Silence from one edge of the horizon to the other, here in the desert land of New Mexico. I’m three nights into six at a place where I can see the sky from edge to edge and it’s glorious.
Sunday Serenity
Sunday Serenity: New Morning
If 2020 has been the longest year ever (and it certainly feels like it), then the last week has been the longest week ever. Everyone’s been used to elections being called within hours of the polls closing, so it figured that 2020 would change things up and make us learn once again the values of patience and persistence.
At 11:25AM on Saturday, the AP declared Pennsylvania for Biden/Harris and suddenly, everything changed. I cried. I smiled, too, but mostly I cried, releasing a depth of tension I hadn’t let myself truly admit over the last four years. I felt hope that America has decided on a new direction.
Instead of divisive rhetoric, chants of “lock them up” and dog whistles of racism, last night I listened to a man and a woman with specific goals, with energy to tackle our biggest problems in American, and hope that we can do those things. But most of all, what I heard was that we’re not perfect by any means, but we ARE stronger together than we are divided.
So as we move forward into this new morning, let us figure out how to talk to each other again. Let’s figure out how to dismantle structural racism, provide decent health care for everyone, and truly make America the shining light of liberty and hope we all want it to be.
Sit down with friends, with neighbors, with people you don’t really know. Let’s talk AND listen and figure out how to fix things. Some of it is spending time, some of it is donating to causes that work for social justice and changes, and some of it is listening to others speak their truths.
It won’t be easy. It won’t be fast. And it definitely won’t be perfect. I don’t know how we’ll do all of it. What I do know is that I’m ready to begin.
Keep some room in your heart for the unimaginable.
Mary Oliver
Sunday Serenity: Reflections
I’ve been thinking about reflections, the theme of this week’s 52 Frames challenge. Part of me kept coming back to the more personal idea of reflecting on things, rather than seeing reflections in water or mirrors.
No one had this kind of 2020 in their plans, did we? Each of us had has to adapt to changing conditions and learn to live differently. If you’d asked me a year ago how many face masks I owned, I would have simply stared at you in confusion, not quite understanding the reason for the question. Ten months into 2020, I can answer it easily: four cloth masks and two boxes of disposable ones.
It’s not at all clear how the vast extent of changes in 2020 in will play out over time. It’s not just about remote working, video classrooms, or online grocery shopping. It’s about how we have already changed, individually and as a society of humans. It’s not at all clear what lies ahead of us.
So instead of submitting a pretty water reflection, I submitted this one. A small stream at low water and a boat ready to paddle should conditions change, it’s a visual metaphor for 2020. We’re experiencing a collective low tide right now, exposing divisions and fault lines in ourselves and others.
May we each reflect on where we are and how we’ve changed. Let us reflect on where we want to go, as individuals and together, as move into the uncertain future.
A rising tide lifts all boats.
John F. Kennedy
Sunday Serenity: Breathe
2020 has been what feels like a constant series of surprises, most of them not very pleasant for most of us. From lockdowns and border closings to always carrying a mask and missing out on museums and other indoor places where I’ve visited, it’s been a year unlike any other. Add in the runup to the Nov 3 US election, and it’s been stressing me out big-time. So today, join me as I retreat to my happy places.
Try taking three slow, deep breaths while you look at this image.
Now, three more. Breathe in the stillness, breathe out the turmoil in your soul.
Three more. See the colors, the textures, the beauty of this world with each breath.
Take care of your precious self in these precarious times.
If you want to use these or other photos as your screen background to help you unwind and relax, you can browse my smugmug gallery and download images for free, my ongoing gift to you. (Don’t click the Buy Photo button, look for the Download button instead, which may be on the left side or bottom, depending on your device or browser).
As long as you’re dancing, you can
break the rules.
Sometimes breaking the rules is just
extending the rules.
Sometimes there are no rules.
Mary Oliver
Sunday Serenity: Forest Walk
Yes, Sunday Serenity is back, starting off with a forest walk. With all that 2020 has going on, it seems like a good time to bring back a weekly time for reflection.
Let’s begin our walk. No cell phone, no TV, not even a hint of a news cycle. The only tweets are from the birds high up in these trees.
Breathe deep.
Let the forest soak into your lungs. The damp air is a welcome reprieve from short, anxious breaths and smoke-filled air.
Look down.
Let the forest fill your eyes. Notice the colors of the leaves starting to change. Time is passing even though the days and weeks seem longer than whatever normal used to be. The days are shorter, and the forest is steadily moving towards winter.
See the details.
Notice the beauty of these leaves. Their growing is all done for this year. Yet still they provide shape and color to the forest’s palette, highlighting the green that remains.
Step back.
Look out at the forest beyond the trail. It’s full of life: a darting deer, a chipmunk scurrying through the bushes, a cardinal darting from branch to branch.
Keep going.
Suddenly, the forest and trees give way to blue sky, white clouds, and mountains that go on forever. You feel so small and so young compared to the breadth and age of the view before you. Perspective is restored.
You take a deep breath as you turn in a circle, committing this view, this perspective to memory. And then, oh, so slowly, you begin the walk back home.
The fact that we live at the bottom of a deep gravity well, on the surface of a gas covered planet going around a nuclear fireball 90 million miles away and think this to be normal is obviously some indication of how skewed our perspective tends to be.
Sunday Serenity: Redwood Cathedral
There are sacred spaces built by humans: the ancient ruins at Stonehenge, the majesty of Chartres Cathedral in France, the great Pyramids of Giza. And then there is Earth’s cathedral: the soaring heights of trees in forest, creating a canopy of shelter lifted skyward by massive limbs and the trunks that support them.
Photographs cannot truly capture what it is like to walk among the California Redwoods, completely alone, the forest silent except for late-season birds and the sound of my footsteps meandering down the narrow dirt trail. I crane my neck up at every bend, the trees soaring so very high above me.
The golden gothic era of stone cathedrals, with their high, vaulted ceilings and expansive windows of stained glass were designed to direct the eyes upward to heaven. In the cathedral of redwoods, the tallest of the trees do the same.
I feel so small walking among them, looking upward to appreciate their true majesty and measure my true size on this planet. May the redwoods survive forever, a sacred space for me, for you, and for generations to come. Namaste, redwoods.
The redwoods, once seen, leave a mark or create a vision that stays with you always. No one has ever successfully painted or photographed a redwood tree. The feeling they produce is not transferable. From them comes silence and awe.
John Steinbeck
Travels with Charley: In Search of America
For millennia the two-million acre redwood ecosystem thrived and sheltered myriad species of life. In the last 150 years, 97 percent of the original redwood forests have been destroyed by timber corporations. … Big business cut-and-run logging operations have instilled a false dichotomy: jobs versus the environment.
Julia Hill
Church on the Water
I like the old stone cathedrals, and have visited almost every one standing in England over the last few decades. Standing in front of thick Norman columns, bathed in the light of tall panes of stained glass, or craning my neck to see the keystone in the arched ceilings always fills me with a sense of wonder that such things exist.
But it is hard to find cathedrals on a regular basis, especially in campgrounds. That’s where water comes in. And a kayak.
Paddling out on a quiet lake early in the morning, letting the rising sun warm me as life awakens all around me, that’s something else. The fish jump, the blue heron flies, the birds call to one another. I sit in the middle of it all, still and quiet.
It’s a time for reflection. Time to breathe. Time to be slow. Hear that still, small voice inside me that guides my path.
I paddle just far enough to be in my own peaceful place where I can leave the worries and anxieties of normal life behind me for a while. They sit on the shore waiting for me, but while I’m out here, they can’t touch me.
Being on the water, early morning, that’s my church.
A lake is a landscape’s most beautiful and expressive feature. It is Earth’s eye; looking into which the beholder measures the depth of his own nature
Henry David Thoreau
Sunday Serenity: Creativity
While in Denver, I spent time at one of my favorite places, the Art Museum. I was captivated by two exhibits in particular and how creative the artists were in the mediums they had selected.
First up is Jonathan Saiz, who made 10,000 tiny paintings…
and then assembled them into this large column that is magnificent to walk around. I slid closer, then stood back, and watch patterns emerge with each movement.
It is a huge piece so here’s the scale of it, thanks to a few visitors on the left side.
Each of the 10,000 tiny pieces of art is a beautiful work of art in itself. There are recurring themes, like water and ladybugs, and the colors change and flow like air and water over the earth. Fittingly, the project is titled #WhatIsUtopia and visitors are asked to find tiles that match their idea of utopia and post them to social media.
When the exhibit is over, he plans to break the big cylinder apart and distribute the 10,000 little pieces to 10,000 people. I don’t know when or how but I would love to have one tiny piece of this beautiful thing.
The second piece stunned me with the curves and shapes, as though it was rippling in the wind instead of being fastened to a wall inside the museum, The artist, El Anatsui, from Ghana, designed this piece to flex with each installation, the light changing how the piece is seen, different in each place. It’s beautiful and I couldn’t take my eyes off it.
And here comes the most amazing thing about it: it’s all made of discarded liquor-bottle caps and copper wire. Found, flattened, then bend into shapes, sorted by colors, and stitched together this most amazing piece, which is titled Rain Has No Father? for reasons I can’t fathom. Forget the name, though, the creativity here is just stunning.
After seeing how both artists took simple ideas and shapes and made them into amazing and beautiful pieces of art, I am renewed and inspired to keep going in my own art.
What inspires you? How do you express your creativity?
Passion is one great force that unleashes creativity, because if you’re passionate about something, then you’re more willing to take risks.
Yo-Yo Ma
(Post written while listening to Yo-Yo Ma’s Simply Baroque album)
Sunday Serenity: Looking Closer
One of my favorite things about hiking is the invitation to focus on individual elements of the environment around me. It’s easier, at least to me, to see the big picture: the sunset horizon, the canopy of trees overhead. I might lose myself in thought as I walk, barely noticing the rocks and roots my feet are stepping over. When I slow down and look-really look-around, I see small delights everywhere.
The forest is dense with life here in the South. From ivy climbing up trees to a flock of wild turkeys, there’s almost too much to see. I stopped and took the time to really look at this branch, with new leaves, after a cloudburst that drenched everything in its path.
On a windswept beach in South Carolina, someone had placed this weathered and broken shell in the crack of a driftwood log. The two were a perfect fit: old and broken in different ways, combining to form a small artwork a beach variation on the Japanese art of wabi-sabi.
The flowers are blooming everywhere, it seems, and at times, the mass of them overwhelm me. How do I capture the riotous blooms of Spring in the South? I moved in closer and saw the delicate lines and petals of each individual blossom.
The more time I spend among forest and trees, by salt water and sand, the less I want to be in a city. I’m finding my new place in this world and it’s less urban than ever: I grew up in LA and I’ve lived in Manhattan, Boston, and Seattle. Maybe it’s time to stay out of the big hotspots and spend time in the smaller, calmer places.
I don’t know where this path will lead, but, honestly, I’ve never known five steps ahead in my life. For now, I’ll keep slowing down and taking a closer look at wherever I am, trying to look around more than I look forward to the next thing.
Slow down and enjoy life. It’s not only the scenery you miss by going to fast – you also miss the sense of where you are going and why.
Eddie Cantor
Sunday Serenity: Light
Light can mean so many things: lighten your load, lighten up, see the light, light-headed, light-hearted, light a fire under someone, and so on. It wasn’t till I spent time in the South that I realized that the light has another meaning: a lush, soft illumination that feels distinctly Southern.
Maybe it’s the moisture in the air, or the fact there there is so much water everywhere: lakes, rivers, streams, and that stuff that falls from the sky. A lot. (As I write this, I’m in the middle of an afternoon-long tornado watch, so rain is on my mind.)
Reflections are one of the ways I love to play with light and water together. It’s constantly different, the view changing from minute to minute as the sun and clouds play a game of tag in the sky over my head.
As Spring comes to the South, I find myself peeking at the sun through bright green leaves and tall trees. The light does indeed dapple the leaves, as I’d read about in storybooks when I was a kid.
At the end of the day, the light slowly fades, signaling time to stop working on whatever has my attention. I try to remember to look – to really see – the golden hour, the sunset, and then the blue hour. I watch the last of the light fade into night. I breathe slowly and think through my day: good things, hard moments, and things accomplished.
Sometimes, the end of day reflection shows that not much went as planned. Kind of like my yesterday. I spent the entire day fighting an infestation of ants in my trailer. Instead of relaxing, I made a run into town for ant killer items, then came back and cleared out three of the four storage areas of my trailer, killed 99.5% of the ants, and then reassembled everything so that I could make dinner and have a place to sleep.
I was too tired to go out and try for a daily photo, so I just downloaded what I had in my camera, not really remembering everything I’d shot last week. Despite all the pretty blues and greens in most of the photos, this stark monochrome image caught my eye.
This shot was way overexposed (the Minolta lens I was using doesn’t have auto-exposure) but I actually liked how it turned out. It reminded me that even hard days and harsh light have their uses: my trailer is now really clean, and this image made it onto my website.
When you look on the bright side, you’re acknowledging that there is a dark side at which you are choosing not to gaze.
Srikumar Rao