birdwatching

Photo: Wikimedia Commons/Mdf

I dreamed I was under the umbrella of a large ballooning oak. The air around me was motionless and humid and I walked in the shade of the branches like an animal in a giant terrarium. Acorns pressed their points into the cushions of my feet. Overhead, a giant grackle sent a raucous squawk hurling loudly through the bell of the tree. No, it was actually a tiny grackle riding shotgun on my shoulder, croaking right into my ear. As the tiny grackle flew away, its feathers gently morphed into the fur of a tiny gorilla, its wings became arms and its face became the face of a human. When I spotted the tiny human in the viewfinder of my binoculars, blinking his eyelids excitedly on the perch of a faraway branch, I realized the tiny person I was looking at was me.

parsley 4 sale

A few days ago, a jingle bubbled up from out of nowhere. I grabbed the recorder immediately and caught it as it flowed out of me. This is what it sounded like as it as being born. What does it mean? Who knows? I've stopped trying to figure it out. I just take it for what it is...the voice of my imagination...and try to get it written down or on tape. It seems to have a mind of its own.

eyeleted

Sketch for photograph I will be submitting to Houston Center for Photography student exhibition this fall. Photograph is 8.5 by 14 inches. 3/4 inch black frame is 14 by 20 inches. 2 inch white mat.

brown and blue

image: gray's anatomy

left orbicularis oculi seen from behind

You open your eyelids, and you see blue sky. You close your eyelids, and you see the back side of your eyelids. The blue sky is still there, but with the curtains drawn, you can't see it. 

the three-minute soul shower

 Photo credit: Peter Halasz

Life is a series of stresses: the earning of a living, family responsibilities, noise, anxiety, traffic, illness and infirmity. Opportunities for peacefulness are harder to come by. Unlike stress, peacefulness does not come looking for you. You must go looking for peacefulness.

Just as skin accumulates dirt, necessitating showers periodically to renew its surfaces, so too does the soul accumulate layers of world weariness and benefits from routine cleansing. Here is a simple exercise to rejuvenate the soul, to get rid of the burdensome baggage the soul inevitably acquires.

red blueberries

 Photo: Gordana Adamvoic-Mladenovic

Standing in a field of blueberries, her face painted golden by the silence of the afternoon, she let a weight slip from her shoulders. She came into a zone. The sun and the breeze and the blueberries in her hands, so much smaller than grocery-store blueberries. It was like she had never seen a blueberry before. The camera in her mind saw the blueberry field around her as a slide show of still-life photographs, each brilliantly toned with the colors of hands and blueberries: the soil so rich and so brown, the stains on the pads of her fingers, a purple more red than violet, a purple more red than blue.  The sky slowed, then began to sparkle. The blueberries were red, not blue. And she devoted herself fully to the oddness of that experience.