Earth

Posted on November 24, 2014 by noellevignola 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.

Ephemeral Light

Posted on November 13, 2014 by noellevignola 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.

Crack in Stone

Posted on October 24, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 5

Ancient the stone that cracks to slip my spirit free into an open sky.

Fire Tops

Posted on October 15, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 8

I waited in the early morning darkness
Breath billowing out in long streams
Finger tips wrapped tight in fisted hands
Dug deep in pockets

The shift in light was so subtle
Suddenly I could see the higher branches
Two crows peered at me as though I intruded
Naked feathers, naked sight

Then it licked the tops in fire and light
My heart beat faster than the shutter
The moment was brief to catch with camera
Yet as quickly as I began, my hand was stayed

Sunrise is a communion I often forget
A flicker of awakening to the earth and the mind
In activity I am artist but a bit asleep
In stillness I awaken as part of the art.

Disappointment

Posted on October 7, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 5

When I was younger I was easily angered by our species neglect and destruction of the earth and nature. It was a source of political debate and protest. Now a deep sadness comes, not merely for the bits of nature damaged or lost, but for humanity’s spirit that is damaged and lost, as well.

Images from a Train: Sunset in the Farmland

Posted on September 25, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 11

The sunset rolled in on long lines and parallel shafts of deepening orange. The clicking of the rails, with the steady rocking, left my limbs heavy in the seat. Tracters were rolling toward the barns outside my window and the swallows had taken up vigil on telephone lines. At day’s end even the birds know it is best to simply sit and witness.

Images from a Train: Omaha

Posted on September 17, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 4

We arrived at daybreak into Omaha. The station is under construction and there are pieces of its past and future, arising together, before the platform. Sleep came late, but the sun was welcome. Coffee wafted down the corridor from the dining car and few were up yet. Feet and arms littered the aisles as I slipped from the car to the fresh air of the platform. The stone and masonry were still wet from the night’s dew and the conductor pulled tight his coat. Passengers lit up for this brief stop and the long rays of the sun caught the smoke rising, as I turned to walk the station.

As I look at the images now, I wonder at all I did not photograph. Pieces of time and movement that still drift upon my mind, as if the cars were still moving in my head.

Images from a Train: Silos

Posted on September 9, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 8

Silos of the Heartland: Photos by Noelle

Worlds great and small rise and decay along the tracks. Underbellies of mediocre villages and hard edges of factories share the same trail. Worn and haggard becomes beautiful, in a countryside of weathered barns, while never enticing anyone closer. Haunting are silos abandoned while compelling to even the dullest mind to look more closely.

Heather and golden rod litter the edges of hundreds of fields, rich in the green of cornstalks and soy. Yellow are the elder stalks from earlier harvests ready for the straw-men of autumn, while bales for the harvested fields already line the lanes. The clacking of the train cars shifts as the train makes its turn heading north past the width of the Great Mississippi. Muddy spillage pours from drains as the floods of summer still fill its low banks. Barges and small crafts pass beneath the train bridge on their way to the deltas of Louisiana.

Ancient seems this story of fields and metal, floods and drought. Harvests come in that stave off the bankers and pays for the baler before summer’s out. Corn packs the pickups and soy to the moored barges to the south. An endless cycle of life and movement from field to mouth.

Soar

Posted on September 2, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 13

Gulls at Johnston Lake: Photo by Noelle

What if it is all to get us to let go of the cliff ledge? What if we’re all being shaken off our belief we must have security, predictability and knowledge? Every hardship a challenge to the internal structures we create to define who we are, how everything works and what is true and real?

What if all of this is for our awakening? To encourage our understanding of freedom, rather than a lesson on imprisonment. To forget everything we think we know and let go of the ledge. Free fall and trust we will fly. What if it’s the reason we chose to live? We wanted every single moment to happen, because our spirit already knew it could soar.

True Power

Posted on August 28, 2014 by noellevignola Standard 13

Sunset storm over the Rockies: Photos by Noelle

“If you are distressed by anything external, the pain is not due to the thing itself, but to your estimate of it; and this you have the power to revoke at any moment.” Marcus Aurelius