flowers, haibun, haiga, humor, photography

Be(e) in the Moment ~ 😉

Learn from the past and
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be ready for the future.
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Live in the present.
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Choosing images to go with the lines of my aphoristic haiku was easy (for the past), serendipitous (for the present), and beset with false starts (for the future).

I remembered one of the photos I took among the ruins of ancient Greek temples at Paestum in the 1970-s.  So stark, so sad, so in the past.  Dwelling on the past would rot the mind.  Learn from it and move on.

The future is fluid, unpredictable, possibly dystopian.  Plan and prepare, but be ready to change plans if an unlikely future unfolds.  (It will.)  I wanted an image that was noncommital but not just blurry.  After several false starts, I took a tight closeup of swirling brushwork in a small painting by an unknown artist, bought decades ago at a charity sale.

Wanting something joyful and ephemeral for the present, I culled some photos of flowering trees taken in 2020.  One jumped out.  The camera catches a bee hovering for a moment where it enhances a larger overall composition.  The admonition to “be in the moment” is like the haiku’s final line and could be tweaked to give this post a title that winks at the final image.

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flowers, humor, photography

Wanderlust

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Planted crocus long ago,
only in their beds, U know.

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Staying there was such a yawn,
some went forth to grace the lawn.

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Call this doggerel if U must,
but I hold a sacred trust.

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I will seize each fleeting chance
to be as cheeky as my plants.

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flowers, photography

Rondo con Chiaroscuro

With less dynamic range than my eye, my camera exaggerated the chiaroscuro in the images posted here.  But not too much.  With a nod to a common way to describe tempo in musical scores, I began drafting this post with the title [Chiaroscuro Ma Non Troppo].  Then I noticed a closer connection to music.  My sequence of images is a visual rondo.

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flowers, haiga, haiku, humor, photography

Mountain Laurel

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Coming soon:
pink nectar chalice,
bumblebee.

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~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~ ~

Start the day with a triple espresso?  The bee did but I didn’t.  While shooting laurel blooms in soft light, I was distracted by the hyperkinetic bee.  Neglected to force quick shutter speeds when tracking it.  (The camera chose 1/200 of a second.)  Got one shot with blurred legs but an in-focus tongue, just as the bee was landing.  Otherwise, a blurry bee was mooning me.  That’s life.  Enjoy the good stuff and cope with the rest.

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flowers, growing old, history, photography

Never Give Up — Continued

Consciously, I had nothing to add when I posted a photo recently.  But the pot always simmers.  I brooded on the word “victory” in a comment by Sue Ranscht.  I recalled the epic journey across northern Norway in World War 2 by Jan Baalsrud, the sole survivor of a commando force betrayed by a Nazi collaborator.  I seized another day of magical light and found there was more to show and to say.

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flowers, haiga, haiku, photography, tanka

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.

flowers, haiga, haiku, photography

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.