Nothing more beautiful than being in the presence of true mystery and magic.
Look, the first day of snow in 2011.
Posts Tagged ‘video diary’
The full moon hides its face behind the clouds
On autumnal beauty
Nature is beautiful all times of the year to me, but I especially love the stark, rich melancholy that is autumn, when light fades early and the branches get bright and vivid, and then spindly and skeletal. Spooky beauty, dusted with sadness that everything fades with the passing of time.
There’s this grass garden at my local arboretum that’s especially subtle when it comes to the passing of time. Who knew that bunches of grass planted together could be so lovely? Different hues of green and gold, a mix of textures: feathery, papery, silky. I’ve been stalking this garden all year and watching it change slowly, shifting in saturation. The color gets leeched out as the cold approaches and then stays. I finally made a little movie of it because I loved the way the wind makes it move.
It makes me sad that it will only be this way for so long, really. Ephemeral, beauty often is — but that is what makes it so beautiful.
Sometimes I just like to make beautiful things
The day I took this, I was visiting my dad in the rehabilitation hospital, where he’s re-learning how to walk. It was that liminal hour, sort of evening/sunset, and the sky really was this rosy and pink all around me. It was so magical; life felt enchanted despite everything.
This is from early, early morning, and I woke up to the sound of wind rustling at the windows. I instantly grabbed my iPod touch and shot this from my bed.
This is more goofy than pretty, but I vowed a bit ago to document my own physical changes over the years a bit better — there are whole years of my life where very few photographs exist of me personally. (I think I manage to avoid being photographed at age 24, for instance.) I like myself as a purple person.
On equanimity
I’ve been spending a lot of time in hospitals lately. High-pitched, loudly insistent beeps, spindly yet durable equipment, and nurses in bright, shapeless scrubs in cheerful, insistent patterns, their voices equally cheerful and insistent. The hallways are bright and there’s a dispenser of anti-bacterial solution around every corner. In the room over a man lay in a coma, and his family spoke in loud voices, insisting that he’d had enough beauty sleep and needed to wake up soon. There’s a woman in the waiting room who’d been camping out there for about a week, her son in a coma as well. She has pillows, a laptop, an iPhone, books of Sudoku and crossword puzzles. My family and I are lucky in comparison, because my father’s health issues are complex but not insurmountable, and I don’t take it for granted.
Funny, this was a month where I vowed to cultivate equanimity, the idea of keeping an inner harmony in the middle of the rockiness of life. But all you can do is breathe and keep your eyes open sometimes; sometimes, that is enough. In the middle of it all, there is still an Indian summer to enjoy and moments where things are beautiful, all the more precious because they are so fleeting.
