Poems, prayers, and play

Yesterday I got up early and went out to the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum with my camera. My goal was to make intentional camera movement photographs and other somewhat abstract photos to use for my online photography class. I am enjoying this class so much and it is challenging me to do new experiments, learn, and explore new ideas each week. Next week is the last week of the class. I will miss it when it is over.

One of my assignments this week is to create a photograph in homage to the work of a favorite photographer. As I have been experimenting more and more with my work, I was thrilled to go back to the work of Valda Bailey as my inspiration for this assignment.

And as luck would have it the skies clouded over in the early morning and even dropped a bit of rain on me as I was photographing. I spent an hour and a half wandering, playing, and making photographs. The iris were in full bloom and the peonies were beginning to bloom. And there were still a few lilacs (not many).

The cloudy sky acted like a giant softbox for my photography and the rain gave me interesting drops of water on many flower photographs that I made. Fortunately it only sprinkled on me and it was a perfect morning for wandering with my camera.

Photo in homage to Valda Bailey’s Blossoms series

The scent of miniature lilacs filled the air as they were still in full bloom all around the areas where I wandered. What heaven it was to catch wafts of their sweet scent.

Blossoming into magnificence

Another assignment in my online photography class this week is to create a photograph that is very intentionally a poem or a prayer. The photograph at the top of this post is my poem photo that I created for this assignment.

Thinking of photography as poetry and prayer feels very inspiring to me. Photography has become more and more a meditative practice for me, more about the joy it brings me than about the results that I create. Taking this class has been a way of nurturing my love of photography and encouraging my soul to blossom.

There are other ways to feed the soul. But I can think of nothing better than spending time in gratitude and wonder in nature.

What do you do to feed your soul?

Who You Are

Who you are is so much more than what you do. The essence, shining through the heart, soul, and center, the bare and bold truth of you does not lie in your to-do list. You are not just at the surface of your skin, not just the impulse to arrange the muscles of your face into a smile or a frown, not jut boundless energy, or bone wearying fatigue. Delve deeper. You are divinity; the vast and open sky of spirit. It’s the light of God, the ember at your core, the passion and the presence, the timeless, deathless essence of you that reaches out and touches me. Who you are transcends fear and turns suffering into liberation. Who you are is love.

— Danna Faulds

You are love my dears, you are life learning about itself, you are soul. My wish for you is that you find ways to recognize and nourish your soul today and every day.

May you walk in beauty.