Category Archives: Photography

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Against the Odds

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What are the odds of marrying your High School sweetheart and keeping your vows “until parted by death” in the 21st century?

scan0027 What are the odds of having open heart surgery at age 31?

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What are the odds of having the love you have, the life you have, the family you have, the memories you have? 

Well, I don’t think the odds mean anything. People don’t live by the numbers. We live by the moment.  Don’t you?

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Against the Odds

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Shadow

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The shadow side is dark but not evil.frame b wIt may look like a negative, but it is not bad.

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A shadow presents a contrasting view. 

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And may highlight something you might otherwise have missed. 

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So I try to appreciate the shadow side as well as the sunny side. After all, we need both in order to see the richness and depth in life.

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Shadow

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Solitude and Wilderness

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The Wilderness Act of 1964 established a means for our nation to set aside large parcels of land where the human presence is temporary. Among other valuable things, this provides for “outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined experience” for those temporary visitors who enter its space and leave it “untrammeled”.

Why is wilderness and solitude important to the human soul? I would argue that it is vital to our perception of our place in the Universe, a place of humility, not dominance or mastery….

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…and a place of natural social freedom. 

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Solitude is instrumental in developing self-knowledge and strength of character.

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When we seek solitude, it is often because we are looking for a greater level of honesty,…contemplating colors…a greater level of awareness.

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To defile these areas of wilderness and solitude is an act of violence that attacks our own freedom and causes us to be unnaturally enslaved. I think it’s imperative that we protect the places in our country that still exist as wilderness and to restrict the encroachment of human development and over-population that threaten them, not only or even primarily for our own benefit, but because any real understanding of humility demands it. 

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Solitude

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Flowers! Just because….

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The sun peeked out today for the first time in about a week. Cold, gray, snowy, icy, cloudy, foggy Wisconsin tends to get me down. Getting up in the dark, working through a sunless day, and then going home in the dark seems to pull all the shape out of life. And the news is even more depressing. So, I’m injecting some color and light into things with this post. Enjoy!

 

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Repurpose

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I love this theme! The mission of getting stuff out of the garbage system and back into useful circulation is part of the vision of Scholar & Poet Books, our home business. We don’t sell just used books but lots of other things we’ve picked up at estate sales and other places along the way. Valuing these castaways goes along with having an endless curiosity and a passion for treading lightly on the planet. You might say that we look at these things as artifacts, the world as a huge museum. 

But for clever, I have to defer to my daughter. She and her husband are proud nerds and bibliophiles. She decided to make some of the flowers for their wedding decor and bouquets out of the pages of well-used books that had lost their covers. 

paper rose

The overall effect was perfect, and perfectly suited to them. 

Remember: Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Re-purpose, Refuse! (for more great information about reducing waste, see The Story of Stuff Project).

Repurpose

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Weekly Photo Challenge: The Nature of Grace

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This is the challenge of a lifetime. Grace is my middle name – for reals! I have been striving to live gracefully ever since my parents explained to me what that name means, hence the blog motto above. I find subtle differences in the nuance of the definition now that I’m learning Buddhism and leaving the Christian world view that I was raised with in my background.

There is something of elegance, but not a worldly elegance. 

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There is an element of casual generosity, an unearned favor and abundance.

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The Buddhist perspective lends the flavor of ego-less-ness to it; it is beauty without attachment, as ephemeral as frost.

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To live a life of grace is to open yourself mindfully each moment to being in the flow of the kindness of the Universe, in a way. To walk in harmony with my surroundings – people, places, things – and to be a living benediction is my aspiration. It sounds pretty lofty and ethereal, like a cloud, and I don’t claim to be doing the metaphor justice. But I might as well aim high in my practice. 

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Graceful

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Ambience (or Ambiance)

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This week’s challenge reminds me of that old joke, “Why are there no restaurants on the moon?”

“No atmosphere.”

So, what’s my ambience? or ambiance? (seems there are two acceptable spellings). It’s Wisconsin. It’s January. The light is distant, southerly, and often behind clouds.arboretum in winter

The air is dry, sharp, and very cold (even in my living room!).  frosty-window

The mood is stark and immediate, like survival, but it brings a certain excitement to the senses. We are alert, light on our feet. 

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There’s a certain pride in the folks who are out and about in this weather. febThey are hardy and happy, eager and resilient.

There’s something in the silence of snow – in the wide, white spaces – that brings out a solitude from which we derive a certain strength.

Welcome to Winter Wisconsin. I find it refreshing. snowy emergence

Ambience

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Names

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“What’s in a name?” Some symbolism, some ego, some remembrance…

A name is just the container, perhaps an identifier; it is not the Thing. The reality goes so much deeper. The story is so much more than the title page. The columbarium 

Names

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2016 Photo Calendar

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As a positive-thinking person, I am sad to hear so many people saying that 2016 was a bad year. So, I decided to go back through my photos of the year and pick just one from each month to remind myself what I was focusing on and maybe get an idea why it wasn’t so terrible, horrible, no-good and very bad after all. Here are my monthly picks:
January – 

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February – 

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March – 

march

April – april

May – may

June – MKE flower industry

July –

monarch

August – edge-2

September – droplet

October –october

November – 

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December – dec

I don’t want to say that the year was without disappointment. At the beginning of 2016, I was also campaigning for Bernie Sanders by phone and door-to-door.

victory 2On the last day of November, I suffered two losses that hit me very hard: my boss resigned and a dear pet died. I guess my point is that perspective is still up to me. Where I give my heart, where I direct my eyes, where I train my efforts and thoughts is still up to me. And no system can take that away. 

May all beings be happy in 2017; may all beings be free from suffering in 2017. Thank you for visiting my blog!

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