There is a fragrance that stays in your memory if you live in the Midwest. When late May comes around, it awakens on the warm breezes and carries pure, sweet delight to every inhaled breath. Yes, it’s here. Lilac season!
Tag Archives: nature photography
Weekly Photo Challenge: Happy Earth Mother May Day!
What a perfect topic for a photo challenge! Mother Earth is my favorite subject, and I’ve got LOTS of nature photos featured on this blog. Check out my Wisconsin Outdoors and Wilderness pages in the header above for some of my favorites!
Since this is the beautiful, lusty, bright month of May, I think I will highlight one of the woodland ephemeral wildflowers that emerge in my neck of the woods at this time: the Mayapple. Yes, the tiny bud eventually becomes a little green fruit rather like a crab apple, but I hear it’s unwise to eat them in any quantity…because…well, you know… Anyway, here’s one small citizen of Earth, from bud to maturity.
Mayapple
Mayapple
Weekly Photo Challenge: Abstract Earth Day
Today’s challenge is “Abstract”, and it’s Earth Day. So many beautiful textures and forms in nature that may be completely unrecognizable close up although familiar at a distance. 
One definition of “abstract” is to remove, as in remove it from its context.
When you abstract something, you may consider it theoretically and separately from its surroundings. This is something that scientists do particularly.
And then the challenge is to put it back into context and look at it holistically, as a whole, interconnected thing.
This is exactly the way we need to look at our Earth. Parts are interesting to study, but the whole, living thing is what we need to protect.
The complexities of our planet, the delicate balance and harmony of its interdependent eco-systems, are perhaps far beyond our capacity to understand. Therefore, it’s important to respect them and strive to preserve their integrity. And it’s equally important simply to revere them and enjoy the awe they inspire.
May you enjoy the Earth today, in abstract detail and in whole.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Landscapes of my Life
I am pleased that Joshua Tree National Park and Jeff Sinon were both mentioned in this challenge. I happen to be fans of both! And of Wilderness, of course. (There’s a page dedicated to Wilderness above – please take a look!)
Landscape has been an inspiration for me from a very young age. My father used to take me for walks in the Morton Arboretum in the far western Chicago suburbs. I was overjoyed to be set free running across open expanses of rolling lawn dotted with dandelions and trees. Suburban landscapes are quite domestic, though. I longed for something wilder.
I would stare out my second floor bedroom window towards the west, imagining that the frontier started just beyond the GAR Memorial Forest Preserve and the Des Plaines river. I finally learned that there were just more suburbs on the other side. Then, when I was 10, we went to Colorado to visit my cousins, and I saw a mountain for the first time. It was like all the magic of a fairy tale come true, more majesty than I could take in with my arms spread wide and my feet clambering tirelessly upward!
When I was 14, we moved to California, and I discovered a diversity of landscapes to love – the shore, the deserts, the redwood forests, the foothills and the Sierras.
By my 30th birthday, I had moved back to the Midwest to raise my four children in a less dramatic but safer environment. I fell in love again with the prairie.
But Wilderness calls me to the North Woods and the West whenever I can travel, and these landscapes are the ones I want to photograph with more care and passion (and better equipment!) in the future.
Landscape
Weekly Photo Challenge: Swans at Half Light
When I was a little girl, my father read to me from E.B. White’s story “The Trumpet of the Swan”. I was 8 years old when that book was published, and I can imagine my father buying it to read to me and my 3 older sisters with his own great curiosity about that remarkable writer neatly disguised as paternal generosity. I had a fascination with the part where the young swan stays at the Ritz Carlton in Boston and eats watercress sandwiches provided by room service, probably in part because I was born in Massachusetts. We had moved to the Midwest when I was 4 years old. When I was 14, we moved to California. When I was 29 and had 4 kids of my own, I moved back to Illinois. Five years ago, I moved up to Wisconsin. In the north woods, and the edge of designated Wilderness, I saw my first wild swans in the half light of evening as I was setting up camp with Steve. I thought of Louis the swan and of finding your true wild voice. I heard the deep silence of that Place and felt the tender understanding of my father, who loved the outdoors. I stood on the soft, summer pine forest floor and took these pictures. To me, the world is poetry – in moment and memory.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Dance
“I am the joy in change and movement.” – Steve’s statement of identity from a Transformations School of Spiritual Psychology exercise.
I have always loved dancing, although I don’t always love change and movement in other areas of my life. My problem as a dancer has always been that I’m too cerebral and not as intuitive and fluid as I’d like to be, especially when learning someone else’s choreography. When I “freestyle”, I think I do better. It has to do with allowing yourself to open up and be unconcerned whether you’re “doing it right”, to just go with the flow of feeling and response. It feels fabulous to let myself move to music! I get a great sense of my biology and my emotions – and it gives my brain a much needed rest!
So what images come to mind when thinking of movement and freedom?
Water, clouds, wind, birds and bodies.
May you move joyfully through your day today, and thanks for your visit!
The Color Green
I’ve never been to Ireland, but I love the color green. I carry a bit of it with me at all times, in my eyes.
I do have a great-grandmother who I think was born there. My grandmother’s name was Marion Keefe McFarland. My husband’s grandmother’s name was Mabelle Claire Mahanna Sargent. Today I think of them, for I knew them both, a little. But mostly, I think of green.
For all of you celebrating Irish, I wish you the best of St. Patrick’s Days!
Weekly Photo Challenge: State of Mind
After determining how to get from our campsite to the trailhead, we were eager to enter the designated Wilderness of this Wisconsin forest. It had been logged more than 30 years ago and then left to return to a more natural state. The trail was an old logging road that had not been maintained, and could barely be recognized under the summer foliage. I felt the quiet buzz of insects around me like a choir of innocents in a holy sanctuary, the sun streaming through the new leaves as if through the stained glass of an ancient cathedral. The forest was teeming with life while calmly silent at the same time. I dared not speak, wanting to be absorbed into the pulsing breath of the place itself.
Every detail seemed to be as exquisite in artistry as a religious icon. 
I wanted to take it all in and cherish it for eternity.
My camera became the instrument of praise and prayer that day, and I vowed to devote myself to Wilderness protection so that humans would always have a place to experience humility.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Seasons of Love
Click the link to listen to the song as you read: 525,600 minutes – how do you measure a season of life?
Whether I measure my life in love,
in sunsets,
in Truth and the tears I cried,
photo credit: Josh
or in rain, snow, sun and the way that he died…
…every season has been rich, beautiful and full of Life. So grateful for the way that is!
All That Matters
(this is a featured article in this month’s issue of The Be Zine. Click here to see the whole thing.)
Once upon a time, there were a bunch of Big Brains who decided that living things (which they rarely called ‘living beings’) needed to be neatly organized. Grouping things together based on similarity was important to them for some reason. So they made up categories and named them Kingdom, Phylum, Class, Order, Family, Genus, Species, in succession from broad to specific. Then they had to remember these categories, so they memorized “Kindly Professors Cannot Often Fail Good Students” – apropos of nothing much. (Personally, I think “Kindly People Courageously Offer Fauna/Flora General Sympathy” might make better sense.)
Meanwhile, some other Big Brains decided that everything in the Universe was made by one Creator and that He gave humans dominion over all the other animal species on Earth and gave every plant for human use. That made them feel they were Most Important among the creatures on the planet. They felt very comfortable with that and valued themselves, and those that looked and acted most like them, very highly.
As for those creatures who were terribly different from them, well, they were kind of “icky”.
Well, these Big Brains were very clever. They prospered and multiplied (and divided and conjugated and came up with quantum physics). They learned how to make a Big Impact on the Earth, making things they liked out of the raw materials Earth had. And every year, there were more of them. They liked to be comfortable, so they tried to eliminate things that bothered them. Like locusts. 
And dandelions. 
They liked to be powerful, so they claimed victories over other living things that had power. Like lions. 
And giant sequoias.
Gradually, they noticed that some of the other living things (or Living Beings) were disappearing completely. 
Some people thought that was a shame, especially if the thing was useful or furry or had a face. 
Others noticed that when one type of thing was gone, things began to change for the rest as well. 
A few Big Brains began to ask some really Tough Questions about why things on the Earth were changing so quickly and whether the Big Impact of humans had anything to do with it.
I can’t tell you the ending of this story. Perhaps the Big Brains will disappear like so many other Living Beings did, 
and Earth will go on without them. 
Perhaps the Big Brains will become less numerous, less dominant, and Earth will go on with them. 
Perhaps something altogether different will happen. It doesn’t really matter how I tell the story.
What does matter?
Well, here on Earth, ‘matter’ can also mean every Living Being 
and every non-Living Thing.
What we Big Brains decide to do with all matter will matter and will help tell the end of the story. 
© 2016, essay and all photographs by Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved
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