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Sometimes I think I owe such sanity as I have left to the animals.
Other times I wonder whether they actually make things worse. Such lack of complication. Such love of the sun. Of course they fight a lot of the time too. Like, yes. Them. |
It's sunning cats and dogs
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Sometimes I think I owe such sanity as I have left to the animals.
Other times I wonder whether they actually make things worse. Such lack of complication. Such love of the sun. Of course they fight a lot of the time too. Like, yes. Them. |
This morning
Dew is perennial; unlike rain, which comes and goes, dew is a daily occurrence. It’s like grace, arising regardless of our merit.
I was searching for a counterweight to the world’s towering edifices of greed, hatred and delusion… A place of light in the world’s swamping darkness. A tiny light barely visible through the trees. A light that was carefully nurtured, lovingly protected, and would not go out. Light, like a witness, like an example of what the world could be.
Obligatory cat picture
That’s my chair, not that you’d know it.
Big nose
I have, under rather regrettable circumstances, acquired another camera. It has a fixed 21mm wide angle lens. Which means I can attempt to convey the impression that Maizy is cute in that head-bigger-than-body way that’s the hallmark of such lenses.
I say attempt because firstly her nose is out of focus and secondly she isn’t cute at all. A split second after the shutter clicked she leapt at me and both I and the camera were liberally smeared with mud.
It’s got a fantastic macro and is altogether a very exciting bit of kit. I’ve been experimenting with it and all the pictures I posted today and yesterday at flickr were taken with it. Apart from the sunflower, which is a few days older but got left behind for some reason.
Tree fungi
Just in time, I hope, for this month’s Carnival Festival of the Trees. A couple more below the break.
qarrtsiluni and the making of images
Hard to say, even harder to spell. But gorgeous to visit. It, qarrtsiluni, is a collaborative literary/artistic space/blog which invites contributions from the big wide world to its regularly-changing themes.
Why am I mentioning it now? Well, obviously, because I’ve just had something published there. And I’m really excited about it.
It’s a bit of a new departure for me, entirely inspired by the current editors, Dave Bonta and Beth Adams. For the previous theme, short shorts they asked me to submit an image in response to a piece of writing – Fish by Zhoen. So I did, and I’m reproducing it below. (I also, incidentally, contributed some words to that theme.)
It’s my first attempt at both responding visually to someone else’s work and at making something rather than taking a straightforward picture. I’m still absurdly pleased with the result and use it as my avatar on all possible occasions even though for most purposes the image ends up so small as to be unreadable.
So right now the theme at qarrtsiluni is education and I was asked to respond to the most amazing piece of writing – Professor Lucifer in the Arena of Angels – by the poet Karl Elder.
You’ll see from reading it that it’s absolutely stuffed full of multi-layered images and meaning, and I had a brilliant time pulling stuff together. In fact most of the elements of the most recent image are from my recent holiday on the Island of Arran and Holy Isle. The brain (not a real one) was taken on my trip to Montreal earlier this year and the glorious darling Maizy who flies in triplicate across the sky did so originally on the beach in France last summer.
It would be so exciting if anybody else felt moved to make an image in response to that poem, or any other writing. Or, of course, contribute more words for image-makers to respond to! Details of how to contact the editors are here.
Minor White
My lovely friend T introduced me to the photographs of Minor White this evening, thinking I would find him sympa. Boy oh boy. Crazy name, crazy amazing guy. He’s taken all the pictures I want to take. Dammit. Look at this, for instance. Have I not striven for just that image? Sigh.
One of his students was John Daido Loori: Author, Artist, Zen Master, a photographer and painter who creates as part of his Zen practice. It’s fascinating to discover these two artists just as I am paying attention to and exploring what I increasingly see as the spiritual practice of looking (and photographing), and the parallels between this and recovering from mental ill health.
The picture of the rock above is from this summer in Arran. Minor White took something very similar, so similar I actually squeaked while going through T’s book.
Most exciting of all? She was one of his students herself. We’re going to have to have a long, long child-free session with several bottles of wine one evening very soon.
Update – to be strictly accurate she was the student of one of his students. A second-generation Minor, as it were.
Watercolour
I love the colours in the water of the canal, as seen by photoshop. This is a picture of the red pillar of a building reflected in the Grand Union Canal. Ask the digital imaging programme to adjust the levels and this is what you get. Such beautiful shades, squiggly lines, swirling textures.
There are other pictures from this afternoon’s walk on flickr.
Time passes
Pretty isn’t always perfect. Or vice versa. At least so I like to think. Which is a roundabout way of introducing the sort-of incorporation of the previous incarnation.
Thanks to the ingenious brain of Mr Hg, much cappuccino and vast slices of very good carrot cake at the local wi-fi-ery, there are now archives dating back to the primordial sludge that was the inception of frizzyLogic, over there in the left-hand sidebar.
There’s nothing as complicated as a content management system or even a database since all that sort of useful stuff was destroyed. It’s a series of static html pages cunningly attempting to give the impression of a continuum. And there are very few images because of course the flickr account is gone beyond recall. But it’s better than a poke in the eye with the proverbial.
frizzyLogic 