skyscape

sunday morning with freud

In a tiny grove with flowers everywhere, young girls of days gone by sit looking in their mirrors.

They say: “Sometimes we think that we have grown old. That our hair is white and our eyes no longer clear as the new moon … but it is not true! Our mirrors are bewitched with winter, and they lie! It is the mirrors that make our hair like snow and wrinkle our young faces! But wicked winter can bewitch our mirrors only, not ourselves … Forever we are unchanged.” ~Wang Chang-ling*

Freud noted that suffering comes from three directions: the feebleness of our bodies, the superior power of nature, and more painful to us than that of any other, our relations with others. He also wrote, “In the last analysis, all suffering is nothing else than sensation; it only exists in so far as we feel it, and we feel it in consequence of certain ways in which our organism is regulated.” The few who possess the ability to experience pleasure through special dispositions and gifts do not have “an impenetrable amour against the arrows of future.”**

*Trans Anonymous. The Jade Flute by various authors. The Project Gutenberg eBook of the Jade Flute

** source: Peter Gray, ed., The Freud Reader  (New York, 1998)

lens-artists: cloudscapes

Across concealed blue skies,

drifting signs.

Imaginary birds and dragons –

aimless shifting stories.

Gathering and dispersing

water droplets and star dust.

In flight,

clouds empty of clouds

solitude
solitude
solitude

trails of clouds

layered memories

a time forever gone

stands between us

dewdrops of autumn

solitude
solitude
solitude

The World is a Book

blogjanuary: joy in life

“The morning chill came through an open window. The morning had begun its transformation from black to variations of dark blues to lighter hues outlining night’s black shadows. It had just passed…the morning ritual. The magical moment of silence in which all of the world – right before the sun’s rays lightens the sky – seems to hush in stillness.


Then in the distance one songbird followed by another as if a congregation’s ‘Amen.’

My mother came to visit. I may have called her as I, with a cup of steaming tea, looked up at the antique framed cross stitch hanging on the dining room wall.

It was during one of those rare visits to her home in which she shared a beautiful piece of counted cross stitch. I saw the delight in her face as she told me it was a gift…a gift of gratitude to someone unknown to me…a stranger. Aged jealously rose unbidden and formed a barrier between mother and daughter.

Within that moment, forgotten…a white tablecloth, each corner embroidered…a crocheted lap blanket…a crocheted dolly sewed onto a pillow cover…applique images within a child’s alphabet book.


And then. ‘Would you like me to make you one?’

‘Yes! Oh yes! Please let me frame it.’


Within an antique framed cross stitch…a magical moment. An exchange of love and validation

Excerpt from, bc kofford, “My Mother Came to Visit”