Resilient: able to withstand or recover quickly from difficult conditions.
Category Archives: Photography
Weekly Photo Challenge: Path
I can totally relate to Cheri’s picture of taking a boardwalk path through a fragile eco-system.
I can also relate to my personal path changing dramatically in 2016. I, too, moved to a new place – to be closer to my job – and then experienced an abrupt twist in the path when my boss resigned. Paths can always lead to the unexpected, even a path you’ve traveled many times before.
Humans have a strong tendency to try to control and predict, to make crooked paths straight, to eliminate as much random chaos as possible. And that means we can often be frustrated, disappointed, or anxious on the path we’re traveling. But we don’t have to be. We can be delighted, wonder-filled and accepting. The path is what it is. How you travel and with what baggage is up to you.
Wisconsin Wonderland
If I want to see the magic of a winter wonderland, I have only to step outside my door. No need to represent it inside my home. No need for a “holiday tree” when you have a holiday ecosystem! I only wish I had a fireplace…
I’m grateful for the world as it is. It may seem harsh, but it is home. Chickadees and sparrows and cardinals and juncos are at the feeder. Deer lie under the trees at night and walk away during the day. Somehow, they live on in the darkness, in the cold, without complaining.
I have a lot to learn.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Anticipation
One of my favorite Advent anthems I used to sing with our church choir was titled “Anticipation”. It was a jewel of tight 20th Century harmony supporting a beautiful poem whose author I cannot find. It goes something like this:
The sky is black
The dawn is but a promise
and here I wait
impatient for the light.
My dearest friend is coming back
Tomorrow.
Anticipation fills the endless night
and soon the sky will fill with golden sunlight.
The day will break with joy beyond compare,
and I will fly…I will fly…
to meet him in the air.
I haven’t got the music or the lyrics to cite the source, but it haunts me in these long nights of darkness waiting for my dearest friend, The Sun, who warms me and enlightens my soul. Soon we will celebrate the Solstice, the return of the Sun, and days will lengthen steadily. That is a hope and a joy to anticipate!
Weekly Photo Challenge: New Horizons
A New Day dawning…
…in a new place. Since the first of November, I’ve been living on land owned by the Conservation Foundation where I work. However, at the end of the month, my boss tendered his resignation. What direction will the Foundation take going forward? I’m not quite sure. As the only employee there now, I have a lot of work to do. It will be an uphill slog along an obscured path, maybe more like this photo: 
So, “we’re not out of the woods yet”, but frankly, the woods is where I want to be. That is where new life is pushing up from under the decay. 
And that’s pretty exciting! So, my resolution: keep practicing conservation of resources and doing no harm, no matter what others around you may be practicing. Live with integrity and love with generosity.
Happy Horizons to all!
Weekly Photo Challenge: RELAX
I can’t help being reminded of a T-shirt my late husband wore. It was commissioned by his barbershop quartet; they wore them together on a barbershop weekend retreat for practicing, hanging around the lake house, and just “chilling” (in Palm Springs). The shirt simply said: RELAX. A lot of the people near and dear to me have been experiencing heightened anxiety – myself included.
November has been a difficult month. To cap it all off, my boss resigned on the last day. My boss and I are the ONLY employees of the Conservation Foundation where I work. And I just moved onto conservation land at the beginning of the month. I have a lot of questions about my local future to add to the bigger questions I have about a global and universal future.
*sigh* So…what do I do to relax? I go outside. I walk. I watch the trees, the sky, the animals, the sun doing what they do without anxiety, on a larger scale, and with the simple grace of the present moment. It never ceases to be helpful to my mood. So, pull up a bench…and relax with me.
Look closely at the beauty all around, and wonder in silence.
Now, don’t you feel more relaxed? I do.
First Snow
For my family in California: this is what I woke up to this morning!
And just yesterday, it was 64 degrees, and we were walking through a thunder shower on the Ice Age trail! Gotta love Wisconsin!
Weekly Photo Challenge: The Magic of Light
Light is magic. I’m enjoying watching the light, from sun up to sun down, at my new home in the country. Foggy dawn changes…
…to afternoon gold…
…to evening moonrise.
Then there are the more nuanced fluctuations of light dancing off cold and warm surfaces and reflective crystals.
Isn’t that what photography is all about? The Magic of Light!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Tiny
Having recently discovered my camera’s close-up setting, I am having a great time photographing tiny details.
I still find that my camera doesn’t quite depict the way that I see the world — the awareness of the juxtaposition of what’s outside the frame with what’s inside, for example.
And the colors and scope of a sunset and simultaneous moonrise.
Where is the camera that can take in all that my eyes and brain and heart envelope? Non-existent. And that’s good because I’d hate to think humanity could be replaced by technology.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Chaos
Sometimes I think WordPress has a surveillance camera on my life! How else would they know that my world is entirely chaos at the moment while I, in my natural state, am an extremely organized person? It so happens that I’ve just moved home and home business 35 miles away into a new rental. A normal move is somewhat chaotic. Add to that the fact that our home business is an online used book (and music and whatnot) store called Scholar and Poet Books. (Find us on Facebook or Ebay!) In our inventory and in our rental home, we have AT LEAST 25,000 books. Being quite the ambitious, self-sufficient types, we thought we could move those ourselves over a two-month period. We’re also over 50, both of us. And most of those books were in the attic, 3 flights of stairs up from the curb. Long story short, we had to hire professionals to help us pack up and move the last 285 boxes of books, each weighing roughly 50 lbs. Now all of that is in our new home, and we’re unpacking and organizing. Another yuuuuge task. *sigh* But our new place is gorgeous, a ranch-style house with only one flight of stairs (down to the basement), on land owned by the Conservation Foundation for which I work. I am not complaining! I’m just sharing what a bit of chaos is like — interesting, challenging, exhausting, stimulating. Here’s a gallery of our old place:
Chaos
Chaos
scillagrace 