Tag Archives: WordPress Weekly Photo Challenge

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Sliced in Half

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I whole-heartedly approve of this prompt.  I can play the magician and slice my picture in half to give you a thrill.  How do you want them?  Diagonal (like the upscale peanut butter & jelly sandwich), horizontal (typical of landscapes and layer cakes), or vertical (which is my favorite, I think, because I like going through life side by side)? 

Half and Half

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Symbols of My Father

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Today is my father’s birthday.  He’s been dead for 5 years, but his influence on my life has been incredibly profound.  I look through my photos and recognize him in symbolic images that point to something he represented in my life.  Representation is a well-developed part of human culture.  We use it in language, art, religion, philosophy, identity and so many other ways.  The real challenge we ‘civilized’ folk have is to strip away representations and come face-to-face with actual entities.  My father was highly educated and an educator himself.  His facility with symbol was quite advanced: he was a mathematician and a writer and combined those skills in his career as a Technical Writer.  I am grateful for the symbols I still see that remind me of his life, his personality, his love. 

My photos are valuable symbols to me.  Especially when I can’t access the actual things they represent.  GWHII RIP 2I miss you, Dad.  Rest in peace.

Symbol

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Door – or No Door?

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The open door…

edge

…is a symbol of the fluidity of life.  We pass through, but may we not also pass around or over?  Most often, I believe, doors are constructions of our own egos, our own consciousness.  We perceive doors even where there are none, just as we construct walls in the wilderness for no reason other than to give us a sense of boundaries.  Why do we find boundaries and closed doors comforting?  Maybe because they give us an excuse for setting limits.  Maybe that’s how they make us feel safe.  Where do you build doorways?  How would you feel in a place where there were none?

Familiar door
Fancy door

Door

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Weekly Photo Challenge: My Muse

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Brie Anne Demkiw’s challenge invites us to share our personal ‘muse’, the subject that we return to for new inspiration and in-depth study.  She has a favorite pier (coincidentally Scripps pier in La Jolla — I went to Scripps College in Claremont), which reminds me of my own pier post, A Jury of My Piers.  My muse is always Nature, and mostly Wisconsin, and you can visit my gallery page of Wisconsin nature shots by clicking here or on Wisconsin Outdoors in the heading. 

But today is an historic day, and I want to celebrate another muse, my youngest daughter Emily.  Emily recently announced her engagement to Nora, and today the U. S. Supreme Court has ruled in favor of a Constitutional right to same-sex marriage in all of the United States.  This is a break-through for the entire nation, but it’s a personal triumph for my family as well.  Emily is a ‘guiding genius’ (one of the definitions of the noun form of ‘muse’); she is a poet and singer and artist and recently became employed by a science surplus store….so she has all the Greek goddess talents going on.  In addition to that, she is an inspiration to me about social awareness, about being aware of yourself, your own psychology, and that of the people around you.  She is extremely intelligent and articulate, so that makes it easy for her to assess and communicate about what she notices and what she thinks.  She has called me out on my hypocrisy and my delusions (lovingly, of course) and challenged me to become more broad-minded.  She is a subject that I find particularly appropriate today….and she’s very photogenic.  So here’s her gallery:

So here’s to Emily and Nora: a bright, fabulous future to you!  May you continue to be an inspiration in the lives you lead and the love you generate.

Muse

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Weekly Photo Challenge: Proud of Roy G. Biv

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The rainbow is a perfect symbol and challenge for this June post! June is LGBT Pride Month, to honor the 1969 Stonewall riots in Manhattan.  My friend and colleague, Jamie Dedes, alerted me to the history of this on her blog.  Here are the facts:

“The Stonewall riots were a tipping point for the Gay Liberation Movement in the United States. In the United States the last Sunday in June was initially celebrated as “Gay Pride Day,” but the actual day was flexible. In major cities across the nation the “day” soon grew to encompass a month-long series of events. Today, celebrations include pride parades, picnics, parties, workshops, symposia and concerts, and LGBT Pride Month events attract millions of participants around the world. Memorials are held during this month for those members of the community who have been lost to hate crimes or HIV/AIDS. The purpose of the commemorative month is to recognize the impact that lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender individuals have had on history locally, nationally, and internationally.”

I celebrate all the colors of the rainbow, all the diversity of the world, the beauty and variety of life, its abundance and its sanctity.  Celebrate with me!  Have a colorful day!

photo by Marni (RIP)

ROY G. BIV

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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: 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