Sliver moon solstice

A Winter Solstice Poem: 

“To go in the dark with the light is to know the light.

To know the dark, go dark. Go without sight.

And find that the dark, too, blooms and sings,and is travelled by dark feet and dark wings.”

 Wendell Berry

capturing december 5: today's temperature

capturing december 3: red

good measure

vernal equinox

I love this time of year.

found object

Found these two photos in a draft of this blog this afternoon, with little other information besides the tags: "family, Paris, photography." It was dated January 11, 2010.

The photos are indeed from Paris, a trip I took about a year and a half ago (time flies). The roses were grown in Rodin's garden. I didn't pay the few Euros extra to enter the house and, in fact, was little interested in the statues anyway. It was all about the flowers.

A little more than a week after my return from Europe, my grandfather had a stroke, and I spent the better part of a day alone in a curtained-off cubicle of an intensive care ward with him. At one point I pulled out some prints I'd been carrying around in my purse. We looked through them together and I attempted to narrate the scenes of Morroccan sunshine, Spanish food and yes, Parisian roses.

There's something about these roses, and their browned edges and autumn light.

Disposable

I just got some prints back from some disposable cameras I was playing around with in the fall. I'm in love with the quirks and the graininess and the colours. Or maybe I'm just in love with that sunshine.

Here's some treats from my late-fall trip to Halifax. Mostly various types of treetops.

9 eyes.

On his website 9-eyes.com, Montreal artist Jon Rafman posts strange and interesting Google Street View images, a collection of the humourous and heartbreaking and everything else that make the human experience what it is. I think what makes the images different from traditional street photography is that the images are taken by a roaming vehicle on behalf of a behemoth corporation. There's a kind of robotic element of the method—cataloguing everything, framing nothing. By assembling these photos, Rafman gives some meaning to the scenes captured by reinvigorating the images with the power (via curation) of a human eye. I can see it.

have you reckon'd the earth much?

Today was the first snow fall that stuck around for a bit.

Now that it's stopped and the sun is shining, the whole backyard is shimmer and glow.

Welcome, day.

still standing by the tracks

Wild and wonderful things found in sunlit corners of a salvage and restoration yard in downtown Cobourg on Saturday afternoon.

my neck of the woods

If one looks closely, it's possible to see (in no particular order): a fifth birthday, a herd of caribou, the hand of Franklin, generations living in harmony, the edges of the outside world and more than one moment of wonder and gratitude.

this is how i work

“What sort of diary should I like mine to be? Something loose-knit and yet not slovenly, so elastic that it will embrace anything, solemn, slight or beautiful, that comes into my mind. I should like it to resemble some deep old desk or capacious hold-all, in which one flings a mass of odds and ends without looking them through.

I should like to come back, after a year or two, and find that the collection had sorted itself and refined itself and coalesced, as such deposits so mysteriously do, into a mould, transparent enough to reflect the light of our life, and yet steady, tranquil compounds with the aloofness of a work of art.

The main requisite, I think, on reading my old volumes, is not to play the part of a censor, but to write as the mood comes or of anything whatever; since I was curious to find how I went for things put in haphazard, and found the significance to lie where I never saw it at the time.”

Virginia Woolf

(And Alfred Einstein's desk.)

dairy dreams

Dairy Queen

2000

Justine Kurland

This photograph means a thousand things and a thousand questions that stay with me long after I walk away.

I'll leave it at this.
At what point do people just start eating their ice cream inside the place where they bought it, where there are tables and chairs and other people we do not know?

Further reading on Justine Kurland is highly recommended for her ways of thinking about: girlhood, nomads, open roads, the Wild West, running away, mamahood, landscape and trains.