Regeneration

This weekend we had a brief trip to the country so we could go on an informative walk led by a knowledgable local, looking at the use and abuse of water in our local area. Goldmining from the 1850s to the 1930s had made great changes to the landscape, not all positive, but what we saw on the walk was nature's regeneration of the land since mining stopped.

That was very interesting and worthwhile, but the highlight of the weekend was seeing our dam with quite a considerable amount of water in it, plus the usually dry creek behind our property not only had water in it but was flowing! Unfortunately I forgot my camera, but I'm sure you can picture it. And all the green around the place was a sight for sore eyes. We could hardly stop looking at it. Regeneration of the dam and land.

I wanted to get back to Melbourne by 3 on Sunday for a talk at the State Library. It was the last in a series on artists books, and this one had 3 artists talk about how they alter books and why. Most intriguing! For those of you who don't know what an altered book is, for an example picture a book with an interesting shape carved out of the cover and through at least half the pages. Beautiful! More info here. Btw, these books would have been thrown out and pulped anyway, and even the librarian in me would not be offended at this. As one artist said, it is like giving a book a new life. Regeneration of the book.

I felt regenerated from that weekend.