stumped

sometimes i just like to offer something a little unexpected to you all. i have just spent half an hour figuring out what to say about this image. i’m stumped.

fir stumps with eastern gray squirrel

on getting lucky

every now and then i get lucky. no, it doesn’t mean my husband and i sneak in a “nooner.” by lucky, i mean that a STILL photo more or less makes itself. all i have to do is notice it and find my camera. that’s what happened with these  dried palm fronds. they were there. i took their photo. they spilled off the top of the image. it worked. i didn’t even need to crop. they were the right shades of russet and blond. they were the right combination of curled and straight. i lucked out.

dried palm fronds

admitting defeat

i don’t usually buy my STILL blog subjects. it goes against the intention of STILL–to find subjects in my natural environment, every day, through attentiveness and curiosity.  but today i gave in. all the signs of spring are here–the goldfinches are back, the light is noticeably more yellow and brighter than it’s been in six months–but there are still three feet of snow yet to melt. i’m tired of dried bits, remnants of summer and fall. i always get to this point in march, and now, here i am. i needed a little color and something a little closer to alive.

gerbera daisy

hanging by a thread

there are times in life when things have been difficult for a while, and you suspect that they are about to turn around for the better, and then they not only don’t turn around for the better, they accelerate in the wrong direction. our recent mid-March snowfall that added another 4 or 5 inches to the almost 60 inches that have already fallen was one of those moments. we are all hanging by a thread around here.

dried paperwhite narcissus stem

peacefully curled

i immediately associated this arrangement with peacefulness and a sort of lovingly motherly embrace. the more i looked at it the more i realized i could equally have seen it as something tentacled or snakelike or writhing, and i am trying to understand whether there is something about the energy of the curves of these leaves that is intrinsically peaceful, or whether i am bringing something to the image from my own personal associations. sometimes an image is a kind of telepathy, where you intuit what i’m trying to say without my having to say it, and we meet in the space of the image together. but sometimes an image is something i make that you interpret in your own entirely different way.

dried and curled wild iris leaves in winter