the view out the window

“I don't sit around waiting for passion to strike me. I keep working steadily, because I believe it is our privilege as humans to keep making things.
Most of all, I keep working because I trust that creativity is always trying to find me, even when I have lost sight of it.” 

― Elizabeth Gilbert, Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear

the view out the window
lensbaby sol 45

I spend time culling the archives of this space. Reading past posts that go back some ten years. As I travel down memory lane I delete many of them. I read post after post where I have rambled on and on about how I am going to work on this or that. Mostly trying different means and resources to ward off the depression that surfaces without much warning. The list is impressive, and I give myself a pat on the back for not giving up.

I notice how my photography has morphed and changed over the years. Having never really settled into a certain genre, I see the whole of my life in these old posts. The misspelled words and bad editing jump out at me often, but within those words I am transported back in time, once again finding the whole of my life. In the beginning I was driven by my need to share, both here and on social media but today, that drive is over. Wanting to just have a space where some of my photos can live, paired with a few words is the only intention I have now.

If someone were to ask me if I was aiming to be a writer or a photographer, I would not know how to answer. My editing skills, along with my knowledge about the settings on my cameras, are at best mediocre. But doing both of these things make me feel alive, and that in itself is worth noting.

***

I took these photos a few days back on a morning spent with Percy. The rain poured down, keeping us inside his house playing. Suddenly the wind picked the chairs up out front and blew them around as the two of us sat on the couch watching. I had just bought a new lens and had brought it along hoping to play around some with it. As I dug it out, I watched him follow suit.

“The old woman paid no attention to the camellia until that morning, when a fleck of pink caught her eye. The single saucer-size blossom was more magnificent than she could ever have imagined. More beautiful than any rose she'd ever seen, it swayed in the morning breeze with such an air of royalty, the old woman felt the urge to curtsey in its presence.” 

― Sarah Jio, The Last Camellia

***

I spy the blooms as we are driving down their driveway on our way home. Five acres of trees, a beautiful garden, their home, and flowers tucked in here and there. I tell him to stop and I hop out and pick this stem, knowing I don’t need to ask permission. I bring it home and place it in the tiny vase, for I am a sucker for tiny vases. One lone flower alone in a vase that shows off every detail, no other flowers to compete with its delicate beauty. I dig out my camera and spend time with the bloom and its waxy leaves and let the calm wash over me, understanding this is what moves me. These are the moments that make up my story.

Their season is way to short for my liking.

“There is no closed figure in nature. Every shape participates with another. No one thing is independent of another, and one thing rhymes with another, and light gives them shape.” 

― Henri Cartier-Bresson

The lilac tree is getting ready to bloom.

 

“It is spring again. The earth is like a child that knows poems by heart.” 
― Rainer Maria Rilke

 

I bob and weave my way in and out of the weeping cherry in our front yard. There is a light breeze coming through the branches, moving the blossoms every so slightly and I wonder if there will be anything in focus. I am pleased when I upload the photos, finding a few that make my heart sputter.

“To photograph: it is to put on the same line of sight the head, the eye and the heart.” 

― Henri Cartier-Bresson

It poured rain, making me ache for sunshine and a ray of warmth.
But then the day came when I woke to sun.
And while it was wonderful, something was missing.
Has my last ray of hope given up on me too?

“I am more modest now, but I still think that one of the pleasantest of all emotions is to know that I, I with my brain and my hands, have nourished my beloved few,
that I have concocted a stew or a story, a rarity or a plain dish, to sustain them truly against the hungers of the world.” 

― M.F.K. Fisher

Even though I don’t relish cooking like I use to, I still think beans are one of the most beautiful foods one can serve.

“If you have two loaves of bread, keep one to nourish the body, but sell the other to buy hyacinths for the soul.”
- Herodotus.

A memory . . .


The small hillside leading to the lower yard in our old house was covered with grape hyacinths each spring. One day come spring, I would hear my three boys run up the stairs to the deck and burst into the kitchen, hands behind their backs. I would then know they had noticed the hyacinths were in bloom. They would each hold out a hand and present me with a beautiful bouquet. The stems would be varied in size and sometimes hard to emerge in water, and the bouquet often included a few yellow dandelions added for color.

This was back in the day when my friend and I threw house parties of all kinds, someone would come and set up displays of candles, or maybe bakeware, and one of my friends had a crystal party. The only crystal I owned was a candy dish an aunt had sent me when I got married and I had never used it. But I bought three, tiny, beautiful crystal vases at that party in anticipation of the beautiful bouquets my sons would bring to me throughout their childhoods. I still have two of those vases and they have served me well over the years.

Today I have no idea where that candy dish is.