Free Bing Photos: From lovelifedrawing.com
Before the beetles find me
Or the fire licks my bones
I will forsake this body
That has so lovingly carried me
Long upon roads
Of hot days and cool nights
Deepening forests
And fine ground sands
For in the end it is but a
Beautiful cocoon
And comes a point when this spirit
Must break free
To fly
Free Bing photos
Leaving work it started to rain. I turned, intending to go back in and take the causeway to the parking garage. Save myself a drenching, I thought. As I turned, I felt the coolness of the air that was ushering in the rain caress my cheek. Just a second, really. It lingered upon my face, before my hand touched the door handle and I stopped to turn back into it. Fresh and full of that summer rain, which now dropped in big, slow drops upon my head.
Surely, I’ll get wet walking to the car, I told myself. Hair will be a mess and you’ll ruin this leather bag, said the always cautious, always organized part of my brain. Still, I couldn’t resist the feeling. A curious intimacy of being touched by the weather, for it was a caress, of that I’m sure. A delicious taunting of a lover to come back to bed. The wind was begging me to stay. So I left the door closed and walked out into that summer rain and let myself fall in love.
Sierra Nevada Mountains: Photo by Noelle
It’s curious how we go about eking out a life. Not the financial part, but the creative life. The part of us expressed, even privately, that makes it all seem interesting. Aspects of us that transcend rush hour commutes, deadlines and scrubbing the kitchen floor. We plant bits of ourselves in between jobs, school plays, and the church pot luck. Oasises of fertile land amidst the rocky terrain of daily existence. Music, photography, haiku crafting, a curious penchant for coin collecting or beading seem small when looked at in the scope of our whole life. Yet, those small pieces are what feed everything about us. Our engagement with them gives us the sense we’ve climbed off the conveyor belt and left widget-land, if but for awhile. A few moments with a favored album or doodling with your child are as water to arid land. A creative nitrate for the mind that enlivens the dullest spirit and grows a beautiful life.
Re-posted from the Art For Ever Facebook page
When I look closely at my small life I get caught up in the details of its constrictions. I see pitfalls and turn little disturbances into high drama. When I look around at the people and places I see every day, it can feel closed in and predictive. But if I look up at the expansive blueness of the sky above me, or out upon the grandeur of a cityscape I fine myself breathing more deeply. The dirt of a trail and a green canopy above invert the smallness of my life into an expansiveness that is freeing. If I draw my eye away from the close aspects and out to the wider view I don’t feel smaller. I feel I have grown bigger and become more connected to what is vast and beautiful. What is eternal dissipates my constrictions and my fear of sameness. A few moments of a night breeze through the bedroom window shows me my life is not small. Only my perspective is.
Last years art, waiting on new spring: Photo by Noelle
For my fortieth birthday my colleagues at work gave me a party with black balloons and a wheelchair. I’m normally a person with a sense of humor, but I had watched this parade with colleagues before me. I work with mostly women. We have a habit of telling each other stories of how our time is past as we age. The best years behind us. We’re used up and lost our sex appeal. Men don’t do this to us and they don’t do it to each other. We do it to ourselves. I smiled and thanked everyone, but I knew in that moment, that I would live differently. That I would not see aging as a cross to bear, but an immense opportunity.
I look at this leaf dead, fragile, used up and am filled with its beauty and grace. Even dead, passed its season and it’s still showing the world what it can do. What it has to give. Aging isn’t about years, it’s about perspective. It’s seeing beauty where no one else would think to look. That isn’t weakness, that’s power. In that power is the possibility to transform. To embrace death when it comes and know you are about to pull out your best work yet.
Free Bing Photos
This is re-posted from Jeff Foster’s Quotes page on Facebook. Simply beautiful.
“I remember, early one morning several years ago, while working as a home carer, I found myself washing faeces off a man’s giant, swollen testicles. He was dying of cancer which had spread throughout his testicles and prostate, and in the night he had defecated himself and rolled all around in the mess. We laughed a lot together and we chatted about football and the latest news stories as I cleaned him up. He could barely move, he was so sore and swollen everywhere. He was myself in disguise.
He had a few weeks to live, but he was so alive, so in the here-and-now, without a trace of self-pity. There was no loss of dignity there – there was just what was happening in the moment. He had somehow found a way to deeply accept his circumstances, even though his life had not turned out the way he had dreamed when he was younger and he had time to dream. It took over two hours to get him ready for his day, to hoist him out of his dirty bed, to get him toileted and dressed and into his favourite chair. He didn’t live for long after that. But I will always remember him.
Even when covered in our own shit and without a tomorrow, we are nothing less than divine.”
~ Jeff Foster
Prickly Pear at Bear Creek Lake: Photo by Noelle
Forgive the alliteration it was just too easy. Still, lying in the dirt for this shot, it seemed even I had become part of the scenery, the view. Amazing how much more beautiful the Earth is when you are lying close enough to smell her beauty. To see, up close, how curious and graceful her surface truly is.
Bear Creek Lake, Lakewood, Colorado: Photo by Noelle
The trail is long as a river in the grass. Sand lilies grace the trail dwarfed now and then by soapweed yucca. In this vastness, the short and tall grasses each belong to me, as surely as the wild sky. Storm clouds gloom, but the rainbow only laughs. The sun has broken through and crickets sun themselves on drying stones. They snap and sing, flying just ahead of me into the sagewort and buffalo grass. I hear the mountain plover and the meadowlark close and far, but they are nothing more than flickers in my peripheral vision. So much moves in this rolling prairie, but always sees me before I see it. Still, I do not hunger for company in such a crowd of scrappy rabbits and field mice. If I keep my pace, I may find the pot of gold before the light winks night.
Walking bridge at Clement Park: Photo by Noelle
Not everyone at the edge is leaping towards death. They aren’t all desperately escaping grief and depression. Some of us come to the edge to see who we are in the air. Then the water. The chance to leap, a joy hungered for. For surely, there is exhilaration in risking everything to become who you truly are. In the quiet corners of our lives we daydream of how water transforms.
Fire Blue: Painting and photo by Noelle
Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.
Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
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