art

a creative place…

“…I was hearing the forest grow!

Nikon D750 f/7.1 1/800s 70mm 110 ISO

Then a peaceful sensation came over me, a sense that I didn’t have to do anything, that nature was taking care of itself. …The forest grew itself in the same way that my body breathed. What are Earth’s natural systems, living systems, always up to? Growing and reproducing. The living world is a creative place, because living things are always creating. Humans are not separate from this creation… We are creating our lives, while all around us the world is a creative place. …when I sit and draw, I am expressing that same creative energy. I open and let the drawings emerge.

John F Simon, Drawing your own Path

early morning readings

…he also is as though covered by a mist, a cloud, a darkness that hides everything he does and hides everything that takes place within him.

Trans: Ira Progoff. The Cloud of Unknowing
Nikon D750 f/7.1 1/8002 85mm 160 ISO

And ‘when I speak of darkness’ the author of The Cloud of Unknowing says, it is ‘not the kind of darkness that is in your house at night when the candle is out.’ It is a darkness of a quite different kind. ‘I am referring he says, ‘to a lack of knowing. It is a lack of knowing that includes everything you do not know or else that you have forgotten, whatever is altogether dark for you because you do not see it with your spiritual eye. And for this reason It is not called a cloud of the air, but rather a cloud of unknowing that is between you and your God.'” (IV:18)

early morning readings

Nikon D750 f/4.5 1/1600s 85mm 320 ISO

“…Visual transmission through images speaks directly to intuition and feelings, circumventing the verbal mind. Drawings offer spaces for imagination to wander, evoking meanings too complex or subtle to know intellectually. This state of mind, in which one can receive information through images, points to one of the closest parallels between the contemplative and creative paths. Aesthetic appreciation and receptivity to spiritual teachings are both practiced with an open-ended state of mind, a state of comfortable not-knowing. We draw and meditate in heightened awareness of what is happening in the moment, opening the space for new ideas, and allowing change to happen.”

John F Simon, Drawing your own Path. pg.150

six word saturday: john prine live at west 54th

Lake Marie… Nikon D750 f/6.3 1/2000s 29mm 360 ISO

Lake Marie is named after Mary Bellamy, who was the first woman elected to the Wyoming State Legislature in 1910. Her husband, Charles Bellamy, a surveyor, surveyed the area in 1879 and named the lake (with a French twist) in his wife’s honor

Lake Marie submitted in response to Travel with Intent’s Six Word Saturday challenge.

finding self

Who on earth was she when when no one knew she was Hanna…

“But what made the greatest impression during those early days was the man who employed her at the bakery. ‘What’s your name?’
Hanna hesitated for a while before answering, ‘Hanna, Lovisa, Greta . . . Broman.’
‘Married?’


Sony RX1003 f/2.8 1/250 25.7mm 800 ISO

“‘Yes, but my husband’s dead.”’
“’Now, then,’ said the man, noting it down. ‘Date of birth?’
She was silent. She’d never heard anything so silly. He had to repeat it.
‘”When and where were you born, woman?’
She stated both year and parish, got the job . . . she never forgot the foreman’s questions and repeated themselves to herself every evening for a long time afterwards. Name, married, born? To her it was if she’d fallen into a gigantic hollow on Wolf Mountain. Who on earth was she when no one knew she was Hanna Augustdotter from Braten, granddaughter of the rich Erik of Framgarden, and who become the miller’s wife at Norakvattnet?
Fortunately she wasn’t given to brooding. But many a time over the next few years she had to fend off the feeling of having lost her foothold.”

[Fredriksson, M. (1994). Hanna’s Daughters. The Ballantine Publishing Group: New York]

Ryan Pfluge…