Momentum is a funny thing.  The tendency of an object at rest to stay rest often feels overwhelming when that object is me.  Conversely, once I start moving, momentum carries me away, often making it hard for me to return.

On Sunday afternoon, curled on the couch and disappointed that I hadn’t been able to actually nap, the thought of putting on my coat and boots, packing up my gear and heading outside to shoot seemed just silly.

But, between the motion of my husband (is motion contagious?) and my need to have photos to post for the next week and a half, I managed to get up and get myself and Tisen ready for the park.

I liken the feeling of steeling myself to unwrap from a blanket and step into the cold to the feeling of preparing to jump into a pool.

I love to swim.  Moving through the water feels like being home.  The feeling of being buoyed up makes me feel weightless.  I’m not fast, but I re-learned how to swim when I undertook triathlons about a dozen years ago.  In the process, I found a relaxed, meditative way of moving through the water that I could sustain well beyond the time I had to swim.  In fact, I often ran late getting out of the pool because I was enjoying being in the water so much.

None-the-less, even now, just sitting here thinking about how much I like to swim, the thought of going out into the night and taking that initial step into the cold water makes me recoil.  There’s something shocking about going from being warm and dry to being suddenly immersed in water that feels like an ice bath (even when it’s actually a little too warm for swimming laps).  It takes a little extra push to move momentum from rest to motion when I feel like I’m about to jump in the pool.

But having made the leap and gotten myself and Tisen out the door, I was soon kneeling on a garbage bag in the mud finding interesting things I’d never seen before.  Once I got started I didn’t want to stop.  The image above is the last image I shot that day.  It was shot after I got the call from my husband that he was making dinner.  I had already collapsed my tripod and put the lens cap back on, determined to head straight home when I saw this plant.

I don’t know what it is.  I don’t know if the image was worth being late to dinner for, but I was perplexed by the arrangement of the dried stems (or were they shriveled petals?) laced with the silk of milkweed.  At least it looks like milkweed.  There are apparently many, many varieties of milkweed, so it seems reasonable this might be one.

The tones of reddish brown intermittent with the silk against the green grasses in the background just caught my eye.