breathless Zoo by Rachel Poliquin

Here is some stuff I've been working on...

So, of all the things here at the ranch I've become most enamored by purple thistle.  There is a small field by the cabins that is filled to the brim with the stuff and it's going to be mowed down in the next couple of days so I decided to make a thistle bouquet and have a photo shoot.  It was beautiful.  It was painful.  Oh yeah, I'm officially obsessed with my camera.

I've dragged almost all of the surrounding nature stuff into my cabin.  It's pretty much like living outside but with a really comfy bed and fridge.  Above is a study of one of my roommates.