Skip to main content

winter

Winter, with her cold arms and grey dress, has long been a difficult season for me to embrace. The beach comber at my core, longs for sunny days and sandy shores with the obstinant blindness of a two-year old. This year, I have tried to soften in many ways, not the least of which is in my blighted judgments of life. In so doing I learned something important about myself: I don't despise winter, I simply don't like being cold. That is much simpler than actually dreading an entire season. So I have been taking baby steps in the hopes of falling in love with each moment a little at a time.
Today, on my hike I found a rainbow of color, subdued and inspiring, radiating from a landscape ripe with angles, contrasts and line juxtaposed with texture and raw beauty.
Here are a few sights along the way to mark the quiet symphony of winter:Sometimes I stand in awe, captivated, behind the looking lens of my camera, by the incomprehensible beauty in the details of the world we inhabit. In this image the juxtaposition of greys and browns made me think of all the colors of winter. And here are some that I found:
Reds
Oranges:Yellows:Greens:
(Can you believe I found this little haven, tucked away beneath brambles in a protected valley between two hills. I nearly cried with joy at the sight of so much green!! I immediately lay on my belly smelling the moist earth and imagining the fairies of my youth dancing in verdant splendor.)
Blues:Purples and blacks:And my trusty brown Maya who patiently waits while I ooooh and ahhhh over the majesty of it all.

Comments

Michelle said…
the colors of the season omgosh how wonderful! I'm trying to love the season i'm in as well but finding it very hard. I can deal with the cold but how do i embrace the darkness? Maybe by accepting the darkness within myself?
Angelina Lloyd said…
Hmm, embracing the darkness... the difficulty may come from the word "embracing", which seems like something we must do, but maybe we could just stop resisting the darkness... a little less do and a little more be.
I love you
Wind said…
I love the way you presented me with a winter rainbow today. I wish I was your dog. Really!
Shane said…
One of the things that will never cease to amaze me is the magnitude of your artistic talents.
There are many ways in which you are truly talented artistically however photography, my dear, is certainly rising to the top.

I am so proud of you!!

Popular posts from this blog

Coraggio

When everything looks bleak and the darkness cramps against the cold, it takes courage to simply look out from imagined isolation toward the wide horizon of beauty available in every moment.  It takes courage to lean into the sea of life and trust the tide. When weary limbs no longer support us, it takes courage to trust our inner buoyancy and float.  It takes courage, in the face of darkness, to remember the light and sit in all our apparent blindness and listen, silently, to the still, small whisper within.  It takes courage, in that dark hour, when nothing else remains.  Eyes closed.  Eyes opened.  A glimpse, a memory, a fleeting vision of a light so bright it blurs the borders of things seen and things perceived into a comprehensive wholeness of being.  It takes courage.

tree digging

Yes, I know it doesn't look like much.  It was only about 5 inches in diameter and 8 feet tall.  The root ball was no more than 3 feet deep.  But it was a sweet red-bud tree that we planted the year Bodhi was born, his placenta was buried in it's roots and like many of the trees in our neighborhood, it died (see this post to understand why) . I can't say that I mourned its death in a tangible way, rather it produced in me a sort of unnameable melancholy.  I am a woman who loves the spring.  I nearly live for it.  When the first signs of life emerge like a haze of hope, I drink in green with the passion of a desert crawling woman sipping at an oasis.  I gorge.  This year has been hard.  Our neighborhood isn't leafing out in native splendor, instead the tired trees seem to begrudge the effort, only offering a tender shoot or bud occasionally.  The north side of many trees appear to have given up all together, too tired after a long winter...

grief

Grief is defined as a deep or intense sorrow. I have been thinking a lot about grief, about it's wide and sticky reach, about the watery quality of it's absorption and the agonizing effort of swimming to shore. Intense sorrow happens. It is a part of life. Yet we press against it. We try to eradicate it. How? We encapsulate our grief in a story, thus effectively removing us from the immediacy of the pain. The mind promises salvation and begins to tell a story, over and over and over. We listen to the inner ramblings, the constant diatribe, the neurotic attempt to avoid the experience. When someone is hurting we listen to their story, we talk about it, we recount our own story, but we certainly don't jump in the waters of sadness, instead we sit on the bank of our familiar longing. Once, when I was floundering in deep grief, my youngest brother knelt next to me and held me for over an hour. He didn't speak. He didn't commiserate. He just jumped in the ...