tongue and groove

arboretum terrace

it seemed kind of amazing that i had the place entirely to myself in the middle of a Saturday afternoon...

capture

i've been shooting photos since a family friend handed me a black & white film camera when i was eight years old and let me take pictures at the San Francisco zoo. then, because he was a high school photography teacher, he took me the school's film lab on a weekend and let me develop them myself in the darkroom. i've been in love with photography ever since...even though i don't know the first thing about it and use almost exclusively basic point-and-shoot cameras.

what i love is the action of photography. i love capturing an image. anyone who knows me well will tell you that i'm not someone who cares about owning things. i've given away my possessions time and time again as i've moved and moved into different chapters in my life. what i do love to collect are memories...and photographs help me to collect them.

i also like to play with photography...to be silly or absurd...to care less about making pretty pictures than about stepping outside of my comfort zone.

i might get down in the gutter and shoot the 'trash' there... 

or take a walk around the block, shooting random photos in all directions but never once holding the camera up to my face...it's interesting to shoot over your shoulder...to see what you've just left or passed...

or to suddenly realize that as somone who spends a lot of time browsing in libraries or through thrift store bookshelves you've never captured what the view looks like from down there... 

there's a lot of technique in photography as an art. you may use a little or a lot of it. i use, well, none. i shoot with intuition and whimsy...because i'm not shooting for anyone's pleasure except my own.

if you ever find yourself questioning your uniqueness, you have only to look at your photographs. they're hard evidence that no one sees the world exactly the way you do. i know lots of people who shoot beautiful photographs, but i don't try to emulate them nor do i aspire to achieve their pretty results. it's not that i don't admire their work...i do. it's just that i can only capture what *i* see...and that's enough for me.

happy 10.10.10!

10.10.10 sunrise in Jacksonville, FL - photo by idea ablaze

this morning i was looking for something about the energy of this day...and found this. i liked this:

"It is important or useful to remember that the numeral is not the energy of the number but instead serves as a symbol of that energy — the power — contained within it."

and what she writes about the most powerful meditation actually being the simplest...to come back to the breath.

"Begin with the most fundamental part of you: your breath. Attend to your breath, noticing the rise and fall of your chest, the contraction of muscles, the inflow and outgo of the life force within you. Move next to your heartbeat, and feel within you the beating of seven billion hearts, all connected in some small way to the bird-flutter inside your own chest.

Breath and heart; heart and breath."

wishing you the interconnectedness of 7 billion heartbeats today. xo

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don't forget to share your "101010" photos at one of the Flickr pools.

B&W

this has been a day that couldn't make up its mind whether to be sunny or cloudy. as the light shifted back and forth and disappeared and reemerged, i wondered what it would be like to be color blind. my dad's best friend was color blind and i remember being so very confused by that as a child...how anyone could see the world in only black and white. or maybe more accurately, how anyone could not see color.  i still get confused when people who aren't color blind say they dream some or all of the time in black and white. having never experienced it, i can't imagine it. yet i've always been drawn to the beauty of black and white imagery. it sets such an entirely different tone for any captured image. suddenly a sharp-edged concrete bench next to the B of A parking lot can look almost like sculpture. or the late afternoon sun bathing the back of an empty lot can turn it into an oasis from another era. or maybe that's just me and my overly-active imagination. black and white may only be two colors (or the absence of same), but they can lead to multiple interpretations.

earth

yesterday i saw a post from Leah that her Creative Every Day theme for October is earth.

EARTH.

i love nature, even though i'm not even a really an outdoors-y person in a lot of ways. i don't believe in organized religion, but if you ask me if i believe if there's something at work that's larger than egocentric humans, i have only to look at nature to know my answer. i'm awed by nature. it literally boggles my mind....whether it's the topography of the land, the vastness of its bodies of water, the species that inhabit it or the overwhelming space that surrounds it.  nature blows my sh*t away.

this photo was taken in July of this year on a lake about half an hour from my brother's home in South Dakota. my brother spent the first 49 years of his life in Northern California. a year ago, he and my sister-in-law bought a home in a tiny village of 270 people and relocated their family to rural, eastern South Dakota. we all wondered if they were crazy, of course. what would they do there?  surely they'll go mad from boredom, especially when winter weather rolls in and they feel trapped. this is a couple used to traveling (a lot) and often to metropolitan areas. they love fine dining and luxurious accommodations. my sister-in-law loves spas.  they're going to go live in the country?! 

this summer i spent the first two weeks of July in South Dakota, visting my brother's family and enjoying certain parts of South Dakota and western Minnesota. one evening  my brother said he wanted to take my niece and i out on a lake, to go fishing for walleye. here's where i should interject that i'd never been fishing. i'd begged my father to take me fishing with him once when i was about eight, but when we got to the riverbank and he told me to put a worm on the hook, that was the beginning and end of my fishing career. whatever i'd imagined fishing to be, it didn't include touching worms(!) or touching fish or having to take them off the hook. then and there i decided fishing wasn't for me.

my brother is not only an avid sports fisherman (and has been since childhood), he was even a commercial fisherman for years and had his own commercial fishing boat. fishing is probably his #1 stress reliever. the man loves to fish. 

fast forward 47 years. okay, maybe go forward reeeeeeallllyyyy slowly. forty-seven years later there i was with my brother and niece, hearing myself say, "i'll go with you and enjoy boating on the lake, but i don't want to fish." my 12-year-old niece, an excellent fisherwoman since she was tiny, looked at me with a puzzled expression and asked, "why would you not want to?" good question, kid.

i don't have to tell you how this turned out, do i? my brother said he'd take my fish off the hook (should i be so lucky to catch one). it turned out that i loved the whole zen experience of it, was sort of a natural at it and ended up going fishing with him in the Black Hills of South Dakota two more times. i caught fish every time. guess what?  i love fishing. i still don't want to touch the fish (or any worms, thank you very much). but to sit in a small boat on a beautiful lake and cast my life (<----look!  "cast my LIFE"...boy, if that isn't telling) and just wait? where do i sign up?

sitting on that lake in rural South Dakota that warm July evening something hit me:  when was the last time i was in nature where there seemed to be no one around? we were the only boat on the lake that evening. there we were, just the three of us, sitting quietly as the sun set, lines in the water, waiting for the walleye to bite. and i got it...why they'd moved there...why my brother had wanted his family to experience that sort of life.

i lead a very quiet, often solitary life...on the surface...if you were a fly on the wall. but i fill my head with a firehose of information. i watch very little TV, but i consume a lot of social media. even in my blogging circle, we often about creativity. but making art (creating something tangible) is still an act of doing. how often we forget to just be. to just stand in our environment and do nothing...except feel the ground beneath our feet and the wind blowing our hair and the sun warming our skin.

so thank you, Leah, for making me think about the earth. i'm going to take her theme to heart this month...to see if i can redirect my focus from that firehose streaming into my head...to the earth beneath my feet.