Wordless Wednesday
Tag Archives: photography
Weekly Photo Challenge: Spring!
I brought my camera out today on a trip to Horicon Marsh Wildlife Refuge, but I didn’t take a single picture. Spring here in Wisconsin meant barely 50 degrees, windy and overcast. Although the sight and sounds of sandhill cranes and Canada geese and red-winged blackbirds were quite satisfying, I missed the sun and wildflowers that I’ve seen by this time in previous years. *sigh* I remembered that 5 years ago on this date, Steve & I were taking a wildflower class through the McHenry County Conservation District. We learned to identify all kinds of woodland spring flowers like anemones and violets and jack-in-the-pulpit and May apples. Haven’t seen but one little anemone this year. Here she is:
Brave little Buttercup! Do tell your friends that it’s almost safe to come out. I will wait for them. 🙂
Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters
Letters and symbols, icons and shorthand. We use them to convey meaning, experience, fact and story to create a reference. Weave several together, and you have history. We’ve created these continually throughout time, and have become so prolific at it that most of us have begun to filter out these symbols habitually. We don’t bother to slow down to read signs. We delete pop-up messages and junk mail. We are inundated and overwhelmed with letters all day long and hardly think about them. What if we focused in on one letter, one symbol, and let it represent an entire text, like the medieval scribes did with illuminated manuscripts? 
This illuminated letter represents my daughter Rebecca’s first Christmas in 1989. What kind of a history does this describe? That there once was a mother who commemorated her child’s first Christmas by making a special ornament. She decorated a tree with it every year for 20 years. The child grew up, her father died, and she moved away from home. The mother stopped celebrating Christmas, but she gave her daughter the special ornament to keep. Soon the daughter had her own house and her own Christmas tree. She decorated the tree and invited her mother to come celebrate with her. Her mother was pleased to see the ornament hanging in just the right place, so she took a picture of it. The End.
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: 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.
Living With Mystery
Possessing a human brain is no picnic. The cumbersome chunk of gray matter is quite the dictator. It wants to know: Who? What? When? Where? Why? How? It shines the light in our eyes, makes us squint and squirm until we come up with an answer. And “I don’t know” won’t appease its inquisition. Somewhere in our distant evolutionary history, this dictatorship must have presented some advantage to survival. Possibly it pressed us to a more efficient way to find food or use tools or attract a desirable mate. When the interrogation continues after it has served its immediate purpose, it becomes rather annoying and can create anxiety, frustration, torment and suffering. Think of a 4-year-old asking “Why?” to every explanation offered. It never ends. When you shout back, “I DON’T KNOW!” do you feel you’ve failed and slink off to ponder your existence? (For a good example of this “insane deconstruction” peppered with ‘adult language’, check out comedian Louis C.K. in this clip.)
Humor aside, the suffering is universal. We have all lived the anguish of a mystery at some point. As I write this, I am thinking of all the people whose loved ones disappeared on the Malaysian jet that has been missing for 11 days. Unanswered and unanswerable questions must plague them. The few photos of their grief that I’ve seen are hard to bear. Add to that circle connected to those 239 people all of the families of military personnel MIA throughout history, all of the families of travelers to foreign countries in unstable political climates who never returned, all of the parents of children abducted and gone without a trace. The stories of devastation are heart-breaking and inevitable. The common denominator is The Great Mystery – Death. Ironically, it is the most mundane mystery as well. We will all be touched by it, every one. And we know it. The two deaths that I experienced first hand were not shrouded by any great cloud of darkness. My sister and my husband both died right beside me: my sister in the driver’s seat of a car, my husband in our bed. They were not ‘missing’ by any means. And yet, I will never have the answer to basic questions like, “What were they feeling?” “When exactly did they lose consciousness?” “Was I to blame?”
Mystery is the Truth. We do not know. We delude and comfort our demanding brains in a parade of ideas. When that effort is expended, can we accept and live with Mystery? What does that feel like? How do I do that?
You see, again the questions surface, the never-ending tide of the probing lobe of consciousness. Maybe some day that flow will be replaced by the still, mirrored surface of a quiet mind.
Peace out,
Priscilla
© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved
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