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silent sunday
Tag: leaves
weekly photo challenge: under cloudy skies
Nikon D750 f/5.6 1/400s 300mm 2200 ISO
Nikon D750 f/5.6 1/400s 300mm 1250 ISO
Nikon D750 f/5.6 1/400s 300mm 1250 ISO
Yesterday’s cloudy skies and rain dovetailed nicely with Traveling at Wits End’s invitation to photograph under cloudy skies
the giving tree
Ono no Komachi
In this world
the living grow fewer,
the dead increase–
how much longer must I
carry this body of grief?
Ono no Komachi (J Hirshfield & M AratanI, The Ink Dark Moon)
A + J
passages
Unnoticed,
the passage has occurred:
as I brood,
autumn dusk dew drops
fall on my pillow ~Princess Shikishi
“…I asked the leaf whether it was afraid to fall, since it was autumn and the other leaves were falling. The leaf told me, ‘No. During the spring and summer I was very alive. I worked hard and helped nourish the tree, and much of me is in the tree. Please do not think that I am just this form, because this leaf form is only a tiny part of me. I am the whole tree, I know that I am already inside the tree, and when I go back to the soil, I will continue to nourish the tree. … As I drop from the branch and float down to the ground, I will wave to the tree and tell her, ‘I will see you again very soon.'” ~Thich Nhat Hanh, The Other Shore
lens-artists photo challenge: look up
This week Patti at P.A. Moed invited photographers to “look up” and share what we see..I saw a smiling face. What do you see?
what is it that i seek?
Standing at this Threshold
With uncertainty, I question:
What is it that I seek?
Protection? Compassion? Acceptance? Forgiveness? Completion?
Who is it that I beckon?
A father? A mother? A sister? A brother? A companion? A child? A god?
To be? To endure? To offer? To embrace? To validate?
An intentional presence that is drawn upon
A place and time of shadows, myths, and dreams?
Birthed within a family?
Matured within a relationship?
Nourished within a community?
Where the Stillness within Silence,
Affirms the exchange of life’s giving and taking,
Embraces the connection of life’s emotional threads, and
Observes the interdependence of life with non-judgmental awareness,
Yet, knows of a united oneness with another that can not be?
Since it can not be, do I yearn
To know integration through the formation of thought;
To see clarity through the flowing of ink; and
To feel completion through the act of creating?
And then, finally, within the stillness of silence,
I befriend
An internal companion with whom
There is an honoring of the who and what of which I am;
A woman, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a wife, a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, a great-grandmother.
I touch
With reverence the presence of all that was, is, and will be.
I release
The seeking, the beckoning, the yearning to the Winds of Change.
I with uncertainty, Step over this Threshold
Foreseeing a return
~bckofford
oh leaves…
Oh leaves, ask the wind which of you
Will be the first to fall. ~Soseki*
*cited in Jonathan Clements, The Moon in the Pines
