Tag Archives: postaday

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Off-Season

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One of the advantages of being self-employed is that you can take advantage of the freedom of your schedule and do things when you feel like it.   Steve and I like to travel in the spring and fall when places are less crowded.  Consequently, we got the opportunity to be the ONLY visitors at a National Park one day.  It was Lassen Volcanic National Park in northern California, and it was April.  Here is what the walk up to the Visitor’s Center looked like:

off season 3We hadn’t really come equipped to hike in so much snow, so we settled for watching the video describing the volcanic terrain from inside the cozy Visitor’s Center.  One park ranger is all we saw there that day.  (I should note that this was in 2011, before the severe droughts of more recent years.)

Here’s a local off-season shot:

off season  Milwaukee on the first warm day in March.

I hesitate to label anything off-season, though.  All seasons of the year are open for exploration.  Nature is doing its thing whether crowds show up or not, and I love to see natural areas at any time and at different times.  It’s always beautiful, always worth it.  Here is my final shot of Guadalupe Mountains National Park in Texas in October: 

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Off-Season

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Vivid Wings

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The picture of the Sydney Opera House reminds me of this photo I took this week on a walk through the Fox Hill Nature Preserve, one of the properties owned by my new employer, Cedar Lakes Conservation Foundation. 

VividElectric lights don’t seem to hold a candle to a day of sunshine on the first of June when the air temperature is a cool 55 degrees Fahrenheit.  Even in mid-day, every color seemed to pop with vibrancy and life!

Vivid

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Signs Along the Way

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Today’s challenge is to photograph scenes that are not your destination, but are the ‘mundane moments’ in between.  This is a bit tricky, as I try very hard not to see any moment as mundane and not to focus on a destination and forget that the journey and process are very important.  I have lots of photos of the flowers along the way as well.  So, I thought I’d do something a bit different.  I’m going to show you wayside signs.  This first one is one of my favorites, located just beyond the security checkpoint at the Milwaukee airport:

RecombobIt makes you consider: what is recombobulation?  How discombobulated do you feel when you have relinquished your shoes, purse, backpack, laptop and phone and had your body scanned by electronic devices?  How about this one:

poisonHow considerate to warn cars passing on the highway that poisonous gas has leaked from these oil refineries!  But once you are passing, how do you heed the ‘Do Not Enter’ warning?  Do not enter what?  The surrounding airspace? Then there’s this:

handling batsI wonder at the necessity of this sign.  Who would manhandle a bat if they happened to come upon one in a cave?  I hate to think.  If not afraid, I would hope they’d be respectful.  And finally, consider this proposition:picnicHow would you set the table in this picnic area?  I hope you brought plenty of duct tape and napkins!

On the Way

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Broken is not Finished

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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

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Weekly Photo Challenge: The Enveloped, Please!

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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

 

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Forces of Nature

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In the Wisconsin woodlands, the force of Nature in Springtime is GROWTH!

growth piercing

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

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!

Forces of Nature

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Weekly Photo Challenge: The Intricate Nature of Wilderness

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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.

intricate 2Have 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.

IntricateAnd in a single catkin about to burst into bloom, the green fire of life glows in a delicate pattern of possibility.

intricate 3The 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

Intricate

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Weekly Photo Challenge: The Motion of the Ocean

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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!

Motion

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Early Bird Curiosity Eclipsing Fear

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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

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

Early morning frost on the tent in New Mexico – same trip

Early Bird

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Afloat, temporarily

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Afloat: borne on the water, free of difficulties. 

glass 4Not exactly the same as ‘adrift’.  You can be anxious, being adrift, afraid you’ve lost your bearings, veered off course, or abandoned your purpose.  Afloat is the feeling of being supported gently, effortlessly.  It’s a kind of dreamy state, I think.  Last year, the day after my birthday, I treated myself to a sail on the Denis Sullivan, a facsimile of a 19th century lake vessel owned by the museum where I worked at the time.  The day was completely calm and foggy. 

dreamy denisThere was a very quiet, gentleness to the water.  It was very relaxing.  The crew still went through the activities of raising the sails, and we helped (a little), but mostly hung around idle.

It’s nice to be afloat, but I wouldn’t want to do it every day.  I like being engaged in a stimulating effort to take responsibility for myself in my life.  I don’t want to expect an easy ride, and I don’t want to complain or blame some other entity for not supporting me.  I appreciate resources, but I don’t feel entitled to them, and I’m very willing to go without a lot of things.  I think this attitude is very simple and useful.

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© 2015, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

Afloat