Big ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #143
Paestum #1
Big limestone columns
sang silent hymns to honor
sleazy pagan gods.
Paestum #2
Old Greek thoughts and deeds
built bigger things than temples.
Like democracy.
Carpe Diem’s Sparkle Of Joy …
introduction and first “task”
Sound of Sunlight
Rushing waters bring
joy to those who hear them sing
and see them sparkle.
Happy Heraclitus
Life flows and splashes.
No things are permanent and
all things are precious.
Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Flags or Banners
Late May in my part of the USA is a time for blooming rhododendrons and several days of observing Memorial Day in various ways. On 2018-05-30, I found good conditions and a good angle for a composition with my new flag and old rhododendron. Tho not a color many would choose for a flag, lavender goes well with red, white, and blue for Memorial Day.
Memorial Colors
Lavender salutes
red, white, and blue of our flag.
Pride and gratitude.
The Pink Rebel is actually a Thanksgiving cactus (if U want to draw the distinction). It earned its nickname by blooming when it damn well pleases, with no special treatment from me. I keep the soil moist all year, with a little diluted fertilizer in the water. The plant gets as much light as my window will give it, with no enforced darkness or coolness. Experts say a Xmas or Thanksgiving cactus so treated is unlikely to bloom at all, let alone during the daffodil season. But unlikely things do sometimes happen. Don’t bet on when or where.
Images #1 and #2 in my response to
were selected and cropped from bursts of photos while running the Mystify screen saver. Image #3 is a photo of an architectural detail, edited to compensate for my inability to compose precisely w/o a viewfinder. (Glad I eventually replaced the old camera by one with both a screen and a viewfinder.) Here is a haiku about the kind of silliness exemplified by the dialog in my response:
What the World Needs
More silliness from
those who know they are silly;
less from the others.
Carpe Diem #1410 Rainbow (short-haibun)
In response to an earlier CDHK rainbow prompt, I wrote a haiku and later found a splendid photo to illustrate it (and inspire some haibun prose). Can I use the same photo here w/o repeating myself? Yes. The photo is a gift that keeps on giving; it has inspired a new haiku.
Out of Reach
Hard fingers rise up,
trying to grasp soft colors
as the rainbow fades.
Including the post title and credits, the response above has 98 words.
Aqua and Azure ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #134
« Extra style points for those who weave both in. 😉 »
… were her favorite flowers, so cheery and dependable in early spring.
I scattered her ashes among daffodils.
Carpe Diem #1402 Daffodils (one-bun)
As the natural light outdoors fades, a mundane miracle occurs. Tho I have no supernatural powers, I create light and see that it is good. I need only flip a switch, and the resulting light provides many other mundane miracles to ponder.
Light ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #133
Before I close the curtains, a pine tree across the lawn is still visible thru the window. Conversely, a bird roosting in the pine could see the light fixture I have just turned on. Most of the light that my fixture throws toward the window goes right thru the glass, harmless and unharmed. My fist could not do that.
It gets better.
Some of the light that hits the window is reflected back. I see my fixture as a ghostly sphere, apparently hovering between me and the pine. Hmmm. Consider a single photon among the zillions that whiz from my fixture toward the window. How does it decide whether to continue on toward the pine or bounce back toward me?
I know. Photons are mindless particles that do not decide anything. They just do whatever a divinely perfect knowledge of physics would say they do, and a humanly possible imperfect knowledge of physics is rather good at saying what big groups of them do.
By far the best current human knowledge says that what a single photon does is unpredictable. Not just unpredictable because we do not know all the details about the laws of nature or how the photon is moving or what is in the glass where the photon hits it. Not just unpredictable because exact calculations are not feasible. Intrinsically unpredictable! On a photon-by-photon basis, even divinely perfect knowledge of the rules and the current situation does not determine what will happen in the next picosecond. Even God must wait and see.
Dunno whether I will succeed in posting more about intrinsic unpredictability and its consequences. (Don’t hold your breath.) Without wrangling equations, a great deal can be still be said about the quantum physics behind partially reflected light and its wider implications. See pages 173-176 of the excellent book Dice World by Brian Clegg (or web pages like the one U can visit by clicking here, if U do not have the book handy).
Time ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #131
I want to add another line that starts with “A time to” in the Bible passage Ecclesiastes 3:1-8. The new line could be anywhere in the series.
Don’t blink or you’ll miss it!
While I could not resist giving this post a silly title, I do respect the yin/yang wisdom of Ecclesiastes 3:1-8 and have already proposed a related serious addition to the “A time to” lines. Those who have seen and liked yet another addition are welcome to comment with a line and/or a link.
Physically, JS Bach was in Germany thruout his life. His musical imagination ranged more widely, with trips to England and France and (especially) Italy. Later musicians’ imaginations took him to many more places. Brazil. Russia. New Orleans.
New Orleans? Yes!
Pianists Eyran Katsenelenbogen and Tal Zilber took Bach (and some other saints of music) to New Orleans. They later played souvenirs of that visit for an audience in China. Bach goes marching in about 12 minutes into the 14 minute YouTube video; the whole thing deserves to heard and heard again.
The image below is a screenshot (with a link to the video) that is better than what I got with the YouTube embed code. U can click on the image to follow the link and then click on “SHOW MORE” (just before the YouTube comments section) for easy access to each variation on the great song that is like an anthem for New Orleans.
Happy Birthday, Johann Sebastian! Hope U enjoyed the jambalaya.
Acknowledgement: I appreciate being pointed to the video from a post on the WQXR Blog by James Bennett, II.
Having an afterlife may be overrated.
Afterlife
Dyed and dried
soon after they died:
artichokes.
As Patrick Jennings remarks in
« Imagination ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #129 »,
a world seen without imagination would be sadly plain and gray. Imagination can be fun.
It is fun when Patrick sees a reflection (of a dark building with a bright light) and imagines a dragon breathing fire.
Breathing Fire © Patrick Jennings
It is fun when I see a decorative gourd and imagine a phallus going soft after sex.
Phallic Gourd © Mellow Curmudgeon
It is fun to imagine being able to fly.
Both Patrick and I are adults who might enjoy imagining flight but would not jump off a balcony and try to fly. It is definitely not fun when a child (or a nominal adult with an assault rifle) acts on wild imaginings. How can wild imagination be tamed but not stifled?
While there seems to be no single simple answer, the methods of STEM do rather well. We soak imagination with other things, many of which have rhyming names: calculation; experimentation; observation; replication; validation; verification. Yes, it is hard work. We often get ourselves soaked, with perspiration.
Sometimes we get consternation, when we find that what we fondly imagine cannot happen.
Sometimes we get wings.
Image downloaded from Imgur has been lightly cropped.
Carpe Diem #1378 Finally … Enlightenment
The Silk Road was a hard slog, as is the path to enlightenment. It might help a little to consider some of the unobvious ways the images in this post are alike.
Oneness Beyond Color
Glass ball and blossom:
so unlike yet so alike.
Enlightenment glows
beyond breakage or wilting;
beyond illusions of death.
Can a haibun be a sutra? Is the Kama Sutra anatomically correct? We will see.
Climbing the Tree
(cropped)
The sculpted couple embrace, each standing on the left leg while hugging the other with the right leg. She entrusts some of her weight to his strong stone hand and thigh; he entrusts some of his seed to her willing womb.
They have held their pose for something like a thousand years. They ignore the admiring gaze of pilgrims who ponder the mysteries of life and love and whether flesh and sinew can hold that pose for anything like a thousand milliseconds.
Climbing the Tree
She climbs his body
as a tree that burns with lust
(and lower-back pain).
Mellow Curmudgeon 
