For one Christmas soon after we moved to my husband Jim’s ideal home, over the course of many weeks I painted for him a large bowl. On the underside is a deep green-blue sea filled with cetaceans (I would not know my porpoises from my whales without having been educated by my children when they were young) and anglerfish, seaweed and coral.
Inside the bowl is a dove-topped ark crammed with pairs of animals no doubt ready to start families of their own.
Circling the rim is a snippet of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ode to the sea:
The Sun’s rim dips; the stars rush out:
At one stride comes the dark;
With far-heard whisper, o’er the sea,
Off shot the spectre-bark.
Today I happened across another Coleridge poem that poetically dovetails with the sentiment I tried to express about now taking in the world for both of us–both the natural world and events which inexorably go on.
Love in the Spaces 
