Many moments of light this weekend, but less time to turn them into blog entries. On Friday, I traveled with two friends out to Kansas for our 18th annual Joy Luck Club gathering. We met our friend, Christina, in Kansas City, Missouri, after traveling ten hours from Goshen, played some mah jongg in our hotel room and did some sight-seeing the next day before driving on to her home in Salina. It was snowing when we left Goshen, and we saw a couple remnants of accidents on the road near Chicago, so it was a relief to arrive safely. And traveling through Missouri, the combination of colors created by the late afternoon sunshine and golden dried grasses, brown branches, white snow, blue sky and blue shadows lifted my spirits. Saturday we spent some time in the contemporary art museum in Kansas City. I liked the glass sculpture by Chiluly and its shadows. And from a little farther away, I was intrigued by the way the artwork reflected in the floor. And this photo by Michael Schultz was a spark of light -- it's a photo of a decaying ammonia factory in Belgium,with green moss and ferns growing on the floor. I also like his quote above, which you may not be able to read: I believe the camera can produce an image that. . . enters a realm of heightened reality. It struck me as fitting well with what I'm doing with this blog.
1 Comment
I've been enjoying the sunshine streaming down the last couple days, though due to other commitments and the challenges of taking photos when the temperature is below freezing, I haven't been able to explore sun on snow as much as I would have liked. At least my spirits can be lifted by the sight of sun and snow from inside the house -- though the snow has been melting since this photo, as the temperatures climb into the 40's. Given that we are still in Christmastime, this 11th day of Christmas, I've been enjoying the way the sunshine brought out these traditional Christmas-y colors. And a different sort of spark of light --
On JRR Tolkien's birthday, January 3rd, Garrison Keillor included this story about him on his daily Writers' Almanac. Tolkien was a professor of English Literature at Oxford, and one day when he was grading exams, he found that a student had left blank an entire page of the exam booklet. In that empty space, Tolkien scribbled the sentence "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He went on to develop that into a story he told his children and, eventually, his book The Hobbit. I'm enchanted by this snippet. What if there hadn't been a blank page just then? What if Tolkien hadn't let his diligent prof-grading-exam identity drift away? What unsuspected delights might come popping out for us, if we find a little time and space in the midst of our everyday duties, and let our creative selves playfully scribble a mysterious sentence, a joyful doodle, a half-heard tune? Last night's snowfall and today's clear skies made for many light filled moments today, starting with sunrise in the parking lot. Then there was sparkling ice on fences and trees, full of beauty even when it weighed branches down. I spent more time knocking snow off branches than taking pictures, and the top of the arborvitae is no longer bowed down to the ground. Ice was everywhere. There's a large flock of sparrows that normally shelters in our privet hedge. The hedge was half its normal height even after John freed the branches from snow. While they slowly recovered, a portion of the flock settled in our locust tree instead, their wings catching the light as they landed. The geese, on the other hand, flew overhead, heading towards the sun.
We got enough snow to stick last night, though it has melted by now. I spent the morning at Pathways Retreat Center, and was able to spend some of that time looking for sparks of light generated by melting snow and ice.
|
My approach to contemplative photography --
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver in "Sometimes" Archives
August 2020
Categories
All
|