Connecting with the Divine

Sunset on the beach, the colours unbelievably vibrant. I took a great many photos and only towards the end did I think of trying a few ICM shots. (ICM stands for Intentional Camera Movement, where you select a slow shutter speed and move the camera whilst the shutter is open, to create a blur.) These days, there is nothing especially unusual about ICM; you see so many of these images. It can give a nice effect when the scene is about colour more than anything, though images often lack a focal point. I was reasonably pleased with this one, though it wouldn't win any prizes. It does, for me, evoke something of actually being there and witnessing the splendour of this natural phenomenon, fast changing and completely awe-inspiring. It actually made me feel quite emotional, watching the beauty unfold. No two sunsets are ever the same and the fleeting colours can be mind-blowing. To me, this image beckons almost like a portal into another dimension. 

'To watch a sunset is to connect with the Divine.'  Gina De Gorna 

Take heart

I was sitting on Shipley Glen, on a bench, enjoying the scenery when I noticed this 'message' in the sky.  That Stevie Wonder song came unbidden into my mind:

'I just called to say I love you
I just called to say how much I care
I just called to say I love you
And I mean it from the bottom of my heart.'

Isn't it wonderful when the heavens remind you that you're loved? 

Harvest

'When the blackberries hang swollen in the woods, in the brambles nobody owns, I spend all day among the high branches, reaching my ripped arms, thinking of nothing, cramming the black honey of summer into my mouth.'     Mary Oliver

When life (or a friend, in my case) gives you cooking apples, fresh and tart from the tree, go and look for blackberries. Well, that's what I decided to do anyway. In truth, blackberries seem few this year, I suppose as a result of the dry weather. Or maybe I just wasn't looking in the right places. Those I found were quite small but still sweet-tasting. I collected a little bag full. Once the apples were chopped and stewed, I added the blackberries, cooking them enough to release their purple juice but not lose their shape. The concoction needed a sprinkling of sugar to satisfy my sweet tooth but, oh, it was tasty. 

Perhaps we all have a latent hunter-gatherer still within us. Once I got into the swing of it - and managing to avoid the sharp prickles of the brambles - it was a pleasurable half hour or so. There is something satisfying about getting close to mother earth and her bounty. I'm not a gardener at all, but I'm sure it must be very pleasing to harvest your own home-grown crops. 

And yes, I did 'cram the black honey of summer into my mouth' as well as into the bag. You can't return from a blackberrying expedition without juice-stained fingers and a purple tongue! 

Ocean

'You can either see yourself as a wave in the ocean or you can see yourself as the ocean.' 

(Oprah Winfrey)

'The ocean has a life of its own. Its tides, whirlpools, currents and eddies are 
a testament to its conflicting emotions.' 
(Anthony T. Hincks)

Walking the other day and listening to my own heart (as you do) I felt like the ocean. On the surface all is relatively calm, even sometimes sun-kissed, with a myriad little sparkling diamonds and turquoise, luminous depths. The waves are mostly gentle, lapping the shore. There is a pattern to the tides, not exactly the same each day but still reliable, orderly, dependable. Sometimes I hit against rocks, painfully, spray surging up with the impact - and then that too ebbs away. But I am also aware of undercurrents, rip tides, strong and tugging, trying to pull me down. In places they boil into whirlpools. I fight but perhaps the best strategy is to let myself go with it and bob up somewhere else, lifted on to a different shore.  Some day, I suppose, I will drown, claimed by the depths. Maybe by then I won't mind. 

Not grumpy!

Just parking this here for memory's sake. I had my granddaughters for the day. They've just returned from holiday and have another couple of weeks before school restarts. We had a lovely day. We called into a huge, local garden centre that, as well as all the plants and garden stuff, has tropical fish, a few guinea pigs, two enormous tortoises and a parrot called Elvis. It also has an arcade of old penny slot machines, so we had a fun time in there. Back at mine, they drew, made bead bracelets and we went to the local playground (they call it the play park) for them to run off some steam. 

My older granddaughter is almost 11 and suddenly rather 'tween', apparently as perplexed herself, as her parents, are by sudden mood swings and outbursts of frustration. (Trying to put on lace-up shoes was a real trigger point!) Up to now, she and her sister (nearly 8) have been pretty much in step but I can see that is changing. They do still play together well but also need times apart and have times of friction. What still suits the younger one is suddenly of no interest to the older one. I can see we're all in for some fun and games! 

That said, they are both very loving and E (the older one) drew me this picture with a lovely message. She'd be surprised by how often my own grumpy cloud is in evidence... but I'm glad she doesn't see it. 

Heavenly host

I popped into Sandsend's little Victorian church, St Mary's, whilst I was on holiday. It had all these paper angels flying around the nave - rather pretty. It also had a yoga class going on and I think the instructor thought I was taking a photo of all the ladies lying on their mats! I didn't hang around!

I do find I love depictions of angels, in graveyards and in paintings: all those cute, chubby little cherubim, especially that wonderful pair in Raphael's 'Sistine Madonna' painting.  There are angels mentioned many times in the Bible, and some people believe they are here on earth as well as in heaven. I tend to think our angels don't have wings...  It is, however, somehow comforting to me to think that we may each have a guardian angel. There have been times in my life when I felt maybe there was an angel nearby watching out for me. When my daughter first left home for university, one of the ways I coped was to pray and believe that there would be an angel watching over her. I still remember the tingle I felt when I went to visit her and looked out of the window of her room. Although it was a fairly modern accommodation block, it was adjacent to a much older building with fancy carved stonework - and yes, there was a stone angel there, looking over and into her room. 

"For it is written: 'He will command his angels concerning you to guard you carefully.'" Luke 4:10

'See, I am sending an angel ahead of you to guard you along the way and to bring you to the place I have prepared.' Exodus 23:20

"And suddenly there appeared with the angel a great multitude of the heavenly host, praising God and saying:: 'Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace to men on whom His favour rests!'" Luke 2:13

Pastels

I really should find time to make more creative, non-representational images. I do quite enjoy myself when I let go and just let myself play. It's hard to judge whether the results are worthwhile, but these days it seems the only way you can be truly original (by which I mean show something different and innovative) as a photographer is to make composite or artistic images, one way or another. Most good landscape scenes have been Instagrammed to death. Sport, nature, portraits and street are kind of niche genres that I'm not too fond of shooting, and many of their subjects are seen over and over again, somewhat predictably. 'Birds on sticks', jet skis, racing motorbikes and so on...  

I did this one a while ago and just came across it again. It often helps to review these kinds of images some time later. If I still like them after a passage of time, that is good. I can't even recall when or where I took the base images but I was playing with water and reflections and then adding coloured texture layers. (As far as I'm concerned, my creative images are so 'original' that I couldn't reproduce one of them a second time myself, even if I wanted to. I don't keep note of the steps in their creation.) This one would probably look good printed on some matte, textured art paper. Printing is another thing I should perhaps do more of, though then you have to find space to store the prints, always a problem. 

Retreating

This painting, a watercolour called 'Medieval hall' by Rachel Wood, was hanging above the desk in my room at the retreat house where I stayed in Sleights. (The copyright will be hers, not mine, and I hope there is no objection to me sharing it.) The more I looked at it, the more I appreciated it - the soft, loose strokes and gentle neutral tones appealed to me very much. It's the kind of scene I'd photograph if I came across it. Furthermore the empty, cell-like space increasingly spoke to me. 

The week I was away coincided with a heatwave, not the record temperatures we had a few weeks ago but still too hot for me to feel comfortable by the afternoon. (I don't know how I do it... That's the third holiday I've had in succession that coincided with a heatwave - 2019, 2021 and now 2022! Different weeks too.) Some people would love the sunshine but I like to explore and walk on my holidays and it was too hot to do that.  So the week, for me, turned into a bit of a challenge to my boredom thresholds. The wi-fi at the retreat house is, sadly or perhaps deliberately, abysmal, only properly available in one room  and even then so slow as to be fairly impossible to use successfully. So, perhaps fortuitously, my 'go-to' time-waster wasn't readily available! That still left books to read and I finished one and started another, and managed to restore to some extent my powers of concentration, generally rather badly eroded by too much reliance on tech/computer/iPad. 

The week also provided, for me, a way back into a regular rhythm of shared prayer and worship, since guests are invited to join the community in their chapel for short services of morning and evening prayer. Since Covid came along and we all had to lock-down, my regular church going has broken down. I did try a couple of services once things were going back to normal (or as normal as they are now) but I found problems with hearing properly and difficult issues with wearing a mask and specs at the same time, and things went on too long for comfort and then I was pinged by the NHS app for 'being in close contact with someone who later tested positive for Covid' - and it turned out I'd been surrounded by about-to-be-ill people! Though I didn't myself succumb (as far as I know!) that was pretty off-putting. So I haven't so far been back. I suppose I should make the effort again but it hasn't really felt as though it has impacted my faith or my personal rhythm of quiet prayer time. I was having issues before with all sorts of aspects of 'church', which are not resolved...

Anyway, the gentle, quiet discipline of short times of shared worship proved comforting. The Community use several parts of the Northumbria Community's Celtic devotions and, having used those myself (and indeed spent time with the Northumbria Community in the past) it was familiar, like rediscovering a favourite and comfortable garment. I have resolved to go back to using those verses again at home. When the worship sticks to a liturgy that is incredibly helpful to me (being deaf), though I can never hear people's offered prayers, which feels both slightly annoying and slightly disenfranchising, since I dare not pray aloud myself in case I'm just repeating or cutting across someone else. Never mind, I just pray my own prayers in those bits.

On the Thursday evening before I left on Friday, there was a simple, shared Communion, the first I have taken since before lockdown. So that felt warming and nourishing, soul food. 

Retreating... re-treating... perhaps moving forwards rather than backwards? 

'Give thanks to the Lord, for he is good; his love endures forever.'  Psalm 118. 

Patina

I took a holiday recently at St Oswald's retreat centre and community in Sleights, near Whitby. It's run by some friends of mine and is an ordered and peaceful place, with a steady rhythm of days. In the two years since taking it over, they have put a lot of care into refreshing the decor and making it a really attractive and comfortable haven. The main corridor to my room had warm brown walls (probably a Farrow and Ball heritage shade like 'Mouse's Back' or something). It's a colour I would perhaps not normally like, but somehow it looked just right. The corridor had a 'dog-leg' turn in it and, on the facing wall, this beautiful panel of carved wood was displayed, illuminated by a small picture-light. I enquired about its provenance. They told me they had found it abandoned in the garage! It had a hinge and appeared to be the lid of a chest, the door of an armoire or something similar. It was filthy and dusty so my friend had painstakingly cleaned it with a toothbrush to remove the grime and then polished it to bring out the lovely patina. 

I was much taken with this panel. I don't know how old it is, but the craftmanship that went into making it is obvious. There is usually something really attractive about old wood, whether a fine carved object like this or a rough, natural piece. If cared for, it often gets better and more beautiful with age. I wonder if the same is true of us? 

We have not been a family that have handed down many treasures through the generations. Truthfully, most of my ancestors were poor and would not even have had possessions worth handing on. When my great aunt died, I accepted her old drop-arm sofa, covered in an unattractive dull brown mock leather. It made a useful perch in my first apartment, until I amassed enough savings to upgrade to a more modern and functional piece that could be used as a spare bed when friends came to stay. The old sofa was snapped up (free!) by a workmate of mine, which puzzled me until I saw it in their house, reupholstered in a luxurious cherry red velvet and looking quite splendid! I also acquired a huge and heavy chest of drawers from my paternal grandparents. For many years it was the repository of most of my clothing. I can't even recall what happened to that! I suspect it too was thrown out in favour of a smart and more modern 'bedroom upgrade'. I find now, as I have grown older and perhaps a little wiser and more appreciative, that I regret losing these two family links - though I doubt that the requisite gene for valuing and holding on to family heirlooms has appeared or been passed on in the family. Perhaps, like shopping in charity shops, it is something that you either have to be poorer and need to do, or somewhat richer so that it becomes something quirky and valued, with the cachet of sustainability. 

Pebbles

Just a little playing with an image of my pebble collection. I can't truly say why I have a pebble collection... They are stones I've picked up over the years on beaches and brought home (and yes, I know you're not really supposed to do that!) Neatly laid out on a shelf in the sitting room, the hoard is perhaps one of my favourite possessions. There is something about the smoothness of them, their diversity of colour, shape, texture, the way they fit in one's palm - and yet all within relationship to each other. I like the grading from largest to smallest. 

I know my grandgirls appreciate them, especially M. In fact, there is a poignant little story to tell here... Once when the family came over, her father produced the tiny, rounded, orange pebble from his pocket and placed it at the end of the line, saying he'd been carrying it around for ages. It fitted and looked at home there so it was left. The next time the grandgirls came, that very pebble went missing. As they were leaving, I exclaimed about it (without really thinking it through!) M bent down behind the door and then produced it, saying: 'Is this it?' So we replaced it in the line. It was only after they'd gone that I realised the likely truth: that M herself must at one time have found it (she's the kind of child that does amass pockets full of treasures) and she must have given it to her daddy to look after. Perhaps she then forgot about it. Anyway, seeing it on my shelf must have reminded her that it was her treasure, so she reclaimed it, but obviously felt a little guilty, hence the 'finding it' again when I noticed its disappearance. I felt bad afterwards for not thinking ahead, and just keeping quiet when it disappeared from the line-up. I should have realised! But, sweet girl, I do love it and treasure it, all the more so because of that incident. And one day you can claim all of them for your own collection, knowing they were precious to me. They are, as precious as the finest jewels. 

Perhaps we're all a little odd! 

There are moments in life, when the heart is so full of emotion 

That if by chance it be shaken, or into its depths like a pebble 

Drops some careless word, it overflows, and its secret, 

Spilt on the ground like water, can never be gathered together.

Henry Wadsworth Longfellow

Boundaries

Warm and humid today but I needed a walk so I did my usual 'out along the canal and back along the river and through the park' route. It takes me about an hour and a quarter, so it's a decent stretch (and I need to stretch, being crippled up with lower back pain right now. 😬 ) It turned out to be a bit of a nature walk, though mostly unidentified. I saw some kind of furry creature swimming across the canal. It was quite long but I couldn't really see it in detail so I'm not sure if it was a water vole, a mink or a rat. By Hirst Weir, there was a bird that I took to be the heron that is often around there - and then I wasn't sure, as it looked a lot paler than herons usually appear, and thinner too. So maybe a little egret? It was too far away to be certain. Less happily, there are flotillas of Canada geese along the river and in the park. I counted at least 50 birds. In the past few years they have taken over the local waterways and fields, big, messy, aggressive and noisy birds. I dislike them. Finally I spotted a tiny, brilliant blue butterfly near the nature reserve. I'm hopeless at identifying butterflies and it didn't stop still to be photographed or closely studied. It was most probably a Common Blue, though its underwings appeared to be blue too, so possibly a Holly Blue? Who cares, really? It was pretty and a delight to watch. 

The advantage of that particular walk, I think, is that it takes place along various boundaries - the edge of the canal, the river path, the edges of the grassland and woodland. Those liminal spaces are always exciting places to be. I walk the same route over and over and yet still see things afresh each time. 

The scene in my photo caught my eye this time. I'm not sure why, though the soft colours are so harmonious and I like the textures of stone, grasses, old wood. The lady lace is in bloom of course, which always reminds me of childhood... Our family outings into the lanes of the Derbyshire Peak District, and - specifically, for some reason - the May Day celebrations at Wellow, which I used to love, watching the maypole dancing and enjoying the festivities. The hedgerows were always coming into bloom at that time of year - buttercups and lady lace and may blossom. Sweet memories. 

Today isn't May Day... August 1st is Yorkshire Day. Having never actually desired to live in Yorkshire, and finding myself here initially just by circumstance (last minute entry to university), I have now lived here for 52 years. I reckon I can count myself Yorkshire and be proud of it. It gets under your skin and I wouldn't want to live anywhere else now.