Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: art, beauty, illuminate, new years, photography, soul, sunrise
going to work at 5:30am every morning (m-f) is a terrible thing. i am, by nature, a night owl. my mind is at its most productive and active state in the late evening and early morning hours. since i have had to wake up for work as early as 4:30am for the past year, i have tried to discipline myself with a bedtime. most nights i try to be in bed before 10pm. i am usually prostrate, but wide awake for at least an hour before i actually slip slowly, restlessly into a night’s slumber. the sleep is hardly ever restful or refreshing. it seemed for a while nothing good came from being up so early. however, i have more recently began cataloging, through photography, each day’s sunset. i have not gotten to the point where i shoot every day, but i hope that that day will come. in addition, it should also be noted that i haven’t always had my camera on me, so my cell phone has had to suffice. the photos presented below are all taken with my cell phone and were taken the week of dec. 29-today …
new years eve
January 2nd
january 2nd (brightness adjusted)
this morning ...
keep in mind that these have been shot with a cell phone and that to truly capture the beauty of each sunrise, (even the best camera fails) one must take them in with his/her own eyes. i would ask you to wake up for a sunrise and let the first light of day hit your eyes and illumine your soul, just as the light hits the trees. let the beauty speak to you and touch your soul.
cheers.
Filed under: drawing, photography | Tags: art, black & white, dead trees, drawing, landscape, moon, night, owl, photography, soft moon, winter
- soft moon glow
perhaps i will find some time to write about this later, but i wanted to get my lastest drawing up here for you …
cheers.
Filed under: drawing, poetry | Tags: art, autumn, december, drawing, foliage, haiku, leaves, maryland, poetry, seattle, trees, winter, woods
december is upon us, but i cannot say that this writer feels much of a difference from the last days of a month and the first days.
when i left for seattle on nov. 11, the trees here in md were brilliantly colored. the leaves decided to make their last days, their best. i had plans to return from the west coast and photograph various locations catalogued in my mind. i wanted to pull out and dust off my canon slr, which i’ve almost exclusively used to shoot in black and white, and shoot autumn’s dying display in color. two things stopped me from doing so: firstly, the battery in the camera needed to be replaced, and second-of-ly, the leaves could not hold on long enough for me to captured them on film … for when i returned just a week later on the 18th, most of the trees were mere skeletons, stripped of their brightly colored leafy robes. it was quite a let down to say the least, but there is beauty in the dead of winter.
/in the winter wood/
/there is no life to be found/
/felled leaves, fallen snow/
just as the trees in maryland were preparing for the change of seasons, out in seattle, i too, was preparing for a possible change. i have been in the process of applying to the art institute of seattle to go back to school to both broaden my horizons and narrow my focus. half way home in the application process, having last week submitted my financial aid information … waiting on the numbers.
thanksgiving proved to be too much at times. family, and then more family as we celebrated an aunt’s 60th birthday on friday. extensions of extended family … our small house proved too small to afford one solitude of any kind, even for five minutes. i survived.
Filed under: drawing | Tags: art, dead trees, drawing, God, life, media, photography
ezekiel 17:21-24:
“All the (Y)choice men in all his troops will fall by the sword, and the survivors will be scattered to every wind; and you will know that I, the LORD, have spoken.
Thus says the Lord GOD, “I will also take a sprig from the lofty top of the cedar and set it out; I will pluck from the topmost of its young twigs a tender one and I will plant it on a (Z)high and lofty mountain.
“On the high mountain of Israel I will plant it, that it may bring forth boughs and bear fruit and become a stately (AA)cedar. And birds of every kind will nest under it; they will nest in the shade of its branches.
“All the (AB)trees of the field will know that I am the LORD; I bring down the high tree, exalt the low tree, dry up the green tree and make the dry tree (AC)flourish. I am the LORD; I have spoken, and I will perform it.”
… i’ve probably only read this particular text once in my entire life, and it was probably an instance where i randomly flipped gilded the pages of a very dusty bible and my eyes happened to fall on these words. i remembered just one part from this passage, and it became the title of this blog. with so much changing recently, whether it be my evolving theology and subsequent evolving worldview, or my new found desire to challenge myself with goals, i’ve found myself feeling very scattered in every sense of the word. my heart is in many different places. my mind wanders and wonders endlessly at the mysteries and rapturous pain and beauty of life. “scattered toward every wind” has such rich poetic imagery to it. though it is used in a markedly negative way in the above passage, in all my aforementioned wondering, i’ve most times viewed my scattering as a positive development.
i think of the dandelions of spring and summer … as kids, and perhaps even now, we would take these weeds, and blow the white, fluffy seeds off and send them off wherever the wind would take them. these seeds land, and new dandelions pop up everywhere. there is something both nostalgic and beautiful about this natural process … i feel as though i am being blown off my stem, scattering toward every wind, discovering new things about myself, about God, and about this world along the way. i’m becoming pliable … feeling that wherever these winds take me, i, like the dandelion weed, can settle and even flourish.
feeling as though i am already a fairly creative person, this season i’m in seems to have lit a fire underneath me, and provided some inspiration. i hope that this blog will be an appropriate canvas for some art and some thoughts …
in the spirit of the above passage, here is part one in a series of trees that i have started drawing … i started drawing dead trees … since it is pretty much my first foray into drawing, i’ve decided to combine drawing with photography. i tried to photograph each tree in a creative and interesting way to add to their … potential goodness, for lack of a better phrase. anyway, here is part one … which is actually the most recent one. for more info on this particular work, i believe there is a comment section below …
cheers.
