This morning I returned to the bouquet of alstroemeria flowers that I bought early last week. And I began to make more photographs of them. They are still beautiful and now that they’ve held up so well for over a week, I’m willing to take them out of the vase and play with them in different ways.
Because I love flowers so much I always have a hard time doing anything that might cause them to wilt early. So I don’t deconstruct them to create still life settings or pull out petals to photograph on their own. Today I pulled a stem with five flowers out of the vase and laid it on a white background. Then I played with photographing it at varying focal lengths as well as different depths of field, adding and subtracting extension tubes to allow me to get up close or farther away.
I find
Endless Fascination
with photographing flowers. I’m also still fascinated with adding texture to my flower photographs using a photo I made of a wall in our house. And I’m still intrigued with creating toned black and white photos. I’ve decided that I want to create some small prints of some of these images on the washi photo paper I recently bought and frame them in beautiful old small frames.
I am finding more and more that the process of making the print and framing my work makes it feel more complete. I am looking forward to going to second hand stores to look for old frames that I might use.
On a totally different topic, last night I was reading Brené Brown’s latest book, Atlas of the Heart, and I came across a Pema Chödrön quote that I really liked. So I’m sharing it with you here today.
When we practice generating compassion, we can expect to experience our fear of pain. Compassion practice is daring. It involves learning to relax and allow ourselves to move gently towards what scares us…In cultivating compassion we draw from the wholeness of our experience—our suffering, our empathy, as well as our cruelty and terror. It has to be this way. Compassion is not a relationship between the healer and the wounded. It’s a relationship between equals. Only when we know our own darkness well can we be present with the darkness of others. Compassion becomes real when we recognize our shared humanity.
—Pema Chödrön, The Places That Scare You
Practicing Compassion
I feel like I have been moving towards practicing generating compassion for myself and others more and more in my life. And Pema is right, it is a daring practice. It’s scary sometimes to go to the deep dark places inside myself. But I have found it also freeing to be willing to look at those places, accept them, and treat myself with compassion, knowing that I am not perfect and never will be. Still I can do the best I can each day and continue to learn and grow.
Wishing that you are able to treat yourself with great compassion now and always.
May you walk in beauty.
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