"The universe is always speaking to us...sending us little messages, causing coincidences and serendipities, reminding us to stop, to look around, to believe in something else, something more."
― Nancy Thayer
hops
The light takes my breath away, and the dog makes me laugh. We eat from the garden and I clip flowers to bring inside.
tomato season
crocrosmia
stop by for breakfast
a good roll in the grass
“What I love about Black & White photographs is that they’re more like reading the book than seeing the movie.”
— Jennifer Price
Morning shadows and light.
“Sometimes we just have to cut off the dead branches in our life. Sometimes that's the only way we can keep the tree alive. It's hard and it hurts, but it's what's best.”
― Nicole Williams, Lost & Found
I do a little dance around this hydrangea in my garden, as I feared I had lost it to the unusual bitter cold weather of last year’s winter. Come spring I had to prune several dead branches out, leaving the middle a bit bare and the bush a bit lopsided.
But the bush is flourishing, and once again I learn something about myself thorough my garden. I see where there are dead and unwanted branches in my life too, and I set out to remove them. Along the way I prune some things back, allowing for new growth in new directions. It is a bit uncomfortable, but who knows, I just might bloom.
As far as what I do love, I love birds; I love lavender.
- Michael Moore
I find a couple of house finches in the lavender bushes last night after dinner. I follow suit, picking some to put on my bedside table.
“Sunday is a good day to save the world in one’s pajamas.”
— Adrienne Posey
hollyhock
clematis
wild sweet pea
There are times when the characteristics of the teacher inside of me causes me to put up roadblocks, even though I have been out of the classroom for 12 years. I want things to have an order, a flow, a plan. It is hard for me to start something mid week, mid month or mid year, after all the year has seasons, months, and days of the week for a purpose. So when I decided to start a somewhat loose 365/daily photo project mid-June, on a Tuesday, it was uncomfortable.
I had no “lesson plan” in place, no rules, no firm idea where it would lead, all I knew for sure was that I wanted (and needed) to change things up a bit. It was sort of a last ditch effort, for in the back of my mind there was this possibility that if something didn’t change I was going to just slip my cameras into the storage bench, where I keep my photo gear, close the lid, and walk away and not look back. But so far, it feels right.
The flow of how, where, and why of this “project” seems unnecessary to me now and I wake with no agenda other than to take a photo of some kind during the day. Slowly over these beautiful summer days, things have worked themselves out and there is an ease once again, to this creative passion I need to nurture.
summer dance
after dinner wine
wild sweet pea
unfolding
“And so with the sunshine and the great bursts of leaves growing on the trees, just as things grow in fast movies, I had that familiar conviction that life was beginning over again with the summer.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald
"Summer was our best season: it was sleeping on the back screened porch in cots, or trying to sleep in the tree house; summer was everything good to eat; it was a thousand colors in a parched landscape..."
― Harper Lee
I take my camera out after dinner hoping to get some photos of the birds, who are usually flocking to the feeder this time most nights. I sit patiently, enjoying the cool breeze coming up off the lake, but grow board and start moving my camera around a bit, happy when I landed on this light on the maple.
Every season is the best season, and right now summer is at her peak.