A Rainy Picnic and Chihuly

What a wonderful birthday I had!  A lovely breakfast with my two favorite people, then Zumba class, and then a fabulously fun[ny] picnic at Martha's beach under a tarp in the come-and-go rain with more of my favorite people.  I would have turned 30 years ago if I had known it would be this much fun!  :)

  

Blue Hawaiians :) 

To top it all off, we ended the day with a trip to the new Chihuly Glass museum at the Seattle Center.

In one word, it was amazing.  

In many words, it was like absolutely nothing I had ever experienced before.  You wander through these dark rooms, never really knowing what surprise is going to be around the next corner.  

Glass sculptures hang from the ceilings, or stand seemingly free form, as if they were growing up through the floor, spurned by light and color.  

There were moments in the exhibit where I felt as though I was staring at the inside of a jellyfish; as though I were inside of its tiny heart (do jellyfish have hearts?) watching it move and grow from the inside out.

There were other moments where it felt as though Tyler and I were these tiny pill bugs wandering through a garden, staring up at sprouting orchids and grass tufts and seed pods.

Other times I kind of got the impression that I was staring at this enlarged and frozen-in-time picture of what happens when you close your eyes tightly, with these happy and busy jolts of color streaming through the darkness in little wooden
rowboats.  

What an inspiration Chihuly is.  Did you know he studied architecture?  Did you know his mother was a gardener?  Well, I didn't.  But I love learning little tidbits about the lives of great artists--  you begin to see how the collision of so many far and reaching facets of life can all collide together in the brain to produce something so unimaginably beautiful and creative.  

And there is something about the glass that is particularly inspiring.  I think it's the way each instillation is made up of so very many little pieces.  And each little piece, you know, has been made separately using the lick of gravity and fire and motion.  Somehow, every little piece fits together.  

Well, folks will think what they will (there has been a lot of curmudgeonly uproar about the price tag of this new museum), but from where I stand, this exhibit was well worth every penny that was spent on it.  Not every city can claim a world-renound artist like Chihuly;  He has used the inspiration of our home, the Pacific Northwest and Puget Sound to create these works of beauty that have touched the lives of people across the globe.  From Jerusalem to Venice to San Francisco-- people have flocked to see his work.  And when you stand in the Glass Garden at night with the light from the space needle shining down like a giant birthday candle (appropriate :)--  it's  a bit hard to believe that it doesn't belong there.