Mayfield Park, Austin, Texas: last autumn:

When I first started sketching on my walks, I simply took a pencil and a notebook.  These images are from a walk at Mayfield Park last November.  I remember it being a crisp day, cool and sunny.  I found a group of ducks where the path dropped down to the river.  I watched them for a while before ambling along the shore through the dense trees until I came to a place where the tree canopies sparkled with an assortment of small birds:  sparrows, cardinals, and tiny flycatchers with their green tops and yellow underbellies.  The cardinals called to one another until a rowdy couple of squirrels leaped through the tree tops and ran them off.

I had the whole park to myself and stayed a long time.  I took a small snack, but forgot to eat it.  I sat on a large rock that commanded a bluff at the back of the park.  I sat there and read for a while and wondered how I could spend my days doing this instead of doing the things I normally do.  The life-gurus that write pop self-help and career books always say we should identify the things we love to do, then figure out how to make a living doing them.  Ok, so how do I make a living reading in the woods and writing random thoughts next to my sketches in a journal?