Category Archives: Nature

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Illustrating a Poem

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Ann-Christine’s challenge to us is to illustrate a favorite quote or poem with 1-4 photos. Donna increases the challenge by suggesting we use a poem that we wrote. I did a post back in June of 2012 featuring this poem, with a photo I took with a borrowed camera. I’m giving it a make-over now, but you can see the original post HERE.

The Sky by Priscilla Galasso

Did I ever thank you for the sky
spread far around like an open field
piled high with moods and structures,
a playground for my soul?

This space above bids my thoughts expand
to climb the heights of an anvil-cloud
and teeter on the edge of a dazzling glare
or slide down the shafts of the sun,

To swim to the center of its lonely blue
where I find no mist to hide me,
and lie exposed to the western wind
like a mountain braced for sunrise.

Or clad in the shroud of brooding gray,
it coaxes me to musings
far removed from the minutiae
that chains me to my life.

I search for light and openness
to shadow the bonds of earth,
exploring the vault of heaven
for its meaning and its truth.

Thanks for this cathedral speaking glory through its art.
Thank you for these eyes admitting Sky into my heart.

Click HERE to see Ann-Christine’s Challenge post.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Magical

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You might describe something as “magical” when it fills you with a sense of awe. Like that light that comes from the sun rising over the mountain and filtering through fog and frost to create diamond sparkles on every tiny filament of life – in the trees, on a spider’s web, on the rocks lining the river bank.

I recently heard a talk on the subject of Awe. Awe is a heart reaction to an encounter with the vast Mystery that we don’t understand. It pulls us out of our Egos, out of our selves and our realm of control, and surprises us in a moment. It is a fleeting and powerful emotion. The speaker quoted from a book by Dacher Keltner called Awe: The New Science of Everyday Wonder and How It Can Transform Your Life. The author describes neurobiological findings caused by an awesome experience (including an increase in strength, a decrease in inflammation, and a kinder behavioral response to people) and catalogues the main sources of Awe in a study of 26 different cultures. The primary source of Awe in this study was not a beautiful sunset or the birth of a baby. It was Moral Beauty – experiencing other peoples’ courage, kindness, or strength in overcoming hard situations.

The second source on the list was Collective Effervescence: the feeling you might get at a wedding, or a concert, or a sporting event when you are part of a crowd of humanity in the throes of joy.

The third source is Nature, outside of us or within us.

The fourth source is Music; the fifth is Visual Design, for example in architecture or landscape.

The catalogue of sources of Awe goes on to list Spiritual Experiences; Life Experiences of Birth and Death; and Moments of Epiphany. Of course, none of these sources is really “magic” or supernatural. They’re all absolutely natural. We really don’t need anything other than the real Life around us and within us and our own Willingness in order to be lifted up into Awe.

Maybe Awe is the magic that we need to transform our world into a place of strength, resilience, kindness, and joy. I believe that magic is available at any time.

Please visit our host Ann-Christine’s beautiful post to view the magic through her lens. Click HERE.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Unique

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Like a fingerprint, patterns in wood grain are unique to the type of tree and the way in grows in its environment. With over 60,000 different tree species on our planet, there are a lot of variations.

“Follow the grain in your own wood.” — Howard Thurman

Similarly, in a way, the ice crystals of frost create unique patterns based on fractal process development and the variations in the surfaces on which they form.

“Frost is the greatest artist in our clime – he paints in Nature and describes in rime.” — Thomas Hood

This Unique Challenge is brought to Lens-Artists by Amy (click HERE for her post with some wonderful examples of the unique in Nature).

(and in case you didn’t see it, here’s one I posted on Wednesday that I really like…)

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Recharge

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The guest host for this week, Egidio, creates a very relatable and inspiring challenge showing how he feels Recharged by being in Nature. I completely agree, shouting “Yes!” to every quote, every landscape, every story in his beautiful post (do visit and see for yourself!). Nature is my first choice for re-connection to Life Force. But when I’m really depleted, especially by all the busy-ness of the hamster wheel that is my brain, I not only have to be in Nature, I have to be in my Body.

My first approach to getting into my Body in order to Recharge is meditation and yoga. My breath reminds me of the gift of Life and focuses my attention on the renewal that is available every minute of the day.

photo credit: Dharam Kaur Khalsa

I gaze at the forest outside my bedroom window and enter into the time warp of slow breathing and mindfulness, becoming aware of every part of my body as I stretch and balance on the mat.

When I am ready for a full-body Recharge, it’s time to step up to more input from Nature and sensory stimuli. Kick off the shoes, run barefoot in the cool ocean water, breathe in the salt spray, be dazzled by the sunlight on the water, and when possible, bring along a Friend.

To be honest, though, I am not a runner. My full-body, joyful, sweaty exercise is Dancing. I go to a couple of Ecstatic Dances each month so that I can be immersed in a musical journey of my own movement and rhythmic response. I feel music in my body in the most instinctual way, having had only a smattering of dance teaching but enough observation to imagine worlds of cultures emanating from my imagination through my arms and hips and feet. My over-worked brain lets go of logic and embraces mood, emotion, attitude, and community bonding. In this freedom, I am Recharged, Reborn, Re-imagined. At the end of the night, though my feet are throbbing, my “batteries” are full and pulsating with Life.

I don’t have ANY photographs of Ecstatic Dance. My hands and eyes and imagination are focused on being in the Moment, alive and active and engaged. I am not the observer with a lens. I am the Art in Motion. You’ll have to imagine the cosmic lighting, the moving bodies, the charged atmosphere of angles and surprise that might create a visual image. Better yet, go find some dancers who are welcoming and JOIN IN! You may get a battery jolt you’ve never experienced before.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Overlooked

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“What we do see depends mainly on what we look for. … In the same field the farmer will notice the crop, the geologists the fossils, botanists the flowers, artists the colouring, sportmen the cover for the game. Though we may all look at the same things, it does not all follow that we should see them.”
― John Lubbock, The Beauties of Nature and the Wonders of the World We Live In

Alcove House, Bandelier National Monument, New Mexico

Imagine looking at a canyon wall, eroded by wind, formed of crumbly volcanic tuff. Would you see in it a choice place to build a home, defensible from attacks, high above the river floods, cool in the summer and warmed by the afternoon sun in the winter? Would you see the path up to the sheltering alcove? And what would you be looking over once you got up there? Also, imagine that it is the year 1150 A.D. Can you look with an archeologist’s or anthropologist’s vision and imagine the ways of the people who lived there?

My friend, Ranger Steve, pointed at the canyon wall. “Do you see that petroglyph up there? What do you think it is?”
“Um…a person’s head? A bear’s head?”
“WHAT?”
“You mean that round, red spot above that pale place on the rock?”
“NO! Not a pictograph, a petroglyph. Carved into the rock under the overhang, above where that cholla cactus is.”
“Ooooh, THAT. I didn’t see it before. Um…a horse bending its head down to drink, maybe?”
“A lot of people see that. It’s probably a parrot, actually.”
Thick-billed parrots now are found primarily in Chihuahua and Durango, Mexico, but used to range north to Arizona and New Mexico. I completely overlooked that possibility!

I was doing a botany hike with a learned friend recently. She was pointing out and naming the plants along the trail, and I kept finding what I call Bonus Bugs. This tiny, pale spider was well hidden in the blooming Bear-grass.

She examined the leaves of a small tree and discovered these spiny little balls. They’re not part of the tree at all, she told me. They’re probably the egg sacs of some insect. Or maybe the tree’s protective reaction to the injury inflicted when the insect deposited the eggs? I don’t know. It’s another one of those innumerable natural mysteries that go overlooked every day. The truth is probably very important to the tree and the insect, though.

Here I want to recommend a book I’m reading: Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. When European settlers came to North America, they definitely overlooked the ancient and intricate relationships already established on the continent, relationships between many species that were reciprocal and mutually adaptive for sustainability. The wisdom in this book is astounding. The poetry of story and reverence in the writing is profoundly delightful. I believe it is a book to inspire revolution and a new way forward.


Thanks to Janet of Sustainabilitea: This, That, and The Other Thing for hosting the challenge this week!

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: What’s Bugging You?

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I’m beginning to think that maybe Donna of Wind Kisses might be a secret sister to me. I love her challenge to us this week! Last week it was bilingual 3rd graders, this week it was Kindergarteners (70 in all) who sang this song with me:

“Head, thorax, abdomen, abdomen
Head, thorax abdomen, abdomen
Two antennae, four wings and six legs
And don’t forget the exoskeleton!”
OR
“Cabeza, tórax, abdomen, abdomen
Cabeza, tórax, abdomen, abdomen
Dos antenas, cuatro alas y seis patas
Y tambien el exoesqueleto!”

So, which of you Lens-Artists have a dung beetle in your photo archives? This specimen was living on the prairies of South Dakota. Could be elk or buffalo dung it was rolling around into a perfect sphere. I wish I had video to show you how he rolled it with his back legs until the slope’s gravity pulled him up over the top, facing skyward. Fascinating!

Another beetle. Ladybugs feature in nursery rhymes and seem pretty harmless, but my middle daughter discovered at Girl Scout camp that they bite, and so grew to be somewhat afraid of them, especially when some meaner girls threatened to fill her sleeping bag with them.

Okay, I’ll post some of the more glamorous bugs that everyone loves.

…and I’ll post some things that aren’t bugs just to see if you’ll jump.

I think it’s always good to meet the neighbors who sit on other branches of the Tree of Life, get acquainted, and learn to appreciate them. Most of them were here long before we were! I think they make great teachers.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Skyscapes and Cloudscapes

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In her book, For the Time Being, Annie Dillard writes keen observations about anthropology, religion, culture, death…and clouds.

She quotes written observations of clouds from centuries ago. It seems that always, humans have looked up from their lives in wonder, trying to make sense of the shifting vapor, what it might mean for the present, for the future, how it all got there in the first place, and how it can be ever-new and unpredictable.

The unique atmosphere surrounding beloved Earth supports everything we know as Life. How much do we really know about it?

“I really don’t know Clouds at all.” — Joni Mitchell

“I see the world being slowly transformed into a wilderness; I hear the approaching thunder that, one day, will destroy us too. I feel the suffering of millions. And yet, when I look up at the sky, I somehow feel that everything will change for the better, that this cruelty too shall end, that peace and tranquility will return once more.” — Anne Frank

“Fear keeps us focused on the past or worried about the future. If we can acknowledge our fear, we can realize that right now we are okay. Right now, today, we are still alive, and our bodies are working marvelously. Our eyes can still see the beautiful sky. Our ears can still hear the voices of our loved ones.”
— Thich Nhat Hahn

“The sky is the daily bread of the eyes.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“One can enjoy a rainbow without necessarily forgetting the forces that made it.” — Mark Twain

Thank you, Amy, for challenging us to find Skyscapes and Cloudscapes and offering such beautifully dramatic examples.

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Mood

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“There are a thousand ‘greatest’ melodies, just as there are a thousand ‘greatest’ poems and a thousand ‘greatest’ pictures, because there are a thousand moods in the mind of (a Person) when a certain note rings with the most clarity–when a certain design is most sharply silhouetted against the changing curtain of (their) mind.” ― Beverley Nichols, A Thatched Roof

Our host this week, Sofia, writes, “I challenge you and myself to think of mood, how to convey and create an emotional reaction to your shot. That can be accomplished by capturing situations or occasions, photography styles or people and their feelings.” Visit HER POST to see a variety of techniques for expressing mood in photography.

The following two photos were taken on the same day, while I was walking with a group of friends. I am always fascinated by the changing moods of the ocean…and of people.

I’m tempted to say that my driveway has moods…but it’s not the driveway at all. It’s the Place, the environment. My driveway just provides a fixed point of comparison.

It’s really amazing to consider how my own mood affects everything I perceive and to know that I can illustrate that in my photos as well.

I am amused to think of “hashtag MOOD” as a shorthand of popular culture. It is a humorous way to acknowledge our common human experience as shifting landscapes of emotion. How wonderful to recognize and resonate with each other as we share our Lens-Artists posts! I look forward to seeing yours!

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Lens-Artists Photo Challenge: Backlit

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“To love beauty is to see light.” – Victor Hugo

“The beginnings and ends of shadow lie between the light and darkness and may be infinitely diminished and infinitely increased. Shadow is the means by which bodies display their form. The forms of bodies could not be understood in detail but for shadow.” – Leonardo da Vinci

This week’s photo challenge comes from Ann-Christine, who writes, “Backlight is a versatile instrument in making pictures really come alive, even if they are only silhouettes or very dark. For landscapes it can be magical.” I find that especially true when water is part of the landscape, adding reflection, glow, and sparkle. I am really happy that the rain in Oregon has let up, and warm sunshine is bedazzling the Coast. I had a glorious day there yesterday, and will return soon!