Category Archives: blogging

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Favorite Images of 2023

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My favorite photographic reminders of 2023:

I will remember the mutual benefits and joys of supportive friendships whenever I see this photo of Hunter, my friend’s cat that I stayed with for more than two weeks during the winter holidays. Hunter is a very affectionate cat, a perfect emotional support professional.

I took the photo above while I was watching a different friend’s cats, who were too afraid to come out of the closet for days. There is beauty in warmth, and beauty in chill. What Life brings is a gift. Appreciating all that Life brings is a practice.

This photo of the Yaquinta lighthouse will always remind me of an acute shift in perspective, from the minutiae of my own thoughts to the realization of vast forces unfettered by attempts at “meaning”.

In the hallway of a museum in New Mexico, I found balance and peace and space, even though I was far from home in unfamiliar surroundings.

A spider camouflaged by flowering bear grass reminds me that slowing down to notice Life on a smaller scale reveals beauty and complexity and mystery.

I snapped this photo of my brother and his dog walking in their new neighborhood two months ago, and it reminds me that change is the nature of life, and that adapting to it requires support and cooperation.

This photo of the Georgia O’Keefe museum in Santa Fe reminds me that venturing out is worth the anxiety. There are bright, sunny, beautiful things to see in the wider world.

I love the playfulness and sweetness of new friends and having fun. This photo brings those memories to mind.

When I am tempted to grow bored with the familiar, I like being reminded to look again, look deeply, and notice with joy the abundance of beauty in the world.

And finally, reflection is good for my soul. There is always a different way to frame things, to appreciate what IS. I appreciate the Lens-Artists community and celebrate its growth in sharing images and stories across the globe. Thank you for supporting creativity and humanity! Thank you, Tina, for hosting this week’s challenge and sharing your beautiful favorite images of 2023. Click HERE to see her post.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Last Chance

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Winter Solstice 2023 – my last post of this year. Where I live in the Northern Hemisphere, there will be more than 15 hours of darkness tonight. It is a time to gather inwardly, to reflect on the shadows of what has been, to practice being comfortable with uncertainty, and to hope bravely for the coming light.

I came upon a phrase today from a campaign to protect wild buffalo herds. “Place-based coexistence”. It makes me think of the place where I live, the forest that I see from my window every day and the life that is sustained here – the flora and fauna, the lichen and moss. We are all to be plunged into darkness tonight. We all breathe the same air, soak up the rain, turn our faces to the light. I want to be mindful of all that is turning together in the Earth’s orbit. I want to celebrate our interdependence.

I think about the relatedness of all Beings in this web of existence and reflect on my actions. Have I been kind, gracious, patient? I think of the quiet days of coexistence that passed while I gained the trust of two cats I was tending for a friend. After days of being stared at from the safety of the bedroom closet, I earned the company of a purring furry friend beside me in front of the woodstove while I read a novel. This has been a long year of waiting and hoping for relationships to heal and grow. I have spent more time in deep observation and reflection and learning than I ever have before, I think. I am grateful for that.

I think of the positive actions I have taken, the aspirational direction of my thoughts, the building, creating, and rising to which I have challenged myself – physically, spiritually, intellectually, emotionally. During this dark time, I want to gather the energy to do more of that.

Finally, I remember that these moments of my life that add up to a year are as ephemeral as soap bubbles. Although they glisten with a rainbow of colors and take my breath away in their flight, they do not endure. They may instruct me, but they must not enchant me and lure me from attending to the present. This is a very difficult lesson for me. I have a photographic memory (as I’m sure many Lens-Artists do), and I find it easy to slip into my mind and out of reality. When I find myself doing this, I can choose to focus on the breath that comes to me, new, every minute. With this breath, and this awareness, I can create new glimmering bubbles of love and light, a gift in real time.

I wish you the warmth of Love and the light of Hope in this dark night. Thank you, friends and followers, for journeying around the Sun with me this year. I look forward to another trip! Special thanks to Tina for the inspiration and leadership her post provides for this year end challenge. Please visit her blog HERE.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Treasure Hunt

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Charlie is a treasure. He is very much a beloved pet in our family.
This treasured pet was named “Moon”, so I get double credit for his photo!
Sunset makes the clouds into a golden treasure. Another double credit!
These parents are making treasured moments with their child in the reflection of the sun sparkling on the Pacific Ocean.
A small “truck” full of autumn pumpkins, a treasure for the kids ready to carve them, and foliage in the background.
I treasure autumn days when I find foliage on my walk: a golden carpet underfoot!

Thank you, Tina, for inviting us to join you on a Treasure Hunt! Here’s the list for all you additional treasure-hunters out there:

  • A pet or pets (yours or someone else’s)
  • The moon or the sun (extra credit for both in one image)
  • Clouds (extra credit if you also include rain or snow)
  • A reflection
  • A child (extra credit if with other family members)
  • An umbrella (extra credit if you include a person using it)
  • A truck (extra credit if you include the driver or what the truck is hauling)
  • Autumn foliage (extra credit if it’s something that only blooms in the fall)
  • Something fun you found on a walk

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Favorite Images of 2021

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Happy New Year! I am so glad to be looking at 2021 in my rear-view mirror, and I know I’m not the only one. For so many reasons, it was a tough slog. But, as my first complete year living in the majestic state of Oregon, it was also a year to discover beauty outdoors that I’d never seen before. I have compiled 12 of my favorite photos into a calendar of the past. I hope you enjoy it!

  • JANUARY
    Hazelnut orchard, Llewelyn Road, Corvallis
  • FEBRUARY
    South Beach State Park, Newport
  • MARCH
    Newport
  • APRIL
    Marys Peak
  • MAY
    Alsea Falls
  • JUNE
    Iron Mountain
  • JULY
    Strawberry Mountain Wilderness
  • AUGUST
    South Beach State Park, Newport
  • SEPTEMBER
    Agate Beach State Recreation Area
  • OCTOBER
    William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge
  • NOVEMBER
    William L. Finley National Wildlife Refuge
  • DECEMBER
    My driveway, Corvallis

My heartfelt thanks goes out to Tina for being our challenge leader this week. Do visit HER POST to see her favorite shots of the year and to read instructions on joining the challenge. I am in awe of the core team of Lens Artists – Tina, Amy, Ann-Christine, and Patti – and delighted to hear that the team will be expanded this year to include three new host bloggers: Sofia, Anne, and John.
I wish all of you the joy of finding beauty in your lives every day as you look upon this marvelous world and the hope of being a blessing every day for someone in return. Make it a great year!

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Going Wide

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“Look wide, and even when you think you are looking wide
– look wider still.”
Robert Baden-Powell (founder of the Scouting Movement)

  • Canyonlands National Park, Utah

“Cleverness is like a lens with a very sharp focus.
Wisdom is more like a wide-angle lens.”
Edward de Bono

  • Badlands National Park (Southern Unit), South Dakota

“Accept the terrible responsibility of life with eyes wide open.”
Jordan Peterson

  • North woods, Minnesota

I absolutely adore landscapes! I love to hike and have worked for a land trust protecting land. Just this morning, I was interviewed by a land trust in my new home state of Oregon for their annual appeal video. I was eager and honored to share my passion for an evolving land ethic to guide humanity into better harmony with the Earth and my gratitude for organizations that uphold those ethics.
This week’s challenge is about wide-angle photography. The truth is, however, I don’t own a wide-angle lens. I do have a Landscape setting on my Canon Rebel T3i, though. It provides a large depth of field and color saturation to enhance greens and blues. I use it extensively when I’m out in the wide open spaces of the USA.

  • Starved Rock State Park, Illinois

Maybe some day I will invest in additional lenses for my camera. I encourage you to visit Patti’s blog to see some stunning examples of wide-angle photography and learn more!

  • Lake Woodbury, Wisconsin

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Inspiration

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  • Sunset from my front porch

Inspiration…that moment when you draw in breath, a gasp, an awe-filled audible inhalation, the desire to take in the spirit of something beautiful, breath-taking.

  • Strawberry Mountain Wilderness, Oregon
  • Lupines on Marys Peak, Oregon

I moved to Oregon exactly one year and one week ago. I have been inspired by something about it every single day I’ve been here, I think. The natural communities are incredibly diverse and resilient and interesting and beautiful. Today, for example, I joined a work party collecting camas seeds. These little seeds are nestled in the dried flower petals like beans in maracas. They shake and rattle as you walk through the meadow grass. Indigenous people roasted the bulbs of these plants as a food staple, high in natural sugars, similar to sweet potato. When I returned from this adventure, I walked down my driveway and began collecting blackberries from the invasive Himalayan canes that grow as a huge, prickly nuisance to most landowners, a deliciously irritating problem. They are everywhere. Free food!

This has not been an easy year for me by any means. It hasn’t been an easy year for most people. On top of the universal griefs and fears, I am new in town, isolated, unemployed, and missing my mother who died in October. There are always mornings when I find it hard to get up and get on with my life. But when I look out my window at OREGON, I find motivation to join the young hawks and the gentle deer, step outside and breathe in the rich scent of Douglas fir.

  • Home, nicknamed Climbing Cloud

In such a setting, I feel like I belong to the Earth, like a tree taking root and creating a tall, strong life. I’m grateful to have this new inspiration in my life. If you’re curious about previous explanations of my blogging inspiration, visit THIS POST. Thanks to Patti for creating this challenge and sharing her beautiful photos.

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #145: Getting to Know You

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“To acquire knowledge, one must study;
but to acquire wisdom, one must observe.”
― Marilyn vos Savant

It is a great honor to be your host for this Lens-Artists Photo Challenge and to be part of a community of observers. Thank you for visiting my blog and getting to know me. I look forward to getting to know you, too!

The artist’s gaze, the photographer’s eye, when cast on a subject begins a relationship. That relationship can grow into a deep affection and a profound wisdom. It is that aspect of relating to your subject that I invite you to explore in this challenge.

“We cultivate love when we allow our most vulnerable and powerful selves to be deeply seen and known, and when we honor the spiritual connection that grows from that offering with trust, respect, kindness and affection.” ― Brené Brown

I am a very visual person, as you might be also, and consider observation to be the first tool in my learning kit. To look carefully, curiously, enthusiastically, enduringly, and lovingly at something changes me. I begin to feel connected to that subject. I develop an affection that fuels further and deeper observation and understanding.

“Our ability to perceive quality in nature begins as in art with the pretty. It expands through successive stages of the beautiful to values as yet uncaptured by language. ” ― Aldo Leopold

My journey from Nature-observer to Nature-lover to Conservationist to Earth advocate is the story of how my eyes opened my spirit to a deeper wisdom about the world in which we all live. I celebrated International Earth Day on  April 22 with others around the globe who are deeply in love with our planet and concerned for her health and welfare. As I’ve gotten to know Earth better, I have grown in relationship to her and in my understanding of the factors impacting her. The photos I’ve chosen to illustrate the development of this relationship start with a monarch butterfly caterpillar on a milkweed plant in a restored prairie and progress to a field of coneflowers hosting a swallowtail butterfly and other pollinators. I took all of these pictures while I was working at a conservation foundation and learning about the interconnection between plants, animals, soils, landscapes, and the humans who cultivate, steward, and extract those resources.

My invitation to you is to present a “Getting To Know You” post showing your relationship with a subject you’ve photographed. The subject could be a Person, a Place, a Culture, an Object…anything that has captured your attention, won your affection and taught you a thing or two.

In your post, include a link to my original post and use the Lens-Artists tag so that everyone can find your post in the WP Reader.  We hope you join us and share what you know and love!

Next week, Patti will be hosting Lens-Artists Photo Challenge #146 on Saturday, May 1, so please be sure to visit her site and joint us then, too. Her theme will be “Focusing on the Details”. 

Thank you for spending a little time to get to know me and these butterflies in their natural habitat. I again want to thank the Lens-Artists hosts – Patti, Amy, Tina, and Ann-Christine – for inviting me to host this week’s challenge. It is an honor and a joy to be a Lens Artist!

Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Happiness Is…

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I see trees of green…

…red roses, too…

…I see skies of blue and clouds of white…

…the bright, blessed day…

…the dark, sacred night……and I think to myself, “What a wonderful world!”

The colors of the rainbow, so pretty in the sky…

…are also on the faces of people passing by…

I see friends shaking hands, saying “How do you do?” They’re really saying, “I love you.”

I hear babies cry; I watch them grow…

They’ll learn much more than I’ll ever know. And I think to myself, “What a wonderful world!”

This wonderful song always makes me cry. In my mind, I hear the voices of Louis Armstrong, David Attenborough and the Barrington Childrens Choir expressing these words of appreciation. I feel myself dancing to it with my daughter at her wedding. It is my song of happiness for the best the world has shown me…the Earth and Sky, loving People and my children. It is truly a wonder-filled world, and I am forever happy to be in it.
Thank you, Ann-Christine, for challenging us to articulate all our reasons for happiness. 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Corner

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Standing on the corner…is this a familiar corner? Or are you just passing through this place, this place in time and history? Where are you headed? Straight on? Or will you decide to turn? Which way? Right? Left? Or a complete turn-about?
So many decisions, choices that could lead to adventure or conflict or character change. 
Whatever corner of the world, whatever corner of your life journey you find yourself standing at…I wish you happiness and peace. 

Corner

Weekly Photo Challenge: Collage

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Here is a gallery collage of photos from my recent series, An American Adventure. In a two-week road trip, I visited eight National Parks and Monuments in Colorado, Utah, and South Dakota. If you would like to see the entire collection of 17 blog posts, click on the banner headline An American Adventure. 

Canyonlands National Park, Utah
The Green River flows through Dinosaur National Monument

Collage