The grass in my lawn is eager to grow into a shaggy mess, so I cannot always postpone mowing until some other plants in the lawn have set seed. But I can do the next best thing and get almost another week from some blooms, plus photos and a 3-5-3 haiku.
Category: flowers
Daylily & Chicory & Nat King Cole
Photographing wildflowers in my yard inspired new lyrics for a song about a couple “too young” to be in love. While the original sweet lyrics came true for some couples, I did not marry young. I still like that song’s lovely music and calm questioning of what “they” say, so I am glad to have lyrics that fit my situation. Wish I could sing.
Sharing
Slow shutter needed.
Daffodil and tulip share
early morning light.
~ ~ ~ ~
There is enough for us all,
if we take less than we want.
I considered posting my photo wordlessly, with the post’s title as a hint that I have something beyond a nice image in mind. Too subtle. Compulsively explicit, I wrote a haiku. Then I expanded the haiku to a tanka.
I hesitated. The tanka’s last 2 lines might be too preachy. Then I read the Gandhi quote in a great collection of images and quotes: Our Beautiful, Broken World (curated by Mitch Teemley).
Thanks, Mitch. The time for subtlety is long gone.
Haiga with Several Time Scales
Haiku poems commonly deal with events on short time scales. In a split second, the frog jumps into the pond. In minutes, the sunset fades. In days, the cherry blossoms fall. How about decades? How about millennia? They can show up too, along with the split second that a camera’s shutter is open.
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Sunlit Moment
Mums are good silk fakes.
Rock is real and will outlast
both mums and viewer.
I dithered over whether to respond to
Scale ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #268
with the material above. With small differences in format, it was posted 2020-04-17. Tho usually reluctant to repeat myself, I’ve noticed that bloggers I respect sometimes do repost things they feel are still relevant. I’ve also noticed that 11 months is quite a while on a cyberspace time scale.
Oh well. It’s rare that I settle on a combination of angle and settings that I really like before the light fades or shifts. Seize the moment.
Snow Fall
Carpe Diem Haiku Kai has the theme “autumn leaves” for November of 2020 and the subtheme “colors of life” for the CDHK episode posted 2020-11-17. Where I live, snow rarely falls before the leaves do. When it does, the resulting colors may foretell the colors of awakening life in the coming spring.
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Carpe Diem #1839 colors of life
Snow Fall
Bright white and strong pink:
early snow on burning bush
predicts apple blooms.
Ozzie Had His Head on Straight
David Eppley’s photo of a bald eagle named Ozzie was among the fan favorites in the Weather Channel’s 2016 Photo Contest. The same excellent photo inspired a haiku that can respond to a CDHK challenge about daffodils. Really.
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Carpe Diem #1832 Narcissus (Daffodils)
Mythornithology
When we saw himself,
Narcissus forgot to drink.
Eagle had more sense.
Click here to see more images and read interesting facts about flowers in the genus Narcissus (AKA daffodils).
Click here to see more images from the Weather Channel’s 2016 Photo Contest.
Memorial Day 2020
Originally a day to remember and honor the fallen in the American Civil War, Memorial Day expanded to include later wars. Now it should expand beyond the military. In the COVID-19 pandemic, essential workers risk their lives and sometimes die, defending the rest of us from the disease itself and the societal collapse it could cause.
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In wartime, ignorant and impulsive pols can somehow make horrendous situations even worse. So it is with the pandemic. Medical workers (including EMT-s and hospital support staff as well as doctors and nurses) have been sent into battle with inadequate personal protective equipment for themselves and inadequate intensive care facilities for their patients. Stockpiling such stuff would cost money. Might even need to raise taxes on those who can work from home, if they need to work at all. And so on.
It’s so much easier to claim that all is well until all Hell breaks loose, then claim that all will be well when the weather warms up, if we just go back to work and drink a little bleach.
The governors of some states have stepped up. Learning from each other and from countries (like New Zealand and South Korea) that took the threat seriously, they made tough decisions. They include a few Republicans (like Hogan in Maryland and DeWine in Ohio) and more Democrats. It is too early to be sure, but they just might have saved the USA from criminal incompetence in the White House. Federalism works.
The doctor in Wuhan who first sounded the alarm about COVID-19 was punished for “spreading rumors” and later died of the disease. Remember him also today, along with our essential civilian workers and those who serve in our military. Remember that dark money and gerrymandering and vote suppression have sickened American democracy but not yet killed it.
Remember in November.
Nothing Needed
Long ago, I bought some dwarf tulip bulbs and went thru the forcing rigamarole to get indoor blooming before planting the bulbs. Nothing but leaves came up. Feh. Tossed the bulbs out back. Guess what happened about a year later.
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Nothing ~ Pic and a Word Challenge #231
Yes, the bulbs survived and put out leaves. And flower stalks. Which bloomed.
Year after year, the discarded tulips bloom in spring, while I do nothing for them. Maybe they are old Yankees like me: compulsively self-reliant.
Haiga with Several Time Scales
Haiku poems commonly deal with events on short time scales. In a split second, the frog jumps into the pond. In minutes, the sunset fades. In days, the cherry blossoms fall. How about decades? How about millennia? They can show up too, along with the split second that a camera’s shutter is open.
(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)
Sunlit Moment
Mums are good silk fakes.
Rock is real and will outlast
both mums and viewer.
Dunno why the WordPress algorithm for choosing “Related” posts missed the one that is by far the most closely related: Weather’s Works.
Widower’s Song #4
The first three songs are haiku in a previous post. This new song is a tanka in response to a CDHK prompt. A vase with this special urn’s shape and colors would have pleased Edith, and that means a lot to me.
Widower’s Song #4: This Urn
It held her ashes,
waiting until daffodils
came for them in spring.
Then it held one last bouquet
of her favorite flowers.
– Gray button (upper left corner) reveals widgets, –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
– above post (on phone) or beside it (on desktop). –
Poinsettia on Thanksgiving Day?
Tho sad that Xmas activities keep moving earlier and have intruded on Thanksgiving, I bought an irresistible poinsettia prematurely. Then I noticed that it fits in with Thanksgiving after all.
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While shopping for food on the Monday before Thanksgiving Day in 2019, I noticed an especially good poinsettia with the salmon pink leaves edged in pale yellow that I like. Too early for a Xmas decoration? Yeah, but this plant’s not so glaringly out of season as the older choices of bright red or stark white.
In the morning on Thanksgiving Day itself, the plant looked even better and insisted on being photographed. Between shots, I noticed ways that the plant fits in with giving thanks after all.
- I can spend an unplanned $4 at the market w/o skimping on necessities. (This was not always true.)
- The builtin flash on a modern camera is sometimes useful. (Yes, I have an external flash.)
- I can still shoot at 1/20 sec in available light w/o needing a tripod. (The colors seen at the time were between what the images show.)
- I still live among people who accept the diversity symbolized by this poinsettia variety. Marxists, racists, sexists, and tribalists all pretend that knowing where somebody fits into their categories tells U most of what’s important about that person. Not so.
Yes, I am posting this small Thanksgiving celebration a little late. One reason is that I let things rest a while and then edit again before publishing. The other reason is that the wheels turn slowly at my age. That they still turn is yet another reason to give thanks.
Capturing the Unexpected
While the juxtapositions collected by Mitch Teemley are all clever and funny, the ballerina/tulip photo is special. Because their stems keep growing and tend to flop over, tulips are tricky in flower arrangements. It’s one of life’s (littler) lemons. The ballerina/tulip photo makes lemonade.(BTW, the [Menu] button atop the vertical black bar reveals the widgets.)
Coincidence? I Think Not.
Life, as mentioned in the first Capturing the Unexpected post, is sometimes horrible, sometimes beautiful, and always just a little bit weird. Why is that? (Lean in close and I’ll tell you.) It’s because we’re weird! We find comedy in calamity, meaning in meaninglessness, truth in absurdity. Coincidence? Nope. We’re wired that way. Don’t you love it when someone captures proof?
(Click on any image to enlarge it, or to begin slide show)
Lavender Elegy
My lavender rhododendron contributes a visual elegy to the Memorial Day observances in 2019. Memorial Day is a time for sadness, along with the pride and gratitude that the same plant helped visualize in 2018.
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Memorial Colors
Lavender salutes
red, white, and blue of our flag.
Pride and gratitude.
Gift of Silence
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Words ~ Pic and a Word Challenge
As Susie left home to start a new life with Dale, her mother watched and wondered. Would the mixed marriage work?
Aware that sharing her worries would be unwelcome and unheeded, Mama let her words of warning remain unspoken and unheard.
Wisely, Mama kept silent despite having words to say. Unwisely, some people run afoul of Wittgenstein’s Laws by breaking silence despite not having any sensible words to say.
Memo to Mystics
Unless you can grab
bubbles, you cannot put your
wisdom into words.
Unless you can grab
bubbles, you cannot put your
wisdom into words.
Visual Rondo
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Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Close Up or Macro
In music, a rondo is a piece with successive segments that go A-B-A-C-A-D…-A, where contrasting segments B, C, D, … are bracketed by repetitions of A that may vary slightly. Let’s arrange some colorful closeups like a rondo that goes
A-B1-A-C-A-D-A-E-A-B2-A.
Vibrant Synergy
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Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Vibrant Colors
I like the synergy when a few good things up their game by working together, as with peanuts and chocolate. When they do not clash, bright colors can work together in vibrant synergy.
Pink and Green:
Magenta and Yellow (with a bee):
With help from blue and green, the pink and yellow flowers in the following photo team up to illustrate a deep truth about statistics. Really.
Outside of CFFC, I posted the photo along with a beautiful image found on the web that espresses the same deep truth in another way. Both ways have no equations, no jargon, and no saturated fat. Click on the photo to see the details.
Mellow Curmudgeon 