Every time I close my eyes blowing that trumpet of mine, I look right into the heart of good old New Orleans. It has given me something to live for. –Louis Armstrong
Tag: creative photography
Coping with the Madness of 2020: List It
I woke up this morning with thoughts of an eight-year-old boy, the nephew of one of my kindest friends. He woke up this morning for the first time without his mother’s embrace. She passed yesterday after a very lengthy battle with cancer. Though I didn’t know her or her little boy, I felt myself spiraling for my friend, for her family, and especially for the little one.
As if the out-of-the-ordinary madness of 2020 isn’t enough, unfortunately we also have to deal with dreaded realities like illness and death. The everyday concerns and these hardships combined with the abnormalities of this year can create a perfect stew of unmanageable anxiety and grief.
So how do I cope when life feels impossible and the emotions are too big to manage? In addition to prayer (which we’ll save for another day), I make lists.
Lists, you ask? Not a typical task list but a lists of things I can’t control alongside a list of things I can control.
I can’t bring back the little boy’s mom. I can’t stop the hurt or grief, but I can pray and offer support.
I can’t singlehandedly eradicate the coronavirus, but I can do my part to stop the spread and protect my family and myself by wearing masks and avoiding situations in which social distancing is challenged.
I can’t control how the vote goes tomorrow, but I can control how I participate in the democratic process by exercising my hard-won right and responsibility to vote.
I can’t take away the abuse a friend suffered as a child that continues to hurt and traumatize so many decades later, but I can listen, affirm, pray, and hug.
I can’t make people not be racist, but I can educate and choose to operate from a place of love regardless.
When I was a teen, I encountered the “Serenity Prayer” on the front of a church bulletin, and the first part has been a mantra ever since:
God grant me the serenity
to accept the things I cannot change;
courage to change the things I can;
and wisdom to know the difference. –Reinhold Niebuhr
The lists help me confront the big scary things in black and white, and then, determine my response to them. More often than not, serenity is the welcomed outcome.
About the Images: The images in this post are the full color versions of the grainy black and white photos in the previous post. I’d mentioned in my latest #treelove post that for Creative Auto shots the camera shoots an original color photo AND processes the “creative photo” at the same time. I don’t like these as much, but this is what happens when I don’t remember where I put the images I’d planned for today’s post. 
Coping with the Madness of 2020: Shut It Down!
Grainy Black and White: Fallen Magnolia Leaves
Plans for my “Coping with 2020” series were slightly derailed because, as one of my former students put it, this week was “ugly.” There’s no other way to put it. I worked 14-19 hour days almost every day this week. COVID-19 numbers rose daily. Zeta knocked down trees and power in NOLA and other places. And it seemed the whole world expressed anxiety about what we might wake up to November 4. By Thursday, I was livid because there was no relief from the noise.
One part of 2020’s madness for me is too much doing, too much noise all the time. Everywhere we turn. Noise. Someone or something telling us what to do, how to do it, how to think. Noise. Piling up our plates. Vying for control of our time and energy. Noise. Noise we seemingly can’t escape because doom and Zoom are everywhere.
Grainy Black and White: Impatiens
So how do I cope? I shut it down. Everything. Computers. Phone. All of it. And I sit, drive, or walk in total silence.
I’ve always loved the early morning and late night quiet and the rare but not impossible moment of respite from the daily noise in the middle of the day. But silence is different. We can always find quiet. Silence, ever-present and always within reach, seeks us, but we have to be intentional about being found.
Silence. When there are too many words and too much doing. Silence. When it’s easy to grab the phone and chat away whatever spare moments we can find. Silence. When we can put in our earbuds and tune out the world through music and podcasts. Silence. When the world is loud and boisterous and simply too much.
Grainy Black and White: Begonias
So this week—in the middle of the umpteenth multitasking Zoom meeting, just after the department’s student assistant knocked with one more issue she couldn’t address—I hit mute, closed my eyes and sat in silence.
I’m sure I was on the brink of screaming, “uncle!” That moment in the midst of the chaos saved my sanity.
When the world feels like too much—get off social media, turn off the tv, turn off all screens, ignore the phone and all the doing, and hit mute.
There is freedom and calm right in the middle of the silence.
Grainy Black and White: Magnolia Pods
Mums the Word!
Maybe our world will grow kinder eventually.
Maybe the desire to make something beautiful
is the piece of God that is inside each of us.
–Mary Oliver, “Franz Marc’s Blue Horses,” Blue Horses, 2014
Today’s blog post is brought to you by the autumn flower–mums!
When we celebrated my aunt’s birthday this past weekend–social distancing measures in place–I knew I had to capture the mums welcoming us to her home. I had plans to play around with them later.
I’d been adding “create something” to my daily to-do list for days, but had not managed to check off that “task,” so I sat down with my computer and iPad to “play” during last night’s non-presidential debate[?]. I was able to revisit the mums and transform them in more ways than I can share in one blog post.
Here are three of the 12 pieces I crafted. [I will share some of the others in separate posts].
Maybe, they’re beautiful. Maybe, they’re not. No matter. The pleasure was in the process of creating, not the outcome.
Fly High…
Fly high… where the only chill that cuts through you is the wind. Where your heart pounds from exhilaration not disappointment, and after ascending through cloudy wisps, brushing your wings, there is only the clear blue horizon beckoning you forth… –Virginia Alison
“There Is Simply the Rose” | #WordlessWednesday
“Man is timid and apologetic; he is no longer upright; he dares not say ‘I think,’ ‘I am,’ but quotes some saint or sage. He is ashamed before the blade of grass or the blowing rose. These roses under my window make no reference to former roses or to better ones; they are for what they are; they exist with God to-day. There is no time to them. There is simply the rose; it is perfect in every moment of its existence. Before a leaf-bud has burst, its whole life acts; in the full-blown flower there is no more; in the leafless root there is no less. Its nature is satisfied, and it satisfies nature, in all moments alike. But man postpones or remembers; he does not live in the present, but with reverted eye laments the past, or, heedless of the riches that surround him, stands on tiptoe to foresee the future. He cannot be happy and strong until he too lives with nature in the present, above time.”
–Ralph Waldo Emerson, from “Self-Reliance,” (1841), emphasis mine
Learning to Make Mistakes: Another Mini Lesson in Creative Photography
There is no such thing as a failed experiment, only experiments with unexpected outcomes. –R. Buckminster Fuller
I have this book called Mess, by Keri Smith, creator of Wreck This Journal. The book encourages making a mess and serendipitously arriving at something beautiful. I look at the prompts regularly, but the book has remained untouched for the five months I’ve had it. Why? Because I’m afraid of making mistakes.
Eye roll.
Bear with me. I’m making progress. I now take the book to work with me and I am inching toward making a mess in the book. Until then, I’m learning to take risks and accept mistakes with my photography.
To that end, on our way to shoot a couple of brilliant trees yesterday, my friend Amanda gave me another mini lesson in creative photography–this one on creating sunbursts. After suggesting settings, she said, “You’ll have to play around with it till you get what you want.”
I know photographers don’t always hit the perfect shot the first time, and of course I rarely do, particularly with an 18-200 mm lens that is becoming frustrating (time for a new one!), but there was something in the phrase “play around” that gave me permission to make mistakes and not feel bad about the shots that fell flat.
I zoomed out for some shots. I pulled the lens all the way in for others. Shooting at 18 mm produced the best bursts, but of course, they were tiny. I knew to crop the image to make the sun appear closer, so here’s the lesson I learned intuitively: in art [and to some degree in life] our messes are often salvageable.
So I’ll keep working on it.
The funny thing is, the image I [initially] liked least has sun flare, an effect some photographers try to achieve, according to Amanda.
Serendipity.
Mini Lesson in Creative Photography
During my hour-long escape from my office last week, I ran into Amanda, a photographer friend who does amazing work. Naturally, we started talking about photography. She exclaimed she needed motivation and inspiration. I remarked that I wanted to do “creative photography.” In that instant she gave me a one-minute lesson on adjusting my position and camera settings and using the sun to “light” an object. After a few failed attempts with my iPhone, I nailed it with my Canon. The DSLR for the win!
After “containing” the sun, I shot again to leave space for words.
After Mary Oliver’s “The Uses of Sorrow”. . .
and a bit of post-processing. . .
Voila! A few looks I like…
and of course, the last one…because it’s purple.
Amanda’s own sun-fired dandelion is amazing (linked). If you have a moment, click over and check out her IG feed. Lots of beauty for your soul.
Today marks the beginning of NaBloPoMo. I haven’t quite committed to writing blog posts every day this November because I have other pressing writing goals. However, since I was anticipating using this month’s posts to get caught up on pretty mail [and such], I have already drafted at least 10 of them. I figure I can manage posting daily if I can find a few minutes each day–outside of my designated “serious” writing time and away from the general madness of the end of the semester.
We’ll see. Tomorrow [and the next 28 tomorrows] will tell. 😉
Pics and Posts 