Life Cycle

An idea for a picture popped into my head as I was leaving work on Friday. I worked on it all weekend. It took a combination of four pictures including the background and some fancy fiddling around in Painter but I am very happy with the results. I am calling the picture "Life Cycles."

I became interested in Astronomy at a very young age and took a course at our local college when the chance came up. I watched Carl Sagan's "Cosmos" series and loved it. I have read and studied many different astronomers. I am fascinated by the life cycle of stars and how they form, live their lives, and die and in death often provide the material for new stars to form. The picture represents the three stages in a planets life; that as a new planet to life, a planet enjoying it's middle age and finally a planet whose sun is going nova drying up the oceans and gradually robbing it of all life.

Our own lives often go through cycles. My niece went through the joys of love, marriage, children, and then at the end divorce. She has recently married for a second time to a wonderful man. From the ashes of her pain she grew into a very strong young woman who will be a wonderful wife to her new husband.

In my own life I too knew happiness, marriage, and then divorce. From my pain I have grown into a very strong woman. I have also grown as an artist. Over the weekend I redid a couple of my older pictures. As I learn to use this computer tool I realized that I could improve on some pictures that I did when I was first starting out. I had limited myself in my thinking that I couldn't go back and redo something. I realized that there was nothing stopping me from making changes to my own artwork. I realized that the original concepts were still good but that I could make the improvements I wanted to make the picture more like I wanted it to be at this point in time.

I watched over my mother this weekend. She is sick with another infection. She gets tired so easily now. I try to do everything I can to make things easier for her but she is still too stubborn to take it as easy as she should. She is in the twilight of her years and with her 80th birthday coming up and with a bad heart it is doubtful how many more years she will have left. For her though the thought of death is not frightening. She believes in a life in the here after and that she will join my Dad and her family who has gone before her. She is a very spiritual woman. I feel sorry for people who no longer believe in God and that there is life after death. It is knowing that you will be able to see your loved ones again that gives you the serenity to face your life.