I was fortunate to come across this open water near Tavasci Marsh at sunset, just when the world was golden.
It reminded me how beautiful our planet is, in all its changing moods.
Water and light, combining to bring joy in the moment.
A photograph is a secret about a secret.
The more it tells you, the less you know.
~Diana Arbus~
My cat Foxy is small, but fiercely independent. She knows what she likes when she likes it.
For this afternoon nap, she chose to sleep crossways in this cat basket with one ear completely covered, even though, clearly, the right way to do it was just the opposite. But who is to say which might be more suitable for her?
I learn a lot, watching my cats.
Men wanted for hazardous journey.
Small wages, bitter cold. Long months off complete darkness. Constant danger. Safe return doubtful. Honor and recognition in case of success.
~Sir Earnest Henry Shackleton~
The constantly changing perspective of Alice in Wonderland delights me. First she is tiny and the world is huge. All of a sudden she grows immense and everything around her has shrunk.
Her image has stuck with me as I take pictures, and it sometimes creates dizzying shifts of perspective. As I viewed this desert cliff side, I thought of her possible Southwestern counterpart.
Imagine, if you will, a gigantic artist, coloring this desert scene. He settles carefully into a cross-legged position in the arroyo, trying to fit in amongst the cottonwoods and alder trees.
Out of an immense pencil box he picks up a piece of charcoal and carefully smudges the vermilion cliffs with desert varnish. Then he selects a white pen and limns the outlines of the Octotillo, as it waits for the summer rains…
Imagination must be visited constantly,
or else it begins to become restless and
emits strange bellows at embarrassing moments. Ignoring it only makes it grow larger and noisier.
~Patricia McKillip~
Even with parts missing where the light shines through, the inherent beauty and grace of these ancient ollas, or water jars, is unforgettable. They are a reminder of our past as a human species. Our yesterday.
But they could be part of our future as well. A new physics theory asserts that time may be fluid, allowing the past, present, and future to exist simultaneously.
If that is true, somewhere, a thousand years from now, an archaeologist is fitting together broken teacups and barbecue platters, wondering what our civilization must have been like! Our tomorrow.
A people without history is like
wind through buffalo grass.
~Teton Sioux proverb~
I discovered this pink gargoyle in the middle of the Phoenix historic district, and my mind went back to a recent trip to Notre Dame in Paris where a lot of his cousins live.
Perhaps this little guy taking a vacation, getting away from the cold winter mist near the Seine!
In the middle of winter, I at last discovered that there was in me an invincible summer.
~Albert Camus~
How long has it been
since you’ve had a friend
wind you up in a swing
and then let go
and you spin so fast
that suddenly you are staying in one spot
but the world is spinning
in a widening circle around you
and you are breathless with delight?
The swings are still there.
It is the greatest shot of adrenaline to be doing
what you’ve wanted to do so badly.
You almost feel like you could
fly without the plane.
~Charles Lindberg~
One afternoon I looked up to see two very different clouds. One was brilliant in the sunshine, each layer clearly marked with almost luminous attention. I reveled in its beauty. The second, almost directly overhead was dark, threatening, ominous.
And then I stopped for a moment to reconsider. If I were under that bright cloud, perhaps it would be the threatening one, while the one I’m standing under now would be the bright one.
What view we take of life depends on our perspective!
It is not what you look at that matters.
It’s what you see.
~Henry David Thoreau~
My cat Foxy has a corkscrew for a spine. I tried to figure out why she was doing this maneuver and finally concluded she chose this position because it felt good.
In addition to the yoga pose Downward Dog, perhaps we need one called Curly Cat.
The child is in me still…and sometimes not so still.
~(Mr.) Fred Rogers~
One of the fun things of being a photographer is that you get to go out in the elements when saner folks are at home, staying warm and dry on a stormy day.
I did take an umbrella on this rainy afternoon, but gave up when I found it impossible to balance both bumbershoot and camera in order to get just the picture I wanted. As a a result, the picture of this massive leaf of the giant agave was taken with rain dripping off my nose. Plant and person mirrored each other!
What I liked was the paradox of wet and dry. Here was this desert plant, designed with thick leaves to minimize the loss of moisture, brimming with water.
Hard to imagine, but we CAN embrace opposites if we just try.
If we all did the things we are capable of doing,
we would literally astound ourselves.
~Thomas Alva Edison~
It is always fun when Mother Nature shows you something you didn’t expect to see. Here, the moss patterns reveal the water currents, as clearly as if they’d been drawn with crayon.
And, as I looked closer, I recognized a pattern that I’d seen it before: it resembled the curve in the bark of an ancient tree, growing around the scar of an old, pruned branch.
Count on Mother Nature to be parsimonious. Why invent a new image, when you have one waiting in the wings to be used again!
All the vanity, all the charm, all the beauty of life
is made up of light and shadow.
~Leo Tolstoy~