Tag Archives: Weekly Photo Challenge

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Room

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Room….and room enough.  How do you make space in your life, for yourself, for your dreams, for another person? 

Scholar & Poet

How do you create warmth and comfort and interest? 

room dining

Is that just about outer atmosphere, or is the inner condition of your soul the place from which an invitation to abide emanates? 

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Isn’t that what “room” is all about?  A place to abide, be it contained or uncontained. 

room tent

And what is abiding?  To me, it’s more than living…it’s living in peace. 

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I want to abide — in my house, in my work, in my life, in the world — in peace. 

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© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Split-Second Story

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StoryThe photo challenge for this week invites us to share a photo that captures an entire story in a single frame.  Here is my interpretation. 

And what is the story?  Is it merely a story of kids going to the zoo?  Does the story that you see here have something to say about animals, including the human animal?  Something about conservation?  Something about family entertainment?  Something about cages and behavior?  Something about connecting to other life forms?  Something about curiosity?  Whose curiosity — the child’s or the lion’s?

I always have mixed feelings, some very strong, that arise when I visit a zoo.  Sadness.  Respect.  Appreciation.  Embarrassment.  Regret.  Awe.  The story is pretty complex, and there are many characters.  When we get caught up in our own narrative and forget that there is more than one, we limit our compassion, our awareness. 

It’s interesting to overhear what mothers and teachers tell their children about the animals behind the glass.  “Oh, look.  There’s the Daddy lion and the Mommy lion and they’re doing _______!”   Are you sure that’s what they are and what they’re doing?  Have you projected your own story onto them?  Do you often do that and teach your children to do that?  What might you learn if you tried to look at their behavior through unbiased eyes? 

You see, this story gets pretty complicated.  It’s worth looking into.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Twist

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“Twist” is filthy with meaning: it’s the unexpected, it’s surprise, it’s even an amazing ice cream choice. What does “twist” mean to you?

Being a bibliophile, I immediately think of a plot twist, the kind that makes you tingle with pleasure in the last chapters of the mystery novel you’re reading.  “Wow!  I never saw THAT coming!”  Such delight.  I did find an appropriately twisty photo that I snapped while hiking around Lapham Peak State Park in early spring.  We were looking for lichen, on a whim, and found ourselves outside the warming house near the skating pond.  I suppose they use that building for winter events, family-oriented programs that might include a craft project or something, because I happened upon this item posing as a lingering patch of snow in the leaf litter….

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A plastic snowflake.  Natural….but not.  It made me laugh.

 

© 2014, essay and photographs, Priscilla Galasso, All rights reserved

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Art

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“Art is the proper task of life.” — Neitzsche.

What is Art?  Who gets to define it?  Who gets to make it?  Do we delegate this activity to those trained and proven in convention or do we allow that any human has the privilege to create, to explore, to juxtapose materials and images and sounds and actions and ‘stuff’ of any description into something unique?  And do we recognize that the miraculous gift of this activity is not merely the product to be admired, but the process that transforms?  Have you been changed by Art, as a creator and as a consumer?  Do you disqualify yourself from the role of artist?  Is it fear that keeps you from it?

I admire people who engage in “the proper task of life”.

Art

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Weekly Photo Challenge: On the Move

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“On the move” in an accelerating society with handy pocket-sized digital cameras may manifest in a blur of city lights and speeding vehicles.  That’s not my style.  I don’t have a smart phone, and my favorite mode of transport is my own two feet.  Slowing to a stop on a trail to snap a photograph of my companions and surroundings is my way of depicting my life, my movement.  “I am the joy in change and movement” is Steve’s self-expression of identity.  I delight in putting one foot in front of the other, moving forward at a pace that allows awareness, self-control and grace.  “Walk with me” is an invitation to a deeper experience of moving with life, apace with the planet.  For a truly masterful illustration of this theme, visit Steve McCurry’s blog titled “One Step at a Time” here.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Letters

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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?  RThis 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.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: On Top

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“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

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Monument

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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.

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Threshold

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I’m tired and indecisive this evening, so you get two interpretations of this theme.   The first is this one:

Threshold

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:

 

threshold 2This 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!

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Street Life

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street sceneThis 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.