river

Winter at The Tree Place Series–December 23rd

/ Elisa / 4 Comments

I got new batteries in the gifted camera!!! They seem to be working well, I got 27 images so far this morning and only one low battery reading! The children were nestled all snug in their beds this morning, so instead of pleasing everyone else and using the time to cook or to clean….I GRABBED THE CAMERA AND WENT TO THE TREE PLACE!!!…and greeted the rising sun that managed to break through the steel gray walls of scudding winter clouds filled with unspilled rains to reflect on the river.

Winter at The Tree Place Series–River Sunrise

I walked a different way this morning, up over part of the dyke system that runs across and then along the railroad tracks. I noticed these weeds…

I had to be brave to attempt the shot. The lens that I had for the camera couldn’t get them into focus. The grasses along the path are slick and thick and springing forth from deceptively loose roots in the mud from all of the rain we have had the last few days. I don’t have any depth perception. It is difficult for me to adjust my body to the slant of the sides and I’m always afraid of falling or of sliding. I really wanted to touch the plants! For today I was able to venture a few feet down the slope. The image was motivating if still a bit out of focus!

I passed some smaller red berries that, while vivid and clear did not pass muster to my eyes at home from amid the tangle of vines on a wire fence to post.

The next vision took my breathe away and I was glad to remember and to feel the reason that I love The Tree Place so.

Winter at The Tree Place Series–Forgotten Lace

I was having a few thoughts about the missed opportunity for red. I like red very much. Et voila!! I saw a splash of red and couldn’t think what it was. My mind said IT’S A BIRD SHOOT QUICKLY! I did!! This time I was also wishing for a lens that I could get better close ups. I hoped upon hope that I’d get to see the bird when I got home and looked on the computer screen!

Cardinal Red Request

By now, my hands had become quite cold. I went out in the morning in a t-shirt and sweatshirt. It felt just right and then the river winds and damp decided to remind me that a person ought really be flexible and layered on winter days. I decided to turn about and to go home. There in the glow of the morning sun were some of my favorite trees…singing in the wind!

Sycamore Songs

Celebrating Alban Arthan–The Winter Solstice So glad to be moved to come out more this year. So glad to have enough food and a warm place to sleep and to call home. May gratitude for the simple and yet ever so important things permeate all thoughts and doings in order to create life!!

Images are the property of Elisabeth Connelley and Purple Shoe Photography. They are offered in limited numbered prints.

Please send inquiries to: elisa58t2sugarless@yahoo.com with Purple Shoe Photography in the subject line.

Morning Trip (58)

/ Elisa / 1 Comment

Moving Forward
The deep parts of my life pour onward,
as if the river shores were opening out.
It seems that things are more like me now,
that I can see farther into paintings.
I feel closer to what language can’t reach.
With my sense, as with birds, I climb
into the windy heaven, out of the oak,
and in the ponds broken off from the sky
my feeling sinks, as if standing on fishes.
– Rainer Maria Rilke
[translated by Robert Bly]

Morning Trip (54)

/ Elisa / 5 Comments

“It is a release, like a dip in a healing, cool, fresh river. Now I am washed away in the river; after so much fussing, I am torn away and alone in the current. But I can swim, or rather, float. The self I held, I left with my towel on the shore, but I’m still alive; I haven’t drowned or died. Pieces of what I imagined I had to grip to me come floating along beside me. The current of the world is unraveling in faces and forms. Without my will the universe unrolls, and fills my arms with muscles, my heart with human concerns. The scintillating milky way of my back is a winking and shimmering constellation; my body itself is a river, a continent of rivers, a flickering, vibrating, shore less ocean of currents and channels, unfathomable, beginning less, endless. The living ride on life like the foam on the crest of a surge on the cosmic ocean.”
– Paul Fleischman

Morning Trip (19)

/ Elisa / 3 Comments

“As with events, so is it with thoughts. When I watch that flowing river, which, out of regions I see not, pours for a season its streams into me, I see that I am a pensioner; not a cause, but a surprised spectator of this ethereal water; that I desire and look up, and put myself in the attitude of reception, but from some alien energy the visions come.

Dream delivers us to dream, and there is no end to illusion. Life is a train of moods like a string of beads, and, as we pass through them, they prove to be many-colored lenses which paint the world their own hue, and each shows only what lies in its focus. From the mountain you see the mountain. We animate what we can, and we see only what we animate. Nature and books belong to the eyes that see them. It depends on the mood of the man, whether he shall see the sunset or the fine poem. There are always sunsets, and there is always genius; but only a few hours so serene that we can relish nature or criticism.

It is very unhappy, but too late to be helped, the discovery we have made, that we exist. That discovery is called the Fall of Man. Ever afterwards, we suspect our instruments. We have learned that we do not see directly, but mediately, and that we have no means of correcting these colored and distorting lenses which we are, or of computing the amount of their errors. Perhaps these subject-lenses have a creative power; perhaps there are no objects. Once we lived in what we saw; now, the rapaciousness of this new power, which threatens to absorb all things, engages us. Nature, art, persons, letters, religions, — objects, successively tumble in, and God is but one of its ideas. Nature and literature are subjective phenomena; every evil and every good thing is a shadow which we cast.

Thus inevitably does the universe wear our color, and every object fall successively into the subject itself. The subject exists, the subject enlarges; all things sooner or later fall into place. As I am, so I see; use what language we will, we can never say anything but what we are.”
– Ralph Waldo Emerson