this morning

"I've always thought my flowers had souls."
- Myrtle Reed

I have the morning to myself. This doesn’t happen very often any more and I enjoy the silence. I water the garden, thin the carrots, and play around some with my camera. I spend time online, looking up odds and ends that I have had sitting on the back burner for some time.

I picked the first sweet peas a few days back, and relished in the delicate blooms on this beautiful clematis after watering this morning. Yep, I do think my flowers have souls.

inspired

Way back in the day, I took a few classes from Kim Klassen. She is a beautiful soul, full of all kinds of creative inspiration and artistic ideas. Lately I have been visiting her site daily, coming away with some motivation and spark to try some new things. Check her site out for some inspiration of your own.

Slow it down more, come closer still. A dot appears, like a flesh-flake. It swells like a balloon; it moves, circles, slows, and vanishes. This is your life.”

― Annie Dillard, Pilgrim at Tinker Creek

it just comes

“I'd been afraid I'd somehow been giving a life I hadn't deserved, but that's ridiculous. We don't deserve anything - not the suffering and not the golden light. It just comes.”

― Ann Patchett, These Precious Days: Essays

The bridge between beauty and heartache is constantly shifting. I stand in the middle, edging ever so slightly in one direction or the other, until I find myself planted firmly in light or darkness. Lately lightness prevails, even as uncertainty about what the future may hold grows within me. I don’t scold myself or try and second guess my actions or emotions, but rather seem to be able to sit with both, and find lessons and value in each of them.

I have found my voice and my worth, both arriving unexpectedly, out of the blue. It is not something I deserve, nor do I feel privileged or special. If truth be told I think it has to do with age. With age has come the sheer understanding that life is full of suffering and golden light, that we learn from both and within the compounds of our life, will encounter both.

The only thing we can do is care for ourselves and for others, while opening not only our hearts, but also our minds, with compassion.

“We speak of ourselves as being blessed, but what can that mean except that others are not blessed, and that God has picked out a few of us to love more? It is our responsibility to care for one another, to create fairness in the face of unfairness and find equality where none may have existed in the past.”

- Ann Patchett, These Precious Days

time well spent

“What you produce is not necessarily always sacred, I realized, just because you think it’s sacred. What is sacred is the time that you spend working on the project, and what that time does to expand your imagination, and what that expanded imagination does to transform your life.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

I spent a few hours one morning culling photos from the past few months. Some I moved to the cloud for safe keeping, others I moved to an external hard drive, in kin to the boxes under my bed which contain thousands of snapshots from when I shot film. What surprised me however was how many I just deleted.

I found a sort of desperation in so many of them, as if I was searching for anything to turn my camera on, pursuing anything that I thought might move me. It made me sad at first, so sad I considered keeping some of them and putting them into a book and calling it In Desperation, or maybe Agony, or better yet - What Was She Thinking. But the more I have thought about it over the past few days, I can see these past few months for what they were, damn hard. I am thankful I had the intuitiveness to keep at it, to spend my time searching for anything that might ease some of the aguish I was feeling. As I said a few post back, I wake now with a sense of purpose and anticipation and a better understanding of how to move forward in my life.

“Whatever you do, try not to dwell too long on your failures. You don’t need to conduct autopsies on your disasters.”

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear


this was June

The garden slowly comes alive in June. I thin the carrots and we eat greens and lettuce thinnings for dinner. Percy picks his first strawberries and loves playing outside. Our walks each Tuesday are the saving grace to my week lately - hunting down the garbage trucks and looking for cats help keep my mind off the news. There is a calmness found among the alleys and sidewalks we venture through, watching life move forward as people work in the their yards, walk their dogs, and smile at us, saying “hi” as we pass by.

It all helps give me hope.


“Look, I want to love this
world as though it's the
last chance I'm ever
going to get
to be alive
and know it.”

― Mary Oliver

fun with diptychs

“The absence of limitations is the enemy of art.”
― Orson Welles

I have had lots of fun creating diptychs over the past ten days or so. Limiting myself to photos that try to tell a narrative story, I have found a myself looking more closely at color pallets, and how I might capture a particular subject. I have discovered tiny details that I might have overlooked before and had fun staging some.

I limited myself to one lens, my 50mm, and shot them all in color.

Like I said in a few post back, I made a list. . .