Surfacing

This pond lily grew all night and broke the surface this morning.  I bought it at a nursery and submerged it in my fish pond, which I spent Saturday cleaning out and getting ready for the summer.  My previous pond lily didn’t make it through the winter.  All week I have watched this new one reach for the sun.

It is difficult to draw things which exist in two media: how to differentiate what is submerged from what is emergent?  How to depict the sheer wonder of that bifurcated existence?  This occupied me for the length of time it took to do the sketch.

I am reminded of William Stafford’s poem “Connections”: