contemplation

lens-artists: life’s changes

trailed with clouds

the layered memories

of time forever gone

stands between us now

in this spring dawn

There is an earth-shattering moment that barges into a life, unexpectedly, shifting and tearing apart everything … everything in the heart held to be true. After the denial, disassociation, and numbing begin to ease, there is a knowing that the “before you” has been ripped away and now an “ongoing emerging you” has begun a never-ending search for THE door of clarity and resolution. Within that search life continues. Life with its births and deaths. Life creating pathways of sorrow and joy. Pathways of contemplation created through photography and haiku.

rain falls

memories of lost years

left by a cloud

My mother’s passing in the spring of 2016, expected yet unexpected, occurred during this journey with WordPress. The intention to validate my mother’s life opened a gate of posting 100 days of contemplative photography and haiku to remember, honor, and share the life of a woman, my mom.

meandering tales

beyond a haze of tear drops

my mother’s face – mine.

Memories of my mom often come to visit…they are remembered moments that announce her arrival, not as the frail woman with a fierce determination that time had transformed formed but the woman who carried with her the stature of Danish Vikings…warriors, explorers, conquerors, survivors.

morning haze

jewels of rain, falling

in a dream

In our next spring

let’s meet as butterflies

afield

Though we are parted,

If on Casper Mountain Peak

I should honor the sound

of the pine trees swaying there –

with the summer breeze.

After my mother’s memories fade and life’s present moments come into focus I often wonder … if we had met – not as mother-daughter – but as children in a playground would she have wanted to be my friend? I know she would have been my bestest of friends.

Thank you Anne (Slow Shutter Speed) for the invitation to share what has “enriched and/or changed” my life.

a moment in thought

“… what if she wrote more from a personal place …?”

Fujifilm X-T4: f/8 1/480 s 60 mm 640 ISO

Not from the first person perspective. A self so absorbed – so narrow focused – so stuck in the muddle of feelings, thoughts, self negation. Why not write from a present awareness of self – “breathing in, I am aware of my in breath: breathing out, I am aware of my out breath.

Would she then awaken an observer through the flow of ink – ink creating negative spaces introducing a new awareness of self?

life passages … 99

Is my mind elsewhere

Or has it simply not sung?

Hototogisu*

~Ihara Saikaku (1642-1693)**

*Hototogisu, translated as cuckoo, wood thrush and sometimes nightingale.

The bird’s song is a strong but mournful cry.

It is said to die after singing 8,008 times.

It is also known as the “bird of time,”

“messenger of death” and “bird of disappointed love,”

and flies back and forth from this world to the next.

Confucian axiom: If one’s mind is elsewhere, one will look but not see, listen but not hear

**cited in:

The Classic Tradition of Haiku

Edited by:  Faubion Bowers

life’s passages…40

snowymtsweb82918
Nikon D750  f/5.3  1/80s   112mm   100 ISO

Standing at this Threshold

With uncertainty, I question:

What is it that I seek?

Protection? Compassion? Acceptance? Forgiveness? Completion?

Who is it that I beckon?

A father? A mother? A sister? A brother? A companion? A child? A god?

To be? To endure? To offer? To embrace? To validate?

An intentional presence that is drawn upon

A place and time of shadows, myths, and dreams?

Birthed within a family?

Matured within a relationship?

Nourished within a community?

Where the Stillness within Silence,

Affirms the exchange of life’s giving and taking,

Embraces the connection of life’s emotional threads, and

Observes the interdependence of life with non-judgmental awareness,

Yet, knows of a united oneness with another that can not be?

Since it can not be, do I yearn

To know integration through the formation of thought;

To see clarity through the flowing of ink; and

To feel completion through the act of creating?

And then, finally, within the stillness of silence,

I befriend

An internal companion with whom

There is an honoring of the who and what of which I am;

A woman, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a wife, a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, a great-grandmother.

I touch

With reverence the presence of all that was, is, and will be.

I release

The seeking, the beckoning, the yearning to the Winds of Change.

I with uncertainty, Step over this Threshold

Foreseeing a return

~bckofford

2018 photography review, december

Olden memories

so brisk

in their fading,

this moment soon to follow —

shadows on the snow ~bckofford

within the present is the past and the future

Thank you for joining me as I wandered through the photographs posted on this blog throughout 2018 and shared the contemplations that accompanied them.

May each of your steps throughout the new year be accompanied with love-filled companions and joyous moments.

early morning readings II

In this world, time is like a flow of water, occasionally displaced by a bit of debris, a passing breeze.  Now and then, some cosmic disturbance will cause a rivulet of time to turn away from the mainstream, to make connection back stream. When this happens, birds, soil, people caught in the branching tributary find themselves suddenly carried to the past.   ~A Lightman, Einstein’s Dreams

Reality in itself is a stream of life, always moving.  ~Thich Nhat Hanh, The Sun My Heart

Cartier-Bresson’s photograph of children playing in the rubble of war…may become a metaphor or symbol of hope. The image over my desk of a grieving mother and child after an earthquake in Armenia, made by my photographer friend Mark Beach, symbolized for me the sorrow and tragedy that is part of life.  An image I once made of the source of the mighty Susquehanna River–a spring flowing into a bathtub in a field that serves as a water tank for cows, then spilling over to begin a stream–reminds me that the restorative juice “river,” with which I am associated, has many small sources.  ~H Zehr, The Little Book of Contemplative Photography

contemplating the leaf

https://vimeo.com/285926090

One autumn day while walking in a park, I became absorbed in the contemplation of a very small and beautiful leaf in the shape of a heart. It was turning red and barely hanging on to the branch, about to fall. I spent a long time with this leaf …. Usually we think of the tree as the mother and the leaves as its children. But contemplating the leaf, I could see that the leaf was also a mother to the tree. The sap that the tree’s roots take up, called xylem sap, is only water, amino acids, and minerals, not rich enough to nourish the tree. So the tree distributes that sap to the leaves, which, with the help of the sun and carbon dioxide, transform it into phloem sap, rich in sugars, which the leaves send back to nourish the tree. So the leaves are also a mother to the tree. …

“We are like that leaf. When we were in our mother’s womb, we were also linked to her by a stem, an umbilical cord. All our nourishment came through the umbilical cord. Our mother breathed for us, ate for us, drank for us, did everything for us. Then one day that cord was cut, and we started to think of our mother and ourself as two different entities. In fact, our mother continued to nourish us like before. Our parents are present in every cell of our body. We continue to receive nourishment from our mother, as well as the suffering and the troubles of our mother, which continue to influence us, as they did when we were in the womb. That cord is still there, not just until we turn eighteen, but for our whole life.

”When we can see the umbilical cord, we can start to see the countless umbilical cords that link us to life all around us. There is an umbilical cord that exists between us and the river…. So the river is also a mother and there is an invisible umbilical cord between us. … There is another umbilical cord betweens and the clouds, between us and the forests, and another between us and the sun. The sun is like a parent to us. Without our link we to the sun we could not live, and neither could anything else. We are nourished and sustained by countless parents….

Excerpt From
The Other Shore
Thích Nhất Hạnh

what is it that i seek?

snowymtsweb82918

contemplative photography…Nikon D750  f/5.3  1/80s   112mm   100 ISO 

Standing at this Threshold

With uncertainty, I question:

What is it that I seek?

Protection? Compassion? Acceptance? Forgiveness? Completion?

Who is it that I beckon?

A father? A mother? A sister? A brother? A companion? A child? A god?

To be? To endure? To offer? To embrace? To validate?

An intentional presence that is drawn upon

A place and time of shadows, myths, and dreams?

Birthed within a family?

Matured within a relationship?

Nourished within a community?

Where the Stillness within Silence,

Affirms the exchange of life’s giving and taking,

Embraces the connection of life’s emotional threads, and

Observes the interdependence of life with non-judgmental awareness,

Yet, knows of a united oneness with another that can not be?

Since it can not be, do I yearn

To know integration through the formation of thought;

To see clarity through the flowing of ink; and

To feel completion through the act of creating?

And then, finally, within the stillness of silence,

I befriend

An internal companion with whom

There is an honoring of the who and what of which I am;

A woman, a daughter, a sister, a niece, a wife, a mother, an aunt, a grandmother, a great-grandmother.

I touch

With reverence the presence of all that was, is, and will be.

I release

The seeking, the beckoning, the yearning to the Winds of Change.

I with uncertainty, Step over this Threshold

Foreseeing a return

~bckofford

a photo study: contemplative photography II

Beyond the clouds
My gaze goes on and on;
The endless sea:
What lies beyond is unknown
As my gloomy thoughts…

~Lord Suetsune (cited: http://www.wakapoetry.net)

solitarybirdweb

sparrow…    Apple iPad   f/1.8  1/12000s   20 ISO

This week’s photo study was inspired by Howard Zehr, (Contemplative Photography seeing with wonder, respect, and humility).  He invites us to consider,

“… how we might use the medium of photography to stimulate our imaginations, to develop our intuitive and aesthetic sensibilities, to gain new insights. …to stop and look and be refreshed. In order to do this, [he] asks us to ‘re-image’ how we envision and carry out photography.

“Rarely do we spend enough time with an image to ‘mine’ all of its visual, emotional, and spiritual potential. Rarely are we aware of its impact on the emotional as well as the intellectual level. Too often our tendencies to judge and evaluate get in the way of appreciating what we see.”

Photo Assignment:
Discipline yourself to make at least one photograph each day.
Once a week, spend at least 10 minutes with one of the photographs.
As you do, consider three topics in this order:
I see — describe each object, each detail, the light, etc., Then associate: what are you reminded of by the shapes, juxtapositions, etc.
I feel — What do you feel as you look at the image?
I think — Interpret and analyze.
Keep a journal about this and any insights you gain.

“The practice of contemplative photography does not end when you finish shooting… The first thing you should do after [photographing] is spend some time with each of your images.  Try to see which ones work and which do not. Don’t be in a hurry to delete the ones you don’t like, but try to learn from them. See if you can remember what was going on in your state of mind when you [pressed the shutter].”  ~ A Karr & M Wood (The Practice of Contemplative Photography)

I am looking forward to seeing your image that was inspired by Howard Zehr’s photo assignment.  Let’s tag with #aphotostudy.