Tag Archives: nature photography
Happy Earth Day!
Where were you in 1970 when Earth Day was first celebrated? I was 7 years old. My particular corner of Earth was a suburb of Chicago where I played in a Forest Preserve across the street from my house. I learned to recognize wild flowers like violets and Jack-in-the Pulpit and animals like squirrels and blue jays. I picked up litter that motorists had thrown out their windows or that picnickers had left in the woods. I’d often find broken beer or Boones Farm Strawberry Hill bottles near the concrete structure off the trail, within the circle of the remains of a campfire. I could never understand why people would just leave their trash behind. My parents would not tolerate that kind of disrespectful behavior in me, and I was incredulous that adults could get away with it. I would come home and tell my mother (a Girl Scout leader) that I’d found evidence of people not “leaving the place cleaner than they found it”. I can still feel my girlish outrage. When I was in 6th grade, I joined an Eco Club and volunteered to help pick up trash in the playground after school. I think I was the only one. I remember being alone with a big trash bag, meandering the grounds and talking to myself. I was very happy feeling that I was contributing to the Ecology Movement. Now that I’m 50, the scope of my awareness has outgrown the patch of land I call my neighborhood. I still feel outrage; I still hope to be part of the solution but on a more grown-up scale. How to do that as an individual is perplexing. There is not one easy button to push to do it. It is a network of decisions, with threads crisscrossing from recycling to teaching to voting. To stay engaged, to keep up the effort, to put energy into learning and practicing responsibility is the way of Earth friendliness. How is your friendship with Earth going today?
© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved
Weekly Photo Challenge: On Top
“Look wider still” was a slogan used by the Girl Scouts and Girl Guides in the 70s for their program curriculum. My mother was a leader at that time and this phrase stuck with her. She connected it to all sorts of insights and still does, even now when she is just about to become an octogenarian. I’ve always thought of this phrase as it relates to the way I am stimulated and entranced by a panoramic view. As a very young girl, I loved looking at a spreading seascape or landscape. I was born in Massachusetts, grew up in Illinois, vacationed in Michigan at a beach cottage, and then lived in California for 15 years. My personal panoramas are waves on the horizon, infinite prairies and fields, and vast mountain ranges. These always make me feel that there is a bigger picture. My anxieties are founded in the smaller loops of stress and the claustrophobia that comes from forgetting to look up. The best way to look wider, to look up, to get a healthier perspective, is to climb to the top of something. James Taylor might suggest going up on a roof, but I prefer to be in a natural setting. Up there, I feel calmer, more peaceful, like I belong to something bigger, more ancient and more durable. There my petty problems fade away, and I breathe easier.
The rooftops of Wauwatosa
© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved
Weekly Photo Challenge: Monument
This week’s prompt page from The Daily Post says this about monuments: “They insist on their own importance, but at the same time allow locals and tourists, pilgrims and accidental visitors, to share a moment and to get a taste of each other’s stories.” The same can be said of the photographs we take and treasure and post. They are monuments of our journey, where we’ve been, what we’ve seen, the stories we’ve told and heard. So, I’d like to share some monuments from my journey on Friday. Steve and I are trying to take a weekly field trip out into the more rural areas of Wisconsin. We are researching a new life, a new home, a new way of embodying what we value: simple, honest work in a lifestyle that respects the planet and is less dependent on human systems. We drove up into the North Country, beyond the oak savannas of southeastern Wisconsin, through the Driftless Area (unglaciated during the most recent glacial event) with its windswept sandstone outcroppings, and into the cranberry bogs and pine forests of Ho-Chunk land. The monumental feeling of this expedition is built of adventure, re-connection with the Earth, the joy of being alive, and the peace of being open to whatever we encounter.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Threshold
I’m tired and indecisive this evening, so you get two interpretations of this theme. The first is this one:
It’s my daughter, Rebecca, at her sister’s bridal shower. A couple of months after this photo was taken, her boyfriend proposed, and now she’s poised to be the next bride in our family. Perhaps she’ll be carried over a threshold shortly after that. (But that’s a pretty old custom; maybe no one does that any more.) Here’s another go:
This one’s probably a bit less literal, but maybe more poetic. I like the ascent from darkness to light, from the cool, barren rock to the wall of mossy fecundity. I like the passage littered with dead leaves that gives way to the vault of sunshine. Steve and I have been talking about the joyous urgency of blooming. He is in midlife, going to turn 50 in November, and he is eager to do something important with his life. And soon! So we are aware of this threshold and urging the “joy of change and movement” into our lives. Not sure exactly how that will be manifest, but stay tuned!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Street Life
This is a story of urban development. This picture was taken from the Milwaukee County Grounds about 2 years ago. This land surrounds the abandoned Poor Farm and Insane Asylum that I wrote about in this post. The area to the south and west of those abandoned buildings was identified as a migratory monarch butterfly trail and maintained by a local group who call themselves The Park People. In the last 9 months, this area has been raked over by bulldozers, trees cut down, and the habitat reduced from 239 acres (in 2005) to just 11 acres…which may never recover from the disturbance and resemble this photo again. The construction project was undertaken in order to create “Innovation Park”, UW Milwaukee’s research accelerator and business campus. In addition to this construction, the freeway you see in the background has been re-routed and upgraded to accommodate more traffic. Massive construction vehicles – earth movers, tree destroyers, and jack-hammers – can be heard around the clock from my bedroom window. This had been the largest green space in the county for many years, and I counted myself lucky to be within walking distance from it. But the life of the street, of urban expansion, has depleted the life of the wild and taken over its habitat. In the words of a famous song, “We’ve paved Paradise and put up a parking lot.” The metamorphosis on display now is not the caterpillar changing into a butterfly. It’s Caterpillar Construction Company changing green space into concrete and steel. Try telling that one to the school children when they start their first grade science class.
Writer’s Fourth Wednesday: Second Person Poetry
Victoria Slotto’s prompt post invites me to share a poem written in the second person. She says, “It is less rare to encounter poetry in the second person. As poets, we love to address our “audience,” celebrity figures, other poets or teachers who have an influence on us, people we love (or hate), God, mythological figures, people from our past.” I went through the book of poems that I self-published back in 1997 and found one that I like. Back in that decade, I was extremely rooted in a Christian identity and was rather prolific in my writing to God. These days, I do not identify myself as Christian or even theistic per se, but I still have a great sense of appreciation. The world is an amazing place; the beauty of it often makes me weep. My brain is accustomed to seeking a source for manifestations, but I now realize that is more about me than it is necessarily about the way Life is. I often find myself wondering, “Who do I thank for this?” It’s more likely that there are myriad contributing factors to the conditions that arise, the harmonious conjunction attributable to all of them simultaneously without hierarchy. So I simply say, “Thanks be,” and leave it at that.
The Sky
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 musing
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 You into my heart.
© 2014, words and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved
Weekly Photo Challenge: Reflections
This week, in a post created specifically for this challenge, show us an image that says REFLECTION.
It could be a person who helps you see things clearly, a place you go to collect your thoughts, or an object that reminds you of your achievements. You could also go for something more literal, like a reflection in water. Or something that demonstrates both interpretations of the word.
“A person who helps you see things clearly…”
What would you say about someone who meets you in your greatest grief, who doesn’t turn away but faces the tough questions with you, offering presence, not answers? Someone who challenges you to pursue those questions and discover the emotions they evoke, the hopes, the fears, the identity that emerges from within…and who then asks you to decide who you want to be? Someone who promises simply to be aware and who asks simply for your awareness?
Steve met me 8 months after my husband of 24 years died. I was in a state of profound transition, the fabric and framework of my homespun in complete collapse. On our first date, we hiked around glacial terrain, enjoying the fall colors and talking. Beside Nippersink Creek, I stopped. I became silent. I no longer wanted to fill the space between us with words and thoughts. I was finally unafraid to be aware that I was with him, in a new place, with a new person, as a new life was beginning. He sat beside me, quiet and reflective as well. What I saw clearly was that Life is beautiful and that death does not diminish that one bit.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Inside
UW Madison Arboretum – inside
We’ve been traveling from Milwaukee to Madison for the last three weeks to take in some of the Winter Enrichment courses offered at the UW Madison Arboretum. Unfortunately, it has been blasted cold each week, so we haven’t been out hiking the trails. Someone set up this little display of prairie grasses in the south window of the visitor’s center, and the sun shining in teased me with memories of warm autumn days smelling dried grass. In the deep freeze of winter, it’s nice to have some plant life taking up residence INSIDE.
A Cup of Kindness
Today is my mother’s birthday. She is 79. She is one of the most positive, enthusiastic, intelligent, and wise women I have ever known. She continues to inspire me. A week ago, she moved from her home of 36 years into an apartment at The Meadows, the assisted living facility where my sister and I worked as college students and where my father died in 2010. She is having an absolute ball collecting stories from the residents, entertaining dinner companions, playing the piano in the chapel and lobby, and making connections within her collage of life. She says that her Bucket List has been reduced to a Shot Glass List, and she’s grateful and content with all that she has enjoyed. She told me that she doesn’t ‘make’ New Year’s Resolutions, she allows them to ‘surface’. She shared that the phrase that is surfacing for her this year is “Live peace; take joy”. That conversation made me think of what is surfacing for me. What is surfacing is Shame. And I’m resolved to do something about it.
I have been thinking about shame for some time. Listening to Brene Brown’s TED talks on vulnerability and shame has brought about some introspective reflection on my history and patterns. I was raised by a very authoritarian father, a devout and dogmatic Christian. He was an intellectual, and my mother very candidly told me last night that although he could understand rationally that our behaviors and social constructs must evolve and change and that they weren’t based in any ultimate reality, he didn’t know how to navigate the emotions involved, and so he would fearfully nail those down into a ‘safe’ corner to protect himself. What he then communicated to me, his daughter, was that we are all fallen creatures, sinners whose nature it is to be not good enough, and that we couldn’t be trusted, so to be saved, we must follow a carefully prescribed path and check ourselves frequently for deviation. Our wills are suspect; God’s will is perfect. My deepest desire was to please my father and to be loved by him, so I became a very compliant child. And I bought the idea that whatever I wanted was probably not good, or good enough, and that I would fail to be good most of the time. My best hope was to be obedient, and so I did that to the best of my ability. I became accomplished in being obedient. As I grew up and my father became less central in my daily life, I transferred that obedience to God, the Church, my husband. Finally, after my husband died, I think I took that authority and transferred it to myself, but I ended up carrying out the same message. Now, I tell MYSELF that I am not good, or good enough, and am likely to fail to be good most of the time. In other words, I have taken over my dad’s role in shaming myself.
Needless to say, this is not freeing me to take risks, be vulnerable, be creative, be self-determinant or self-reliant. Instead, it is keeping me in ‘customer service’ when Steve is itching to make me a full partner in a home business (or series of them) so that we can be self-employed and embody the values and lifestyle that WE find important. How do I make the changes necessary to gain this freedom? First, I have to stop telling myself that I can’t. Or shouldn’t. I have to stop shaming myself. I have to become aware of the times when I do it, and I have to let go of them. Like the bubbles surfacing in my champagne. POP! “So, here comes that shaming bubble. I don’t have to analyze it, give it power, or trace it back to someone to blame. I will just notice it, watch it pop and let it be gone.” That’s my resolution for this coming year. Take a cup of kindness, and stop shaming yourself, Priscilla! Then move on.
I am also posting my blog summary for 2013 today. I want to give big cyber hugs to my Bestest Blogger Buddies – Helen, Stuart, Jamie, Naomi and Elena. Thank you for supporting this vulnerable venture and helping me trust myself to create something. (Something ‘worthy’? Something ‘good enough’? STOP. You don’t need to judge it. Create something. And just leave it at that.)
And here’s a sample of what I’ve created on this blog this year. If you’re new and see something you like, please browse around!
scillagrace 