Category: Blank Space

Personal ‘wows’

I have been working with a borrowed macro lens this week that is going back to its owner soon. Hence this abundance in macro photography here. I’m enjoying it more than I expected and it pleases me to play with different forms and styles. I see great limitations to my craft here though – on the macro front – and great possibilities at the same time for dreamy illustrative work and wall art.

This exercise, as usually, is prompting a few conversations in my head about personal ‘wows’ that perhaps are more derailing than demanding. But then.. a long time ago I complained about my inability to deal with disappointments in the process of creation so I’m on a mission again.. of finding balance and an honest appraisal of my skills.

And as always, I think about consumerism and in this case about borrowing things.. or rather having to return things quickly. I’ll be honest. I do not like borrowing things – mainly because my children destroy things and then I end up paying for them anyway as I do not like returning items with scribbles on, dolls with hair-cuts, broken lenses.. you get the gist. Well… in this case… the lens needs to be returned soon and I am trying to be very careful and what I have noticed that out of this borrowing creative abundance flows and it makes me happy. I even wonder if I should be borrowing pens.. would I write more then as long as the pen has a return date on. 🙂

How have you been lately?

May be an image of scorpion grass and nature

15 s

Worth the effort?

While the Internet is flooding with messages of growth, renewal and resurrection, we are not there yet… really. We are still in darkness and we think that we will remain in it. Despite the promise, there is no certainty. Anticipation only, perhaps, on the shoulders of those who have never lost hope…

‘Why not to die on the cross for others?’ Jesus said not to Himself. But he did it. Because someone else said so.

He thought it was worth the effort. Do we?

Waste to Art: Guest Post on Laudato Si Blog

Yesterday, I was privileged to contribute my post to Laudato Si blog that is full of great green tips and explores the Christian calling to care for our common home.

Here is an extract to the blog post. Link to the full text below.

A long time ago, inspired by a blogger from Australia, Sash Milne, I started a Nothing New Project, i.e. I tried not to buy anything new for a year, to decrease waste and increase living. While back then I felt quite virtuous about living that way, there was nothing too virtuous about the way I live now, as if back then I stretched myself too far and snapped like a bandana that children get for the Remembrance Day in the UK. When you do a project like that, that forces you to reduce your buying and question every moment when you open your wallet and reach for a coin not out of poverty but out of restraint, you either learn to love yourself as you are, without the gadgets and extra consumption and you learn to live differently or you feel somewhat destabilized because you locked yourself out of participation in the prevailing culture, i.e. the culture of consumerism. Oh, and one more thing, you can also develop the maturity to make yourself accountable for the trail of waste that falls behind you but, in all honesty, this wasn’t the learning outcome that I have satisfactorily reached and consolidated. To consistently swim against the current, you have to decide to consistently swim against the current and that is hard.
What the Nothing New project showed me is that I by and large go through life inattentively, to the shouts of waste that brutally lurk in the shadows of my life or blatantly ‘shine’ on display in my house – as if the psyche couldn’t quite handle the tension between wanting more and needing less. I go through life with an ecological heart that is neither pure nor faithful to the principles of ecological teaching, but I still have hope for myself and the humanity – that we will make progress. Read more..

A deserving Derbyshire soul

“It all starts with rest.” ~ Noel Jesse Heikkinen

Photos taken in Derbyshire, Dovedale and Ambergate, Shining Cliff Woods and Ashbourne Park in Ashbourne and the Museum and Art Gallery in Derby.

It was Derbyshire Day on Sep 22 and so I though I will share with you a few pictures that I took in my area recently. Happy viewing. :)

A deserving Derbyshire soul rests every so often…

I hope you’ve had a good rest this weekend. :)

Aspirations

“Mum, I want to be a policeman,” she said with determination.

“Do you mean a policewoman?” I repeated.

“A police girl then. I am not a woman yet.”

“A police girl? Okey, but what happened to the pilot? You don’t want to be a pilot anymore?”

“No. One of the engines got broken.”

I hate when photographs flood my desktop. I would like them to belong somewhere as quickly as possible. I would like them to find their space, an owner or an accompaniment. They should know their space – just as a good student should know their sitting place in a classroom. Our daughter has just started school and she loves it partially because everything is so free-flowing at the moment for her and she can jump from station to station to explore the classroom. No one asks her to sit in one place. No one asks her to belong to a single location. She can honour her stage in development and explore. Trust and develop her instinct and intuition.

I suspect that my desktop files are at a different stage of development and they would benefit from more structure. I could arrange them better, arrange them according to their place of belonging, according to their chosen location. In the Beatrix Potter movie, there are many scenes in which Beatrix Potter talks to her illustrations as if she was trying to get to know them, to get a response from the work that she created. I suspect the same can be done with our photographic work. Which direction do you want to take? Where do you want to belong? Who do you think you belong to? Where does your gentleness reside? Where is your strength, your voice?

Sometimes we try so hard to protect our right to make our own choices that we stop making choices. The need to be untamed is stronger than reason or logic. It’s stronger than love at times.

After all we just want to be free but do we really? Perhaps not to the degree my files are on my desktop. I love watching the freedom of my kids. I love when they run and play and explore and scream. I love the safety that they they do it with under my watchful eye but at times my watchful eye gets tired with the different directions it has to take to keep them safe, to keep them unscathed and then I welcome the school routines, I welcome the quietness prompted and provoked by homework, I welcome the single-mindedness of the school uniforms. Life is a bit easier then, I think and my personal dilemma and internal conflict related to freedom for self-expression and the stifling aspects of routine life is somewhat resolved by the other ways in which liberation is afforded to me and them. A good degree of routine is necessary after all if one wants to become a police girl.

Aspirations require routines. I am terribly sad to admit this. In fact, I feel a degree of defeat almost as I write this, but it a joyful defeat. One that makes me and the kids smile.