Glow

A string of white lights in a glass jar, like a hundred fireflies on a summer evening.

Forsythia

One spring, when I was in high school, a friend taught me the Korean word for forsythia. I didn't know what it was called in English, so I couldn't tell her, and for quite a while after that, I only knew the Korean word for it.

I don't remember when I learned the word "forsythia," or when the Korean word or my friend's name fell from my memory. But every spring, I see the yellow blossoms and I think of her.

365 Project Photos

So, regular readers will perhaps have noticed that we're quieter than usual around here. For my part, writing has been low on the list of ways I feel capable of expending my creative energy. Which is really pretty ungood for me, but there you have it. In the absence of writing, I've committed to a 365 self portrait project for the year, which...well, let's just say there may actually be well over 365 photos by the end of the year, but it won't be because I'm diligently taking one photo a day every day. No, not so much.

Which leads me to some genuinely interesting questions about why I'm doing a year-long project, what I want from it, how I want to (gasp!) improve my technical knowledge and execution, why self portraits in particular, how much can you do with self portraits, etc. Which will all maybe encourage me to sit and write at some point, which is a cheerful thought. But for now, I thought I'd take on at least a little bit of the bloggie responsibility around here and share some of the photos I've done so far this month, the ones I'm most excited about.  xoxo

Blur

Self portraits taken today for Rewriting the Story. The assignment was to play with blur and focus--blurring things that might normally be your focus, focusing on things that wouldn't. I was a little stumped about how to control the focus while using a remote (which automatically focuses the camera). I could have set the focus manually and then set the self timer, but really--ten seconds to clamber around too many branches or climb past brambles to perch on a fallen tree? In a delicate, filmy dress? Yeah, not happening. So I messed around with making things "blurry" in one way or another during editing.

The blur interests me on levels I have no energy to delve into right now. I've been sick the past couple of days, and I have other posts stewing in my brain, but I can't write those now either. (It's amazing I managed to get any photos done.) But sometimes, I just like to come here and check in. Or reach out. Make a mark somehow.

Something More Than Babysitting

 

Yes, the child is out of focus here and below. 

He was moving more than you might imagine to look 

at this, and it turns out I'm not so good at catching 

fast-moving kidlets with my phone camera. 

Last night, Lis and Troy both had work-related commitments, so I’d eagerly agreed to spend a few hours hanging out with Penn.

After dinner, we gathered up some plastic bunnies with parachutes and set off for the park with them. Penn explained to me in great detail how you have to climb to the very highest point on the play structure, and then drop the bunnies just so, allowing their parachutes to fill with air and ensuring a good jump. He decided we should take not only his bunny, but the second one—the one his mom and dad use—because it’s better to have a second one, in case one person wants more turns. Because sometimes, sharing just isn’t the most fun you can have, you know?

He asked me if we could stop by his friend’s house to see if she could go to the park with us. So we wandered down to the co-housing community where she lives, the community that Lis and Troy and Penn are also a part of, though they don’t technically live in the community.

Of course, it didn’t take us long to run into someone we know. Because Lis often invites me to join community meals at the common house (and because it’s the kind of place where everyone and their goldfish belongs to the food co-op Lis and I both work for), I’m familiar to many of the members. And Penn, of course, is well known and loved.

So we stopped and chatted. And then we went and knocked on Tatum’s door. It was close to bedtime for her, but she and her mom came outside to spend a few minutes with us before Penn and I walked on to the park. Brie and I chatted and the kids ran around, giggling madly as they pretended to sneak up on us and poke us in our backs. We would break the conversation to feign shock, the kids would run away, and we’d go right back to the conversation.

Once we’d walked our friends back to their house to get ready for bed, we turned around to see another friend, Amy, across the walkway, going to visit Holly at her house. We all greeted one another warmly, and as we chatted, Holly heard us and called hello to us out her kitchen window.

It was pretty much exactly as blissfully warm and community spirited as it sounds, and what really struck me was this: Not one person even asked why Penn and I were hanging out, or where Lis and Troy were that evening. It seemed as if everyone found it entirely normal that a loving, non-parental grown-up would be out and about in the neighborhood with her four-year-old friend on a spring evening.

Eventually, Penn and I wandered on. We climbed the play structure exactly as Penn had described to me, and we dropped the bunnies from the great height, and their parachutes filled with air to help them land safely. 

And then it was getting later, and Penn was yawning, and a tired-whiny note was starting to enter his voice. And I knew just how he felt, so I picked him up to carry him home. The night air was cooling, and his little body was warm and solid as he leaned into me and put his head on my shoulder. We walked several blocks that way, in silence, until my arms couldn’t take it anymore, and I put him down and we held hands the rest of the way home, through a neighborhood where everyone knows us.

Starry, Starry...Well, Everything, Just Now...

This week in Swan Dive, we've been creating texture photos to use for layering. Below is a texture I painted last fall (when I took the class for the first time). It's sort of texturally interesting, but so far I've found that it's not entirely well suited to my photos.



A bit of playing around with it in PicMonkey and Pixlr Express, however, and I got this:



Specifically, I softened and intensified the original a bit (using the Orton effect in PicMonkey), then I took it over to Pixlr and layered on one of their star overlays two times at full strength. And now I can't stop layering it over my photos. For example:



Or this, originally seen edited completely differently here:

Fairy Tale Photo Edits for Today

All played with, as that's my M.O. for this month.

I often have mixed feelings about doing this to photos--it's really fun to do, and I can get really into the experimentation. But I'm not always sure I like the results. The beauty of being able to play with them like this? The two below weren't very good photos to begin with, and now they're at least interesting to look at--see the before and after.

Before: Booooring

After. "Who's that trip-trapping across my bridge?"
All edits and textures from PicMonkey and Pixlr Express

Before

After--texture can be found here

So...definitely more interesting than the originals. Definitely a lot of fun to make. But they're not really anything more than pretty, you know? Not that there's anything wrong with pretty, but apparently I have a complicated relationship with making things that are just pretty.

But I don't always feel this way about editing heavily. Sometimes, it's precisely, exactly what a photo needs to become precisely, exactly what it's meant to become. Below, for instance, is my favorite self portrait so far. In altering the image's texture and color, I turned it into something that has less to do with what I look like, and more to do with being...I'm not really sure how to put it. But it became something outside of myself, something that has a deeper story, and something I hope is more than merely pretty. And I love that.

Also interesting--the texture on the self portrait is the very same texture I used on the orchard photo above. It works well on both, but it's astonishing how vastly different the total effect is, no?

Sunday Drive

I got in my car this afternoon with my camera and no particular plan except to get a cup of coffee and go somewhere beautiful to take some pictures for class. So, coffee in hand, I took off toward those hills I love, thinking I'd probably wind up at Cold Canyon to walk along the creek for a while. But once I got to the turnout where everyone parks to access the hiking trails, it was completely packed with cars.

So I just kept driving--up around Monticello Dam, where Lake Berryessa begins, and really into the hills. And when the road split into 128 and 121, I took 128 toward Napa. I've known for a long time that you can get to Napa that way, of course, but I've never driven the route--I thought it would take a lot longer than it actually does. Frankly, it can't be much more than half an hour longer than taking the highway, and it's about a thousand times more beautiful. I stopped a lot to take pictures.

(Photos are clickable for enlargification-type purposes.)

Caution: Hyper Edited Photos Ahead!

Since playful post-processing in the service of freeing one's creative intuition and discovering one's visual voice is sort of the point of the class, a little bit of hyper editing is a very good thing. (Also: Yet another free online photo editing program!)

And yes, I'm posting photos rather than writing anything real. It's a tiny door back into the blog--say, one of those cat doors you stick in your sliding glass door--but at least I'm crawling through it.

Without further ado, I present to you three takes on some nectarine blossoms. (So my landlord tells me, and she's someone I have reason to trust about plants...though, even she seemed maybe not 100 percent sure? So you know, whatever. Oooh, look! Pretty flowers!)

Just a Photograph, Plus Some Online Photo Editing Options

I've been silent lately, mostly out of exhaustion. I miss it here, though, and I'm hoping to come back soon. Meanwhile, I've just started another class with the lovely Vivienne McMaster. (And there may still be time to join, if anyone out there is interested! You all know I can't say enough about how much I love Viv and her online photography classes, right?)

Anyway, this is a photo I took a week or so ago, but just got around to editing today--in the playful, and hopefully messy, manner of our current assignment. Which is to say--a bit on the over edited side, but totally fun in its over-the-topness!

The dip in the hills (also seen at a distance here) is called the Berryessa Gap. Through it and into the hills a bit lies Lake Berryessa, and around the lake and over the hills and some very beautiful and windy roads you eventually get to Napa and Sonoma, set in their own little valleys in the hills. It's a beautiful place, this place I live.

For those of you who are concerned about Picnik closing this month, do you know about PicMonkey, Pixlr, and Pixlr Express? PicMonkey is the most like Picnik, which makes sense, as it seems to have been developed by the same folks. Pixlr Express is easy and straightforward--I'm having some trouble understanding the main Pixlr program, which is apparently a bit more like Photoshop? Which would explain my confusion. But they're all very, very useful to know about as free online photo editing options. That don't force you to join Google+.

UPDATE: After I posted this, I found this incredibly helpful link to a (rather large) collection of short, easy to follow videos all about using Pixlr! It's a wonderful resource--many, many thanks to whoever is behind this little labor of love.

Notebooks

(This essay is old, but I was thinking about it recently when I read Alice's post here, and then I found the pendant and used it for photo experimentation. [And I have to say, the photos are at least a whole lot better than they used to be!])



On the sofa next to me are no fewer than four journals of various sizes, all partially filled. There are also two sketch books (one large, one small), and a large pad of silky, sturdy graph paper that I like to use for taking notes and making lists and for sketching. In addition to the notebook pages that have been written or drawn on, each of these books has its own collection of scrap paper shoved into it, not quite fitting, getting worn and ripped around the edges that stick out.

I was looking for a list of words I’d written down at some point, thinking that I wanted to use them as the basis for a writing exercise. I scribbled them on one page or another, somewhere toward the back of a journal, or so I thought. But I currently have no idea where they are—I can’t find them in any of these books, and I can’t think of any other notebooks I’ve been schlepping around with me over the past year and a half. (I mean really, isn’t seven enough?) The rest of my notebook collection is neatly packed away in a box, historical documents now. But I came across my inspired word list just recently, so surely it’s in one of these living, breathing, and extremely disorganized books.

But if I can’t find the list, I have at least gotten a chance to look over a portrait of my brain as it really seems to work on a day-to-day basis, and I have to say, it’s a little distressing. For one thing, my journal writing has been less than regular of late. I know that my writing is better when I keep a more regular journal—and by “better” I mean that honest-to-God non-journal pieces of writing happen more often.

On the other hand, it seems that I never stop taking notes of one kind or another, even when the goal isn’t anything you could call “writing.” Example: My life is absolutely littered with tiny bits of paper covered in ideas about food. “Steamed carrots with vinaigrette/dill/etc.” says one. Another: “Greek style ‘yogurt’ with almonds and honey.” And then there’s simply: “coffee and chocolate frappé thingy.” The same page contains notes like, “get soldering stuff working,” and the somewhat cryptic-unless-you-live-in-my-head, “etsy!”

Other pages list the measurements of various beloved children for whom I’ve made clothing or plan to do so. Lists of spices my acupuncturist wants me to incorporate into my diet. Over-ambitious to-do lists that, I note, are in most cases still not completed. Almost dictatorial lists of life goals: “Learn to play the guitar/Make more of my own clothes/write more/learn to balance creative endeavors.”

The sketch books are just as overwhelming, with drawings for pieces of jewelry or clothing I want to make, various designs I’d like to turn into texture stamps for jewelry, not to mention all the things that aren’t sketches (more lists of food, more to-do lists, and the occasional more-to-the-point notes on soldering, polishing, forming a bezel, etc.).

So these notebooks are a mess, and I’m not sure what to think about that. My lack of focused writing frustrates me, and it’s super annoying not to know where things are when you want to find them again. I like to think I’d prefer to have one journal and one sketchbook and fill all the pages before jumping to new books. I’d like to keep my writing and sketching segregated from my to-do listing and recipe imagining. Surely I’d be way more productive if I had a place for everything and if everything were in its place.

And yet, just now I found a year-old sketch I wouldn’t have said I was thinking much about—it’s for a small, roughly drawn landscape pendant, with a tree in the bottom left corner, a hill behind it, and a moon in the top right corner. I hadn’t looked at it in months. But as it turns out, I took almost that exact pendant out of my kiln just yesterday:

I can’t consciously remember the words on that lost list, but maybe someday soon I’ll write something with them anyway.

What Friday Looked Like

Yesterday, the light and the cloud cover were all over the place, even during the 15 or 20 minutes over which I took these photos. But it's amazing what can happen when you adjust your shutter speed more or less correctly, eh?

(This in no way means I knew what I was doing--it only means I'm finally brave enough to adjust the dial and see what happens. Which is no small thing, really, I suppose.)

Crow (sort of the unofficial bird of Davis, CA)

Walnut trees and sky

UC Davis research fields

UC Davis research fields

Flowering quince

The town logo

Where I Lay My Head Down

It seems as if one should more easily fall into a river than out of one, doesn't it? But I've definitely been out of the River the last few days. I've had a lot of moments of noticing, and even of composing those moments into small stones in my head, but not so many moments of actually typing them out. Or of visiting other people, which I actually kind of feel worse about--I like the visiting in this project an awful lot.



For now, though, I'm actually not writing a small stone. Today I took pictures of my bedroom for the prompt over at Bella's 52 Photos Project. My bedroom has been slowly becoming a real room--that is, one with a coherent sort of feeling to it and a sense that someone might actually spend some time living in it. I've rarely had such a bedroom, actually, and it feels really nice to see this tiny room develop into a space with a spirit. I started out this morning trying to get just one good shot, but I ended up wandering in and out of the room through the day, taking pictures as I came and went from the house and noticed the light changing and moving across the room. (I'll spare you from looking at all of the 40 or 50 pictures I took, and even from looking at the 14 or so I actually edited.)

(And then poof! As if by magic, a curtain-y thing appears!)

The beautiful oak bed is with me on a long-term loan from my friend Jenny. It's her bed from childhood, and several years ago her dad shipped it out to her here in California from Philadelphia, our hometown. I remember sleeping in this bed in high school, when I would stay at her house, and I love that it's come to live with me. The mattress is high off the ground--higher than in a normal bed, since this one wasn't necessarily meant for a modern box spring--and even when I sit up, the headboard towers over me. The net effect is of being in a safe little boat, with some enormous, protective shield at my back. The other night, it was raining hard, and the wind was blowing all around my little house, and I lay in my warm bed reading and feeling as if nothing in the world could touch me.



What you can't see clearly in the above picture is that the horizon line is not actually flat--in better light, you can see the serrations of the Pacific Coast Range, west across the Central Valley. I love all the variation in that view, the way the weather comes over the hills from the coast; the way the sunset looks different every single night of the year. I've always loved driving north on the very road I now live on--the road just out this window and over the fence--because the light and the mountains are always so dynamic. And now I can sit right in the middle of my own bed and watch it all.

(Okay, maybe the pictures are a sort of stone for today.)

Winter Trees

On the bike path, dried husks of seed pods cling to the tree, lit from within and hissing against each other in the breeze.

Seedpod

Under a drift of long pine needles, a burst pod of sticky red seeds. They looked fake, all glittery in the sunshine, like tiny plastic jewels.

Miracles

Penn and me yesterday, on a coffee date with Lis. Photo by Lis.

Last week, with a little nudge from a friend, I decided to choose “miracles” as my word for the year. As soon as Julie suggested it, I felt pulled by the word—intrigued, delighted, nervous. It fit well. There’s a lot behind that word for me, and I sat down to write about all of it this afternoon, but I got overwhelmed pretty quickly. There are so many miracles from this past very difficult year, so many people who were involved in creating those miracles or in helping me to see them. But it’s my word for the whole of next year, so I have a feeling I’ll have plenty of opportunity to write about it—no need to get it all out now.

Still, as I wrote and wrote and tried to spin out all the threads of all the miracle stories from my year, one little story popped out at me, so that’s the one I’ll tell you now. Maybe I’ll tackle each story in its time—little piles of straw waiting to be spun into gold.

But this one is about Penn, Lis’s (and Troy’s!) amazing, beautiful little boy (the toddler behind Toddlerblog over there, for those of you who are new here). And I think this story says just about everything you need to know about what it is I'd like to invite into my life by choosing this word.

The morning after I ended my marriage, I moved out of my home and into Lis and Troy and Penn’s spare bedroom. They welcomed me wholeheartedly. Penn and Lis greeted me at their door, and Penn was clearly concerned and full of questions. He wanted to know why I didn’t want to live with B. any more, and I had to tell him that was a really good question, and it deserved a really good answer, but I wasn’t sure how to explain it to him just at that moment, and would it be okay if I thought about it and gave him an answer later?

And he said yes, and then he asked me if I was still sad (Lis had told him I would be, and he could see I’d been crying), and when I told him yes, he came over to me and gave me a hug that made me cry even more. Because the hug he gave me was not, in any way, the hug of a not-quite-four-year-old child. It was the hug of a soul-level friend, a friend who understood at the deepest level that I was hurting. It was the hug of someone who was caring for me in exactly the way I needed to be cared for in that moment, and it was easily the most awe-inspiring, miraculous hug I’ve ever been given.

Borrowed Earrings, and a Love Letter to my Bryn Mawr Friends

(This post was partly inspired by Bella's prompt this week for the 52 Photos Project, which was to photograph something you've borrowed or would like to borrow.)

Five and a half years ago, I attended my fifteenth college reunion, and sometime during the weekend, I admired my friend Giulia’s earrings. Giulia always has gorgeous jewelry, and this particular pair of earrings was made of green amber and silver. She gave them to me—for no particular reason, except that I expressed my love for them, and she loves me. I protested a bit, but she insisted that I take them. So I agreed to take them on loan, and over the next five years, I thought of her—of course—every time I wore them.

This past spring was an especially hard one, but it was also my twentieth college reunion, and I knew I needed to go, because my college friends are some of the dearest, steadiest, most beloved people in my life. And when I packed to head east, I made sure Giulia’s earrings were with me. I figured it was the obvious time to return them.

I’m not sure Giuls remembered that I had the earrings until I handed them to her, but when I gave them back, she proceeded to search through the jewelry she’d brought with her until she found this pair:

She decided I needed to take them home with me, and of course, this time I agreed. At Bryn Mawr, we like to joke that once we’ve done anything twice, it’s a tradition, and so Giulia and I have started our own little earring loan tradition. She picks a pair for me to borrow for five years, and I bring them back at the next reunion.

*******************

It’s difficult to put into words just exactly how much Giulia and all my other friends from college mean to me. I’ve thought of them pretty much every day since last May, and the energy of their love washes over me frequently. That love has always been there, ever since college, but I think something about this particular reunion marker really hit many of us hard, in the best possible way.

I had a moment during the weekend, in our class meeting, when I looked around the vividly familiar dorm living room, and saw all those vividly familiar faces—the faces of people who are incredibly close to me, and the faces of people I really barely know, except that I’ve “known” them in some way for the last twenty-four years. That’s more than half my life.

Faces you’ve known for more than half your life mean something—something significant. They may not be the faces of dear friends, and yet—they’re not at all strangers. They’re something more than community, even, though they’re certainly that. Perhaps they’re like an odd kind of extended family, people you feel connected to, people who share some vitally important part of your history, even if you really don’t know a whole lot about who they are, or what their daily lives are like.

And then there are the people who actually are my dear friends. I don’t know that there are really words that can adequately describe the feelings of nourishment, love, acceptance, gratitude, comfort, support that I receive from this group of people. They’re home to me.

I was stunned, several times during the weekend, to realize that these friends have always seen me, since I was seventeen, in ways that it took me many, many years to see myself. They knew what was in me and who I could be long before I did. Simply because they love me, and they were paying attention. I certainly hope I’ve been paying enough attention to be able to see each of them in such a deep way.

At the end of the weekend, a small group of us went for brunch at a local diner before dispersing to our separate parts of the world for another five years. (We’ve done this Sunday brunch thing at the last two reunions now, so you know what that means….)

I was sitting in the diner booth, stirring my coffee and listening to Giulia, who was sitting next to me and telling a story in her inimitable, animated, gorgeous, larger-than-life way. I turned to look at her, and it took my breath away. Every bit of her was so familiar and dear—her beautiful face and smile, her mannerisms, her speech patterns and laugh. I know them so well that I can call them to mind in a heartbeat. Just thinking of her calms me, makes me feel loved and joyful and lucky.

And I’m incredibly fortunate. Because Giulia isn’t the only friend I feel this way about—I have a whole pile of friends like that where she came from. And I won’t list them here—I’ll let Giuls stand in for them all—but I trust they know who they are. And I hope they know how very, very, very much I love them.

More Self Portraits

Last night, prompted by a conversation with a friend about her daughter's Halloween makeup, I felt a sudden need to draw all over my face with eyeliner. I've been thinking for some time about taking self portraits that incorporate some sort of fantastical makeup design, but somehow I never bothered. Because apparently, I was waiting for a really convenient time--like 10:00 at night on a night when I'd had the flu for several days prior. When I had to be up early to go get a U-Haul van so that I could move furniture into my new home. (About which, more later, once it's safely through the "worse before it gets better" stage of moving in chaos. The one in which cardboard features heavily as a decorative device.)

And then, although I hadn't exactly planned to take pictures last night, once I had all that makeup drawn on me, I couldn't very well waste the opportunity.

So here you go, in keeping with my new (but apparently ongoing) obsession with ethereal, fairy-like characters and candlelight in my self portraits. (I have no explanation, really. I was not particularly an ethereal, glitter-and-fairies sort of child. I'd love to think these current ethereal fairy-like creatures have a certain Shakespearean forest creep factor, but it's entirely possible they're just glittery. But whatever. They keep presenting themselves. I think I've decided my job with creative obsessions is simply to play them out to their natural finishing points.)

The last one is hands-down my favorite. I think I now also have an obsession with editing my photos to look like paintings. Yum.

The texture I used on this one can be found here. Honestly,
I wasn't really that into textures until I found this guy's
textures. They're really saturated and painterly and beautiful.