Sunday Serenity

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.

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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.

Douglas Adams

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? 

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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)

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. 

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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

Energy is definitely one of those things that flows both ways with me. Last weekend, I was full of energy, sparked in large part by being at a retreat with generous and intelligent women writers. I left there Monday, my head full of ideas and my heart full of support and kindness. 

This weekend, I’m mellowing out. I’m currently sitting outside under grey skies that threaten to spit a bit of rain on me, but I’m not moving till it happens. I can hear the birds better out here, from the raucous crows to the sweet trills of that unknown bird just off my right side. I’m a bit chilly; I could put on socks and shoes, but my feet are still enjoying the freedom that yesterday’s warm sun promised them. I know soon that rain will show up and I’ll retreat inside to the dry warmth of my tiny trailer and listen to raindrops on the roof as I make a cup of hot tea. 

I learned early on in this full-timer gig that every day can’t be a tourist day, seeing things, going places, doing stuff. For every day that I’m an explorer of new places, I am an introvert hanging out near my trailer. For every weekend that I’m full-on active and engaged, there’s a weekend of sleeping in, reading books, and having toast for dinner. 

I suppose it’s just coincidence that my astrological sign is Libra, the balance scales. Like those scales, I bend far to one side, then the other, until I find my balance. Energy up, energy down, it all works out in the end. 

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Life is a dance with the universal flow. 

Maria Erving

It’s been a difficult few months for me, seeing so much pain and sorrow in civil rights exhibits and reading more of the same in histories, biographies, and in essays and books. I’ve immersed myself in hard truths about our country, our history, and, in the end, about myself and my white privilege and inherent racism. It’s work I needed to do and work I need to continue doing. As Fannie Lou Hamer stated, Nobody is free until everybody is free.

I realized yesterday, though, that I need to take a break and do something different to balance things out. To balance me out. (And, yes, I realize as a result of all this work I’ve done that being able to “take a break” from learning about and confronting racism is white privilege in action.)

I pulled out my huge book on the photographer Sally Mann (it’s a coffee-table book that must weigh 10 pounds). I read some and looked at her images, and once again, got inspired by her work. I took out Sony camera and the decades-old Minolta lens — such heavy glass that makes such beautiful softness — and went outside to the bare branches and bleak sky of an early spring afternoon in northern Alabama.

I took some quick shots, maybe ten minutes in total, then went back inside. I lost myself in post-processing, not even realizing that the sun had sunk below the hills and evening had come.

I’ve been absorbing so much information the last few months and I am not yet sure how to process it or if anything public will come out of it. I’ve not posted much about it because I haven’t figured out what to say or how. One side effect, I realized this week, is that I hadn’t been creating very much, and that’s where I find my passion on a regular basis. The few hours at Sloss Furnaces became the start of remembering how much joy I get out of doing a photo shoot and then writing and publishing it here.

I’m heading up to Virginia for a women’s writing retreat next weekend and the timing couldn’t be better. I need to get out of my own head and three days spent with 20 other women who write can only be a good thing. It’s time to get back in touch with my writing side and see where that road goes.

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My mission in life is not merely to survive, but to thrive; and to do so with some passion, some compassion, some humor, and some style. 

Maya Angelou

Not every day as a vagabond can be big and fabulous, full of adventures and amazing things to share. There’s laundry to be done, a kitchen to be cleaned, and, yes, even windows to wash. Other days are quiet, reflective, taking the time to think about life and things seen, and puzzle out, as all humans do, the whys and wherefores of the world.

It was on one of those latter days, late in the afternoon, when I took this walk. Despite the pollen floating on the breeze (tree pollen is my personal kryptonite), I enjoyed the time to wander down a new path.

I listened to the birds singing, felt the weak sun through the trees, and stood amazed at this view of the marsh at high tide.

The first flowers have opened up, promising of warmth to come. I know winter isn’t over yet, but soon, soon…

Some walks don’t produce deep thoughts, they just soothe and settle. That was today’s walk, a bit of forest bathing to ease the heart and mind.

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To hear, one must be silent.

Ursula K. Le Guin

Staying in one place for a while has already begun to reap benefits. I’ve had the time the past week to work on a book of my favorite Sunday Serenity posts. Topics include Time, Focus, Passion, Loss, Memories, and and four more.

Click on the graphic below to jump over to Shutterfly where you can buy a copy.

I don’t make any money on Shutterfly books. If the price is too high for your budget, try waiting till they have a sale or a deal; they have been running deals since Cyber Monday and probably will most of December. (It’s not the easiest store to use, as it turns out, so if you get an error message when you click on the link, try to dismiss it and see if the book page appears.)

For all my photo books, check out the revamped Photography link on my website!

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Find your authentic voice, become vulnerable, and then put yourself out there.

Meredith Brooks