Category Archives: photography

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Center

The east and the west are yours, the north and the south are yours.

The center is mine.

I stand in the center, I sit in the center, I sleep in the center.

I move and it moves with me.

There are no doors to close.

I am here and the Beloved is here and the universe is all around me.

I walk in beauty and ugliness, joy and grief, riches and poverty.
I walk on concrete and in trees, indoors and out, up stairs and down.
I walk on land and in seas, below ground and above, in darkness and light.

Now I walk in beauty: beauty before me, beauty behind me, above me and below me.

The center holds: blessing to the Beloved.

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Resilient

We went for a walk last night down town. On the way back, the bell in the fire tower was illuminated and looks magical. The tower was built in 1890 for the town fire bell and has been preserved. Read about it at the Jefferson County Historical Society : http://www.jchsmuseum.org/Resources/Resources-HistoricPreservationBellTower.html

I hope we can come together as a country for health care as this community has for the bell tower….

This is for the Photo Prompt: resilient.

 

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Pandora’s Box

I read this: Was Pandora framed? today and thought, I know I have a Pandora poem….and here it is, from 2011. And another write up, Why the number line freaks me out, that too. When I think of infinity and Pandora’s Box…. it’s worrisome…

Pandora’s Box

Oh, you’d think
It would be empty by now

But I open the box again
I say what I want

And hear “No.”

I sit in want
Old wants
Buried wants
Pressure rising

I know by now
What is happening
I let it rise in me
I do not fight it
I clean the bathroom
Scrub tile and grout
Wants claw inside me
Burst like striking oil
A geyser from within
Black sticky want
Screaming up through the air
Falling everywhere
Filthy, flooding

It will take a while to clean up
this dark matter,
pollutant to poison
or fuel to sustain?

 

I took the photograph yesterday on North Beach. It looks like a popped child’s toy, pink. But it’s not…. it is all over the beach. A seaweed? Something hatching? Nature is a Pandora’s Box as well…. infinitely creative….

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The dead are with me

I am at the lake. There are younger people with me. We go to the graveyard. The earth is soft and loose. There are no markers or stones. We do not need them.

“I can feel the people in the earth.” says one of the younger people.

“Me too!” says another.

“Of course.” I say. I name the people under the earth and introduce them. The young people are amazed. I am surprised that they have never felt the dead. I think the cities and concrete and phones and television and computers: all of these must block the signals. But we never allowed electricity here. The phones don’t work. Candles, aladdin lamps, propane stoves and heat with wood in old cabins. Thin shacks where we hear the wind and water, and tents, lying in the embrace of the earth.

We leave but when we come back, the young start to reach down into the soft earth, arms length. “Did they die young?” one asks. “We want to know more.”

“You must be patient.” I say. “Don’t push the dead.”

Later I return a third time to sit quietly alone with the dead. Dark falls, moonless, overcast, no stars. I stand to return to the cabins and my flashlight dies. I know the paths well, but not the path to the graveyard. I tie up my long skirt and kneel. I feel the ground gently. Yes, I can feel the path. I start to crawl slowly, stopping to feel the packed worn earth. I think of wolves and cougars but none have been here for years. It is not cold enough for exposure. It is just dark and slow. The dead are with me and approve.

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Morning

This is for the Daily Prompt: discover.

I see people out with ear buds in place, walking or running. I also see people outside face down towards their phones.

I am sending people outdoors from my clinic, without ear buds, with cell phone off or silenced.

We need the sensory input from forests, from the outdoors, from fields, from beaches. We need the unpredictable and to USE all our senses. Smell, sound, proprioception… Proprioception is your feet telling you whether you are on a flat surface or little stones or a dirt path or that there is a rock there. My daughter and I walked on the beach last night, without a flashlight. I stumbled more than her. We discussed night vision and clearly hers is better than mine. We could see the light of Seattle reflecting from the clouds and onto the water of the Salish Sea. Mostly clouds, a few stars, no streetlights. We could see the windows of houses along the beach. The tide was out and the waves were very quiet, and we walked into a flock of sandpipers who called.

When my son was 18 months old, we took him to family land in Ontario, Canada, with old cabins on a lake. The paths are dirt. I ran those paths in the dark as a child for years, and every year the rocks and sticks were different. My son was used to floors and sidewalks and a grassy yard. For the first few days he stumbled on the paths, which are not even. By the time we left, he was running the paths with ease.

We need that sensory input and proprioception and to use all of our senses. When we get new complex sensory input, chronic pain sensors are turned down, as the brain is engaged to evaluate new information. We need outdoors, we need sensory input, we need uneven paths and beaches and rocks, we need to practice balance or else we lose the skills….

Turn off your phone. Take off your headphones. I exchange calls with birds often. I hear eagles and can imitate their call. I am good enough that sometimes the eagles that I cannot even see when I call, will drop down from the sky to see where the sound came from….Am I some sort of weird eagle insulting them?

Happy solstice and joy to you and yours.

 

 

 

 

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fortune

For the Daily Prompt: fortune, an old poem. This is the version I learned, but there are others… I think that I learned this from a nursery rhyme book, that had been my mother’s. A cautionary tale, perhaps….

“Where are you going, my pretty maid?”

“I’m going a-milking, sir,” she said

“May I go with you, my pretty maid?”

“No one will stop you, sir,” she said

“What is your fortune, my pretty maid?”

“My face is my fortune, sir,” she said

“Then I can’t marry you, my pretty maid.”

“Nobody asked you, sir,” she said.

Other versions:


https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Where_are_you_Going_My_Pretty_Maid_(A_Baby%27s_Opera)
https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/A_Book_of_Nursery_Songs_and_Rhymes/Nursery_Songs/LIII._WHERE_ARE_YOU_GOING_MY_PRETTY_MAID%3F
http://www.bartleby.com/360/2/138.html

I took the photograph a few days ago at sunset. We are almost at the solstice. Blessings all.