a shell of a thing came to be

The storm came one night, you see

The thunder came and fell the tree.

Falling, falling became the tree.

And a shell of a thing came to be.

A small shell of a thing, you see

Flying high above the sea.

There is no alighting upon the sea, you see

For a shell of a thing above the sea.

Searching, searching for her tree

That fell the night she became to be.

Weary, tired – flying, flying above the sea

Wishing for all to see.

Oh how brave, how marvelous she is to be!

As she flies so high above the sea!

Blind to their eyes, she is to be.

Wings flying, trying so hard to be,

Above the torment of the sea.

For there is no rest above the sea.

Only the falling, falling tree, you see.

fading memories

fading memories… Nikon D750 f/5.6 1/400s 78mm

 “At the threshold of stillness within silence, the scent of mothballs signals the opening of a small steamboat trunk entrusted with long-forgotten memorabilia.  Carefully placed upon a layer of women’s 1930 era clothing are three stacks of yellow ribbon-tied envelopes. Within each are hand-written letters reminiscent of second grade penmanship inquiring, “Dear Mother, how are you?  Fine I hope.”  On the left side is a stationery box filled with certificates of marriage, birth, baptism, and death intermingled with a child’s brilliantly colored drawings. Beneath the box is a small silk sachet holding a solitary diamond engagement ring and an ivory locket.  At the bottom of the trunk, children’s books and wooden blocks with carved letters surround a miniature wooden rocking chair and a one-button eyed velvety-patched teddy bear. I become distracted from the remaining contents as black and white photograph images softly held within the folds of a woman’s garnet silk dress glide in the air and scatter on the floor.

“The photographic images are a visual memoir of a young family where trust once allowed two young sisters to roam free throughout a field of tall, yellowed grass.  ‘How many days,’ my questioning mind wonders, ‘how many days were left before the decline of my father’s health shifted the lights of a colorful present into the gray-shaded time of waiting?’ Within this stillness of waiting, memory tells of a young child seeking solace through repetitive rocking behaviors and of a father’s fragile heart enduring a turbulent wait for a donated aorta.

I hear compassion speak to my heart and I begin to feel how my father intuitively knew of my inner turmoil and of the tranquil stillness within rhythmic repetition.   His gift of a rocking chair tells me some fifty years after his death of the multiple emotional and physical sufferings within his suffering, the interconnectedness of the suffering within the family, and of his wish to ease our suffering.” …

~B C Koeford, A Meditative Journey with Saldage

fading vision II

It is an in between time — stepping through the doorway that separates sleep and wakefulness — when one has a sense of self shifting betwixt roles. The observer of and actor within a movie which randomly muses through moments past or re-creates imagined eras. 

abstract street photography

The awareness of self as an observer and/or director, speaks to me of an inner knowing of something that is vague, immense, and has a Will separate from the unconscious actor “me.”  Let us name this in-between time, Chaos.

Chaos manifested in the beginning.  Within her void, time slumbered in undifferentiated fusion with all the elements, potentials, and seeds of sentience.  Yet, some say that Chaos was born from Mist and that Mist was the first to exist.  

Mist is symbolic of things indeterminate, or the fusing together of the elements of air and water, and the inevitable absorbing of the outlines of each aspect and each particular phase of the evolution process.