The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera ~Dorothea Lange

Fujifilm X-T4: f/4 1/25s 16mm 500 ISO
The camera is an instrument that teaches people how to see without a camera ~Dorothea Lange

Fujifilm X-T4: f/4 1/25s 16mm 500 ISO
Outside my window looking eastward is a field …once a hay field that silently told stories of seasonal changes. My favorite was during time of haying as it awakened childhood memories of harvesting … especially of those times of baling.
All of this ended when the construction of a new housing development began with dust and noise and then the absence of the hawk soaring through the late afternoon sky. After that it became a time of remembering when I was 7, and the sense of okay-ness to wander over to work sites accompanied with childhood curiosity, “what ya doin’?” during the beginning stages of construction.
Then … the clock towers ... of importance, of course, was the building of the tower right across the street and questions about possible blocking of the eastern horizon’s dawn. So a shift from my year long photo project from …

the morning’s sun north to south – south to north travels to a focus on a section of the horizon – away from the clock tower which began to look like a prison guard tower.

Yet, this morning as I pulled the drapes open with joyful anticipation suddenly silenced by …

Before my vision
The fire and smoke of burning
Arose and died again.
To bamboo fields there is no more returning,
Why seek there in vain?
~Diaries of Court Ladies of Old Japan, The Sarashina Diary

dawn’s tranquility
receding shadows
waiting … waiting … wait …

Visit The Life of B to join November’s Shadows of Squares
She with a cup of coffee, embraced within her chilled palms, both blanketed by the first light’s silence … her eyes looking, not seeing the eastern horizon’s slow transition from darkness to light. Suddenly, the sky’s canvas painted by the dance of the sun’s rays and clouds broke through her internal musings, “Wait, wait, please don’t move,” she pleaded as she began a search for her camera and trying so desperately, once again, to win her battle with … the moment by moment changes within life, the ephemeral nature of all that is…
across a concealed blue sky
aimless shifting stories...
gathering and dispersing – obscure particles
painting stories … anew,
moment by moment




Thank you Tina for the week’s lens-artist challenge: Ephemeral
it seems to wash
the summer mountains…
sunrise ~Issa*

Fujifilm X-T4: f/8 1/210s 80mm 400ISO

Fujifilm X-T4: f/4 1/250 s 58.6 mm 400 ISO
He often complained in his last year that he didn’t understand what it really consisted of, the loneliness we all feared so much.

Fujifilm X-T4: f/4 1/75 s 60.8 mm 400 ISO
What is it that we call loneliness, he said, it can’t simply be the absence of others, you can be alone and not lonely, and you can be among people and yet be lonely. So what is it? … All right, he said, it isn’t only that others are there, that they fill up the space next to us. But even when they celebrate us or give advice in a friendly conversation, clever, sensitive advice: even then we can be lonely. So loneliness is not something simply connected with the presence of others or with what they do. Then what” What on earth? (cited: Night Train to Lisbon, p 319.)
“”We live here and now, everything before and in other places is past, mostly forgotten and accessible as a small remnant disordered slivers of memory that light up in rhapsodic contingency and die out again.

Fujifilm X-T4: f/9 1/10 s 80 mm 400 ISO
“This is how we are used to thinking about ourselves. And this is the natural way of thinking, when it is others we look at: they really do stand before us here and now, no other place and no other time, and how should their relationship to the past be thought of if not in the form of internal episodes of memory, whose exclusive reality is in the present of their happing?” Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon, pp, 241-242
There is a profound moment … a second or so before the sun’s light peeks above the horizon … when a quiet stillness embraces the soul. And then … a single bird’s singsong begins a welcoming of the dawn followed by the distant scent of a coffee … releasing me from the solitude of night.

Thank you Stupidity Hole’s for this week’s lens-artist challenge – quiet hours.
Settling, white dew
does not discriminate,
each drop its home ~ Nishiyama Soin

Fujifilm X-T4: f/8 1/600 s 80 mm 400 ISO
“Was it possible that the best way to make sure of yourself was to know and understand someone else?

One whose life had been completely different and had had a completely different logic than your own? How did curiosity for another life go together with the awareness that your time was running out? …” Pascal Mercier, Night Train to Lisbon, pg 97.
Fujifilm X-T4: f/4 1/750 s 65.2 mm 400 ISO
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