Tag Archives: blog

Earth

Posted on by Standard 8

Really look deep. Take in the red and let it sink into your root chakra – fire. Allow the rich azure to settle upon you a royal crown. Draw the green into your heart on each breath and know your majesty. Feel the color filling you up, the coolest draught. Drink yourself drunk on the beauty. Now settle down. Sink your feet like tree roots into the earth. Go down, deep and dark into the fertile soil until you hit the molten core. You are exactly where you are meant to be. Breathing in the earth and breathing out love. There is a a pulse as deep in the earth as in you, waiting for you to lay your hand upon it.

Dead Things

Posted on by Standard 11

It’s good to really look at dead things. To open oneself to a meditation on the destruction and ultimately the transformation of life. What we fear most, when examined closely, is just one more extraordinary moment of beauty in us. Death builds beauty, it doesn’t really destroy it.

No Mantra Required

Posted on by Standard 9

I’ll confess to often getting bored. I suspect this is the well-spring of all my creative talent. Boredom. It is a cloying, needy friend who is satisfied by nothing. Pumpkin seeds are never salty enough. Shopping has never touched it. If the movie isn’t exciting by the fifth minute, boredom is wandering off in search of other stimuli. For someone so devoted to meditating for peace I can be, at times, a restless and demanding peace-seeker.

Photography, curiously enough, is one of a few creative processes that absolutely sates me. I can live in it for hours. Other’s work or my own, doesn’t matter. I love the way a photograph shifts my energy and refocuses me down whole new paths. Black and white in particular can be nostalgic or haunting, mystical or glaring. I am never so delighted then when I stumble upon a photograph that makes me stop my restlessness. Fleeting images inviting me inward and checking boredom at the door. In its own way it is a meditation, photography. The doing and the thinking, the looking and the tweaking. It calms my mind from wandering off in search of other pleasures. Without effort my heart slows and my breathing stills. No mantra required.

Reflecting

Posted on by Standard 9

 

Bear Creek/Sims underpass: Photo by Noelle

Bear Creek/Sims underpass: Photo by Noelle

It shimmers in the dark. Brilliant and colorful. Full while silent. Stories and nothingness. A soul is a curious thing endlessly reflecting light, as it bobs upon the water.

Ephemeral Light

Posted on by Standard 10

Ephemeral is the late afternoon sun. In autumn and spring colors are fleeting. Light passes over all life, a gentle hand grazing the tops of wheatgrass. Such a romance. Infatuated until dusk when a sliver of light caresses the earth and leaves me standing in the field.

Bouquet

Posted on by Standard 2

No witch waiting on Hansel and Gretel. No sickness or evil lurking in the dark of the wood. Only a bouquet of light awaiting my arrival. So delighted I’d worn my best flannel.

Tree I Know

Posted on by Standard 18
In the marsh at Dancing Willows: Photo by Noelle

Quite some time passes when I am in the company of a tree I feel I know. Some I do, as in I have grown up with them or pass them often on my walks. We have that familiarity of time and company. Others simply stop me because I KNOW them, deep at the center of me. Maybe they feel the same. A sense of deep woodiness at the center of their being about me. I walk among them, along creek beds and down into the marsh, running my hands on their bark. Rough and rutted I scratch my back like a bear. I understand Muir’s passion to protect them. I, too, find it hard to return home. The company they offer runs as rich and deep as their roots.