Category Archives: Photography
Weekly Photo Challenge: Broken is not Finished
This week’s challenge is perfect for the photos I took yesterday at Hippie Tom’s Serendipity Farm – an antique/junque pickers’ and gleaners’ mecca in Southeastern Wisconsin. Steve and I were out for a ramble through a wildlife area and stumbled upon the road signs advertizing his sale. The parking area was bustling, TV cameras were rolling, and Hippie Tom was in full swing for Spring. It seems that his farm is only open twice a year for the public to browse and discover treasure in his vast complex of old out-buildings. It’s a jungle of old and semi-new, broken and mostly intact, recyclable and re-purposeable stuff. And we do create a lot of stuff, us humans. It makes no sense to simply throw it on a trash heap, polluting the land with it. Reduce, reuse, recycle, refuse. Broken is not finished. There is purpose and life even during brokenness. If there weren’t, I wouldn’t be able to type with my left pinkie right now. (Broke it in high school. It’s distinctly crooked, but usable. Yup, I play keyboards and sometimes guitar with it…not expertly, but ‘proficiently’.)
Broken
Weekly Photo Challenge: The Enveloped, Please!
What does “enveloped” mean to you? Signed, sealed, delivered, secure, safe, covered. A wonderful environment for inner growth; a wonderful place from which to emerge. Staying enveloped indefinitely is not my idea of living, though. The thrill of ripping open that seal and discovering the treasure inside is life revealed and reveled in!
Enveloped
Mother’s Day Gift
My mother’s day gift was an afternoon of appetizing art. We had a blast! Thanks, Sooz!
Nerd Love to All Mothers!
Steve just happened to stumble upon this YouTube clip, and it is now my Favorite Mother’s Day Song! (click on the link below to listen and laugh)
Biologist’s Mothers’ Day Song
Celebrate the nature and nurture that brought you into this incredible world! Have a great day, everyone!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Forces of Nature
In the Wisconsin woodlands, the force of Nature in Springtime is GROWTH!
Plants that have lain dormant for months have an incredible urge to surge and unfurl. You can see greening in a matter of hours, really. The wildflowers on the forest floor have a limited opportunity to pop up and take in the sunshine before the canopy leaves provide too much shade. Early May is the best time to see woodland wildflowers in bloom.
Trout lily
Anemones
A wildflower is an inspirational force of nature. You may think they are delicate and fragile, and they are, being ephemerals. But they are also survivors. They are perennials uniquely adapted to their habitat. They do not require any tending, care, watering, pruning, pampering or husbandry to blaze up every year with the desire to GROW. I like to think of them as my ‘spirit flowers’. I’ve been a widow and single mother of 4 for 7 years; I am a woman with a fierce desire to grow and sustain my life and my kids’ in the most natural way I can. My kids are grown and living independently from me now, and we are each beautiful illustrations of the fragility and tenacity of life. Yes, we are WILDFLOWERS in many ways.
Happy Mother’s Day to all mothers and nurturers of life who recognize the force and the freedom of growth in themselves and in others!
Weekly Photo Challenge: The Intricate Nature of Wilderness
Usually, I reserve Friday mornings for Word Press and open the Daily Post promptly at 11:00 to see what the photo challenge is for the week. Yesterday, however, I was camping in the Whisker Lake Wilderness area in northern Wisconsin. I was up just before dawn, roused by a chorus of woodpeckers and swans, red-winged blackbirds and Canada geese. The early ecophony (a great term Steve recently ran across in an environmental essay: a portmanteau of ecology and cacophony) was only slightly less raucous than the previous moonlit night’s melee of frog song.
Have you ever wondered at the intricacy of co-habitation in an eco-system? Around Perch Lake there were mammals, birds, amphibians, insects and reptiles all doing their interconnected dance with time and space in the most amazingly complex overlapping of rhythms. The full moon, the night frost, the dawn mist, the swelling heat of day: the ebb of one activity and the flow of another as time marches forward spins a never-ending tapestry of living.
On a single rock on the side of the hiking trail, I found another intricate web of life, a microcosm of mosses.
And in a single catkin about to burst into bloom, the green fire of life glows in a delicate pattern of possibility.
The Earth is a multi-layered, intricate web of pattern, design, and interconnection. How marvelous to look at even one tiny corner!
© 2015, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved
Weekly Photo Challenge: The Motion of the Ocean
Initially, this challenge had me stumped. I primarily photograph nature in still life. I’m a very calm person, not enthralled by activity and speed. Movement is, however, the way of the Life…but I generally see it in a larger, slower context. How does the Earth move? In myriad ways at varying paces, constantly, glacially, and in the beat of a hummingbird’s wings. How have I photographed movement in Nature? In water – falling and surging, as well as frozen. Last September, I had the opportunity to revisit the Pacific Ocean. It is constantly in motion, yet can appear stationary in a landscape photograph when spread out to the horizon. Its dynamic nature is more readily apparent at its edges, and that’s where I aimed my lens.
I recently discovered some really dramatic ocean photography in the work of Ray Collins. Visit his website here to be really swept up in the motion of the ocean!
Morning Dove
In praise unceremonious
birds sing to greet the morning.
In liberty they make their voices heard.
Each separate tune a secret speech upon Creation’s ear,
an intimate awakening of love. What expression can I give you
to welcome your affection,
to place myself within your waiting arms?
The murmur of my scattered dreams,
the sigh of lonely longing,
a wish for lasting closeness on my lips.
Hear in my stuttering, open heart,
Oh, lover and companion,
the grateful, private music of the dawn.
Happy Earth Day (one day late) and Happy Poetry Month! I am also happy to report that I am now employed in my first environmental job – as the office manager for the Cedar Lakes Conservation Foundation. I feel very fortunate to be able to use my time and energy toward preserving habitat, safe-guarding watersheds from pollution, and halting development and building in Washington County, Wisconsin. It was Wisconsin senator Gaylord Nelson who founded Earth Day 45 years ago; the natural beauty of this state has been an inspiration to a number of prominent environmentalists: Aldo Leopold, John Muir and Sigurd Olson, to name just a few. I celebrate the spirit of the land and the people who love it, and I invite you to join in! Write me a comment and let me know how you spent Earth Day!
© 2015, poem and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved
Weekly Photo Challenge: Early Bird Curiosity Eclipsing Fear
There is something in me that craves a sunrise. I’ve known this for a long time. It’s an exhilarating feeling, a feeling of adventure, of anticipation, of freedom. Perhaps it’s because getting up early means you have a special mission…to board a plane or set off on a journey or explore a new day. I think I first experienced this adventurous feeling when my sister and I set off cross-country on a road trip when she was 20 and I was 16. She was going back to college in Ohio in her newly purchased car. We set off from our home in California, and I was along for company. Unfortunately, we never made it to Ohio because we crashed in Nebraska and she was killed. That rather put a damper on my adventurous spirit for quite a while. But I recently discovered that I still love a road trip even though I can never put disaster completely out of my mind. Learning to embrace that perceived conflict, that life is exciting and wonderful and not entirely safe all at the same time, has been a great journey in itself.
Sunrise in Kansas on my most recent road trip
It’s like the feeling I get when I’m camping ‘far from civilization’. The nights seem very dark and very long as I lie awake in a tent with howling winds or other unidentified sounds surrounding me. I feel aware and a bit afraid and very alive. When the sun begins to rise, I feel eager to rush outside and see the light dawn on all those things that felt so mysterious and vaguely threatening. I realize then that a sense of curiosity is eclipsing my fear. That is what I want to develop more and more. Perhaps that’s a return to childhood; perhaps that’s what maturity is.
Early morning frost on the tent in New Mexico – same trip
scillagrace 
