Tag Archives: wordpress photo challenge
Wordless Wednesday: Ice Age spring
Comments allowed and appreciated: no restrictions!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Culture
This week’s prompt for the photo challenge is “Culture”: a broad topic, an umbrella under which humanity sits. I tend to spend more time with the artifacts of a culture than with big groups of people. Steve & I sell used books and estate sales items and see a lot of different artifacts of this last century. We work at a living history museum and handle artifacts from the 19th century. And we find artifacts from this century around the neighborhood. So, I thought I’d share a mosaic of shots I’ve taken showing some American artifacts of different centuries. I hope you have fun trying to identify them!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Up
What’s “Up”? This week’s photo challenge theme…a movie I never saw…my youngest child’s very first word (although she said it ‘uppy’ meaning, “Please pick me up, Mommy!”). What’s up with me? I’ve been working at Discovery World Museum and keeping our home business, Scholar & Poet Books, running, so I haven’t been online for two days. But I am up for this! (and down with it as well) The sky’s the limit! Things are definitely looking UP! 
The rooftops of Wauwatosa 
Playing with my dad, 1971. 
My treehouse 
Blannerhasset lantern
The rooftops of Wauwatosa
Playing with my dad, 1971.
My treehouse
Blannerhasset lantern
Wordless Wednesday: Lift my lamp beside the shore
Comments allowed and appreciated! 
Weekly Photo Challenge: Change
Pema Chodron writes in a book called “Comfortable With Uncertainty”:
According to the Buddha, the lives of all beings are marked by three characteristics: impermanence, egolessness, and suffering or dissatisfaction. Recognizing these qualities to be real and true in our own experience helps us to relax with things as they are. The first mark is impermanence. That nothing is static or fixed, that all is fleeting and changing, is the first mark of existence. We don’t have to be mystics or physicists to know this. Yet at the level of personal experience, we resist this basic fact. It means that life isn’t always going to go our way. It mean’s there’s loss as well as gain. And we don’t like that. …We experience impermanence at the every day level as frustration. We use our daily activity as a shield against the fundamental ambiguity of our situation, expending tremendous energy trying to ward off impermanence and death. …The Buddhist teachings aspire to set us free from this limited way of relating to impermanence. They encourage us to relax gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change.”
Much of my life and energy of the past 10 years has been spent trying to cope with change, as I watched my husband’s health deteriorate and my children grow from an innocent childhood into a difficult adulthood. Five years ago, my husband died at the age of 47. In my most agonizing moments of wrestling with impermanence, I would take myself for a walk. Two blocks from my house was a place I liked to call “my prairie”. It was a place where “relaxing gradually and wholeheartedly into the ordinary and obvious truth of change” came naturally. At that time, I’d never heard of Pema Chodron and knew very little about Buddhism. But I could see change all around as leaves turned color, decayed, and returned to the soil where new shoots would eventually spring. Cloud formations came and went, as did the warmth of the sun. Paths mown in the prairie grass grew indistinct and were redirected. Small animal carcases seemed to melt into a puddle of fur and bones until even those were carried off or disappeared. Change was constant and friendly, not the scary beast I was beating from my front door every day.
“My prairie” became a very special sanctuary to me. This is where I went on September 11, 2001 to think. This is where I went when I returned to my old neighborhood after moving in with Steve in 2011. This is where I will wander following the Bridal Shower my daughter’s best friend is throwing for her in June. I bring myself and all my changes into this sanctuary, and I feel immediately embraced by the bigger changes of the Universe in its course. All the impermanence, egolessness and suffering of my life seems to settle down into just What Is when I am here. I feel at peace. It is my pleasure to introduce you to my picture of Change…
Weekly Photo Challenge: Color
COLOR! Wow. Great photo subject! It is now April, and color is slowly returning to the palette of the Wisconsin landscape. Lawns are still brown and dormant, but the little Scilla Siberica is pushing up bright green and blue in my garden. Hooray! I’ve been posting black and white photos for months. It’s time for a change! I am definitely agreeable to embracing the rainbow…and you can take that as a political statement, too, if you’d like.
Emily’s ukelele
scilla siberica
Happy April, everyone! And Happy Birthday to my son, Joshua – thanks for making my life more colorful!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Future Tense
The challenge for this week is Future Tense. I admit, thinking about the future often makes me tense, anxious, sometimes panicky. I have a vivid imagination and a lot of irrational fears. And I’m working on breathing, living in the present moment, all those Buddhist practices that address those thought patterns that Western Pragmatism put into my head. The OMG! your children, your finances, your health, your retirement….you must have a PLAN for the future, you must be PREPARED, if you’re not anxious, you obviously haven’t grasped the situation!!!! There are DANGERS out there in life!
Do you think life is something to be feared? Do you think life is a wonderful adventure, naturally unfolding, peaceful and harmonious and without judgment? How do you want to live your life? You have a choice.
Weekly Photo Challenge: Lunchtime
This week’s challenge is about a universal favorite: FOOD! I grew up in a family that was highly educated about and highly appreciative of food. My family was started in Massachusetts, moved to Chicago and then to California. Regional ethnic influences were explored and absorbed with gusto. Last night, as Steve & I enjoyed dinner at our local sushi bar, we got to talking about our personal culinary histories. Steve adamantly refused to eat anything but hot dogs, potatoes and asparagus until he was 16. Then, on a trip to New England, he actually tried fresh fish and realized that he was missing a world of wonderful taste. You can get lost in a food wasteland, if you’re not adventurous, in the Midwest. But there are plenty of opportunities to branch out.
Last year, on St. Patrick’s Day, we ventured into the city to see what kind of shenanigans we could witness. We had lunch at one of Steve’s favorite places: Beans & Barley. I love it immediately for its California vibe. Here’s a picture of my portabello and gorgonzola and roasted red pepper sandwich with curried potato salad:
And the beer? New Glarus Spotted Cow. The best in Wisconsin micro brews, IMHO. And you can’t buy it in Illinois. Oh, but that’s not all! DESSERT!
The cafe has a deli and market attached, were you can find a variety of locally made sauces, mustards, natural soaps, and ART!
Yes, indeed, ladies & gentlemen! Step right up to the Art-o-Matic vending machine, insert your token, make your selection, pull the knob, and PRESTO! A cigarette-pack-sized piece of genuine, handmade ART will plop into the tray! Decoupage, graphic, random, actual ART. Really, isn’t this a cool idea? Get your local cafe to install one TODAY! All your neighborhood artists will want to supply stock for it. I think it’s brilliant.
This year, on St. Patty’s Day, we’re invited to the Finnegan’s house (Steve’s sister’s) for garam masala corned beef & aloo gobi, naan, chutney and Chai spiced rice pudding. See, living in Wisconsin need not be bland!
Weekly Photo Challenge: Forward
“Forward” is the weekly photo challenge prompt. Hmm. Directional. Nautical. Paths…I have a bunch of shots like that which I’ve already posted. Boring. Check the dictionary. Aha!
3
: notably advanced or developed : precocious
Inspiration! Allow me to (re)introduce Emily. She is turning 22 on Wednesday. Last year, I did a Birthday Post dedicated to her, but she deserves more press. Especially with this theme! Ready, brash, precocious. She is much more than these, but she is these. Ready to act, in many senses of the word. Ready with her emotions, her opinions, her dreams. Ready, often, to take on any challenge. Brash, bold, unreserved, “larger than life”. Precocious….oh, the stories I could tell! When she got 2nd runner up in the Little Miss contest, they asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up. “An artist…like Georgia O’Keeffe!” she replied in her 5 year old voice. In first grade, she was given the responsibility of trotting down the hall to the third grade classroom for reading because she was far more advanced than the rest of her class. Often, however, her teacher would find her in the nurse’s office having an extended visit, chatting, charming, helping out, telling stories. In high school, she was invited to lunch in the teacher’s lounge by a new staff member who thought she was a teacher. She is progressive. She is learning, growing, changing at an incredible rate, still. And she is someone whom I love so thoroughly and passionately that sometimes, I almost can’t bear it….the rush of oxytocin, almost losing her as an infant to meningitis, the fights we had, the pride when she performs, the fear we lived through…we are bound together and moving forward, deeper, higher all the time.
So, now, the photos:
Guess which daughter is Emily…
She is really too fabulous for words, but “Forward” describes some of her.
scillagrace 