Tag Archives: sun

Seagulls

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Seagulls at Johnson Lake: Photography by Noelle

Seagulls at Johnson Lake: Photography by Noelle

“He spoke of very simple things- that it is right for a gull to fly, that freedom is the very nature of his being, that whatever stands against that freedom must be set aside, be it ritual or superstition or limitation in any form.

“Set aside,” came a voice from the multitude, “even if it be the Law of the Flock?”

“The only true law is that which leads to freedom,” Jonathan said. “There is no other.”

Jonathan Livingston Seagull by Richard Bach

Girls of Autumn: Photo Poem

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Light Trails: Phot by Noelle

Light Trails: Photo by Noelle

A recent study demonstrated that light-emitting photons continue to emit light for up to twenty-eight days, AFTER, the photon had been removed. That is, the light the photon gave off when it was at a given point in space and time would still exist in that space and time even after the photon had moved on. They found the average degradation of that light was approximately twenty-eight days. Give this some real thought. Imagine as you move through your day that you are quite literally walking through light trails everywhere you go. Not discernible to your naked eye, but there, nonetheless. Look at these little girls running, dancing amongst cattail particles on a sunny day. They are not merely dancing in cattail dust, but dancing in light that is refracted off of every surface that autumn sun hits. And even after the photon hits and leaves, its light gift remains floating there for you to touch. The negative of this picture captures this idea for me, as each little girl appears to be leaving a light shadow.

Psychiatric and therapeutic circles spend a great deal of time discussing what Carl Jung referred to as our “shadow”. The side of us we don’t want to see or confront. Our ‘darker’ aspects. But what if the real story isn’t in our darker side, per se, but in our light shadow? What if, by confronting our darkness what we really find is a light trail we are leaving everywhere we go? What if the trail isn’t a dark shadow at all, but like those light-emiting photons we are leaving light wherever we go?

My favorite Thomas Merton quote goes:
“There is no way to tell people they are walking around shining like the sun.”

Hard to get people to believe, but I will tell you all the same. You are walking around shining like the sun and as in the photograph, you are leaving a light shadow everywhere you go. Embrace that today. Namaste

Sunrise

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Re-posted from Enchanted Nature's Facebook page

Photo Re-posted from Enchanted Nature’s Facebook page

At first the light is soft
More a grayish change from a deeper night
Then the gray takes shape, as light causes
The bark to darken to the west
I am steady as the trunk
Eyes, too, are soft upon the grain

We are objects in a photographic negative

Gray seems to move into the deepest purple
Red
Almost without my noticing
It is the great prelude
The rich, earthy drumming that heightens
The senses to the light
To come

Orange like fire streaks the trunk
And lifts the eastern bows up into
Arms praising the Sun God
Who has yet to grace the
Horizon
The purple red drifts into the color
Of shadow and now even the
Nightshade is no longer night

I breathe it all into my inner sanctum
Quiet in my meditation
The thunder of the rise a crescendo
Seen only at the pulse

Such be the morning drama of it all
And it would be
Too much
If I were not already weeping

Spirit Water

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Urban Flow: Photography

Urban Flow: Photography by Noelle

My spirit moves as water.
Fluid and full at a trickle as a gush.
Evaporating in the hot sun, yet frozen as the lake I stand on in muddied boots.
Permeable while demanding as a slap.
Softly infiltrating the skin and wearing my mind round as sea stones.
I pull nutrients from life as the salt water robs the drift wood white.
There is weight in my thoughts.
The settling of sediment of a thousand lifetimes on the reef of gray matter entrenched to the floor of my skull.
And still, I seep into the crevices of dams built long ago. Working steadily and freeing it all a duck feather swirling round in the eddy.
My spirit moves as water, influenced by a divine moon.

Above piece inspired from “New Organism” by Andrea Rexilius

City Walk

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Photo collage: City Pavement

Photo collage: City Pavement: Photography by Noelle

I walk along the Hudson river in Manhattan near my brother’s home. Cicadas are singing in the trees. Sail boats are on the water and today there is a good summer breeze. A father speaks to his son in a language I don’t recognize and the boy squeals with laughter, a language we all know. Two women jog past, sweating and talking about stock trades while four girls ride pink and purple bikes ahead of me. There is a group of East Indian men speaking in excited voices about something in a soccer game on a park bench. A large and very loud, woman covered in tie-dye down to her sneakers offers me jewelry, as an elderly man taps his way up the stairs with his cane behind her. Two men kiss by the water’s edge and a boxer’s head suddenly protrudes from a bush looking for a stick.  I hear the cicadas again in the trees randomly vibrating their timbrel membranes which make those distinct vibrating sounds we all know in summer. It’s like a musical back drop to all these people moving in and out like the waves on the river. More peaceful than the band playing on the speedboat that bursts by, but louder and more strident than the homeless man who speaks ceaselessly in a whisper to no one in particular. I smell the lilies in the garden boxes and fresh cut grass. I stop. A tendril of hair moves along my cheek. All of us are living our lives from cicadas to the homeless man. Each life as dense with events, mundane or exotic, as each seeks out. Every single one unique. Nothing is the same. Not each living thing, not each second that unfolds. That butterfly has never moved or landed on that hibiscus, with the light coming off the water like it is doing right this moment before. That’s why it’s all about The Now. Every second is a snowflake. A divine finger print that is like no other.