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Fresh basil and garlic soon to become … (drumroll) … pesto! Have a good day, folks. 🙂
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged basil, food, food photography, garlic, Inspiration, Photography | 2 Comments »
and eyes and feathers and … just all around beautiful.
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged beauty, birds, Inspiration, nature, Photography, Revere Beach, seagulls, waterfowl | 4 Comments »
From her lovely garden in Brooklyn. These that weren’t eaten on the road back to Boston were sliced up with some cucumbers and celery and tossed with oil and vinegar. Good stuff! 🙂
Posted in Inspiration, Kitchen Inspirations | Tagged beauty, family, food photography, gardening, gifts, Inspiration, Photography, red, tomatoes | 1 Comment »
This morning I woke to … sound. Phone alarms going off on multiple floors inside the house. Outside, car horns honking, then the cursing that usually follows honked horns, the beep-beep-beep of delivery trucks backing up and so on and so forth. Life in the big city. By the time I made it to the kitchen table and sat with my first cup of coffee, I’d decided that today I was going to write about silence! Not silence as in the absence of all sound but as in the absence of mankind. I wanted the silences that I had just experienced along the Eastern Shore and in the mountains of Virginia. I scribbled some notes about birdsong and humming insects and water lapping at rocks. I was getting darned poetic. But even as I tried to wrap myself in that real yet also romanticized silence, I could not help but remember sounds I had experienced just two days ago, just one day after returning from my travels.
shore birds
The morning began calm enough. Home brewed coffee is always a good start. But then suddenly the air was filled with the sound of heart-wrenching sobbing. I rushed to the window to see a woman walking away from the neighboring police station. Every few steps she’d turn and look back, her hand sometimes pressed to her heart and sometimes over her mouth. After a while I turned away, not wanting to speculate about the source of her grief. Later that same day I walked into Harvard Square and there too was a woman crying. She sat huddled next to a storefront with a beat up cardboard sign. It said something like, Please help me eat today. She’d propped the sign against her knees. Her hands covered her face, muffling her cries. Her body shook just as hard as the woman I’d seen that morning.
At one point the woman in the morning had thrown back her head, I think to ask God why?, at least that’s what I deduced from her creole. As she stood there for that short moment, the wind whipping her white dress about her dark skin, she brought to mind the Haitian man whom I’ve written about before, the man who regularly travels past the place where I live and who, even in the rain, will lift his face to the sky and sing joyously, perhaps to God as well, songs like Ave Maria.
eastern shore of virginia
The woman in the square was quite young, probably a teenager based on her ragged jeans and t-shirt. Red wavy hair spilled over her hands as she cried. Some people walking by placed money in her cup, but her tears did not stop, I think, until another teen sat down next to her with his sign.
My hearing these women did not change their circumstances but their crying did affect me. I was humbled because no matter what aches or pains or grievances I may have, the sound of their tears reminds me how awfully lucky I have been in this world. It is too easy to shut out the cries of those around us. I do want, and maybe even need on occasion, that special quiet of wild places but I also want to remain aware of the aches, pains, and joys of the loved ones and of the strangers around me as I hope there are those who are aware of mine.
white tailed deer in virginia
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged Inspiration, landscape, life, musings, nature, Photography, silence, sound, storytelling, travel | 1 Comment »
I think these are young mallards because in the right light the heads of some shone faint green. These were lined up on a log in the expansive campus of the Chesapeake Bay Maritime Museum in St. Michael’s, Maryland.
Just sunbathing and cleaning I suppose but this fellow certainly gave me a look of “turn your camera elsewhere.”
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes | Tagged birds, Chesapeake Bay, ducks, maritime, nature, Photography, travel | 1 Comment »
My understanding is that box turtles will eat just about anything that they consider edible. There must have been some tastiness in the stick in this one’s mouth. But we had to interrupt its meal because it was munching in the middle of Wildlife Drive in the Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge of Maryland. It was gently moved to the side of the road where I’m sure it found more good stuff to munch.
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes, On the Road | Tagged animals, Blackwater National Wildlife Refuge, landscape, nature, Photography, travel, turtles | 1 Comment »
The sun beginning to set beneath the Chesapeake Bay. The first of a series of images from a whirlwind trip of five-days and four-nights with stops in Delaware, Maryland, Virginia and New York.
Posted in Inspiration, Nature Notes, On the Road | Tagged beauty, Inspiration, nature, photograph, sunset, travel | 1 Comment »
Water. Rocks. Branches. Sunlight. And a little bit of wind.
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moth found in the tealight candle
I’m going to work with the words of Rector Phillips Brooks (1835-1893) for a moment to help express what I feel after repeatedly seeing footage of the men in Charlottesville, Virginia, especially the night before the violence, their faces illuminated by firelight. What is the source of their purported rage and of their very visible glee? Are they really so blinded by the “charisma” of white supremacists like Richard Spenser, Steve Bannon, David Duke or of a Trump. Actually Trump and charisma are two words I’ve never heard mentioned together. Yet there are people who still eight months into his presidency look up at him with their faces illuminated by something.
Illumination.
It was that sense of illumination that reminded me of a sermon by Rector Phillips Brooks. It is The Candle of the Lord and in it Brooks plays a riff and then does all sorts of variations on the proverbial theme that the spirit of man is the candle of the Lord. He begins, in essence, describing how there are those in this world … people who have a certain light fed by a certain source and they do good work in this world. And then there are those other individuals who too cast a bright light but the source of that light is far different.
[Such a person] “burns so bright and lurid that often the purer lights grow dim in the glare.” And if one were to believe that the source of this man’s light was from a dark place, “then we can understand the sight of a man who is rich in every human quality, cursing the world with the continual exhibition of the devilish instead of the godlike in his life. When the power of pure love appears as a capacity of brutal lust … when the almost divine magnetism, which is given to a man in order that he may instill his faith and hope into some soul that trusts him, is used to breathe doubt and despair through all the substance of a friend’s reliant soul; when wit, which ought to make truth beautiful, is deliberately prostituted to the service of a lie; when earnestness is degraded to be the slave of blasphemy, and the slave’s reputation is made the cloak for the master’s shame …”
He projects light and power “and men who want nothing but light and power will come to it. It is wonderful how mere power, or mere brightness, apart altogether from the work that the power is doing and the story that the brightness has to tell, will win the confidence and admiration of men from whom we might have expected better things. A bright book or a bright play will draw the crowd, although its meaning be detestable. A clever man will make a host of men and boys stand like charmed birds while he quietly draws their principles out of them and leaves them moral idiots.”
It saddens me that there are so many brightly lit individuals, who get too much face time on TV and in social media, let alone book deals, who project power even though they have very little, who as they gain great wealth that enables them to feed their narcissistic desires, are creating a host of white walking (sorry, Game of Thrones) moral idiots in this country that may be the future of its undoing.
But even as I write these words of negativity, I see the positive, in the sacrifices made in Charlottesville, and around this nation each day as people stand up to bigotry and hatred in any form. These are scary times but they’ve been scary before and will be again. Its what we do in this moment that matters. And it all matters.
Posted in Inspiration | Tagged Candle of the Lord Sermon, Inspiration, musing, Phillips Brooks, Photography | Leave a Comment »
Words + Images 