I am a much better swimmer in my nightly dreams than in real life. In a pool or natural body of water, I am clumsy, get water up my nose and battle a fair dose of fear.  In my dreams however, swimming is effortless and I move with weightless ease.  I swim across borders, glide through continents, past mountains, treasures, crumbling buildings, and strange animals. I am as skillful as a sea creature. The journey is endlessly fascinating and delightful and I sleep contently.  So in waking hours, I find myself drawn to aquatic imagery again and again.

I started this series thinking about swimmers and swimming.  And as I often do, I used fragments of old books.  This led to the serendipitous discovery that an unnoticed piece from an antique book that I’d affixed to some work held the lines: “distant lands” and “long winded tales”.   Sometimes tossing a pebble at random produces just the right notes for a melody or a clue to what apparently was missing.   To honor those unexpected results, this series has become “Long winded tales from distant lands”.