“Life sometimes is hard. There are challenges. There are difficulties. There is pain. As a younger man I sought to avoid them and only ever caused myself more of the same. These days I choose to face life head on—and I have become a comet. I arc across the sky of my life and the harder times are the friction that lets the worn and tired bits drop away. It’s a good way to travel; eventually I will wear away all resistance until all there is left of me is light. I can live towards that end.”
The gift of a new day (I touched on that in Thursday’s post) always offers the opportunity for something new to experience that will only happen or begin on this day. I’m so much more aware of that than in my youth. So here is a list of some opportunities that pop into my mind as I write this post, which could be totally different next week. It’s short because I’m expecting each of us to add our own.
So, new days are for writing our first poem, begin or finish our autobiography, face the blank canvas of our first painting, bake our first pie and be brave enough to eat it, write our first song or maybe just the chorus, take dance lessons or dance in the rain, find the courage to ask her out for dinner, give our granddaughter her first driving lesson, develop our fist black and white print, watching our first sunrise in the desert in a state of awe, running our first marathon or accepting the fact it ain’t gonna happen at this age, begin a new adventure as we are never too old, plant a vegetable garden, learn to ride a horse or a unicycle or snowboard, and the list goes on and on….
Not looking too healthy after scalping and thatching
Since arriving in the Phoenix area, I’ve made 3 trips to visit my parents in Gold Canyon. A couple weeks ago I was shocked to see the condition of the golf course in their community. The grass that was green the week before now looked like it was dying, and it was. So, what happened?
I walked over to the golf course to see about finding some images of the moonrise but clouds prevented didn’t allow those images. But, as many “good photographers” know we must also look behind us and in this case the lingering sunset is what was being given me. This is a jpg file exposure and tone adjustments then cropped to 16:9. The exposure settings were 30s at f22 with an ISO 200. Hand held.
They tell me down here that they are liking this beginning of winter and the cooler temperatures. Yes the 65 degree mornings are nice but, man, it quickly gets up to 95. This Colorado lad has to rethink this. Since, I am somewhat intelligent, and please don’t listen to anyone who says otherwise, I try and get my walk in before 10:00 am. In doing so those shadows I discover are spectacular. So, again it was shadows I was seeing this morning.
“What is at the core of my work is, in essence, a mediation on being a human being.” – Eli Reed
