This is part of my 12X18 posters series. Seemed appropriate as Spring springs and flowers grow. In-Joy!
Click on the photo to see it by itself.
Yellow and Red Tulips: Butchart Garden
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Tag Archives: flowers
Rodin on Faded Beauty and a Faded Daisy
Rodin on Faded Beauty and a Faded Daisy
I’ve just finished my first month of recovery after having had open heart surgery to replace my aortic valve. Not easy. I’m like a faded flower hoping to bloom again, soon. They say it takes 2 to 3 months to fully recover, but I’m impatient and want it sooner! 🙂
Faded flowers fascinate me! Is the beauty of the flower that once was gone? I don’t thinks so! This is a new stage of beauty, a wiser stage, even more true of faded human beauty.
One of my favorite books is Robert Heinlein’s “Stranger in a Strange Land.” He made me revise my thoughts of beauty 45 years ago when he describes the following statue:
She who used to be the beautiful heaulmière
“You know I wouldn’t be rude to the old woman who posed for that. What I can’t understand is a so-called artist having the gall to pose somebody’s great grandmother in her skin . . . and you having the bad taste to want it around . . . ”
“Anyone can see a pretty girl. An artist can look at a pretty girl and see the old woman she will become. A better artist can look at an old woman and see the pretty girl she used to be. A great artist can look at an old woman, portray her exactly as she is . . . and force the viewer to see the pretty girl she used to be . . . more than that, he can make anyone with the sensitivity of an armadillo see that this lovely young girl is still alive, prisoned inside her ruined body. He can make you feel the quiet, endless tragedy that there was never a girl born who ever grew older than eighteen in her heart . . . no matter what the merciless hours have done. Look at her, Ben. Growing old doesn’t matter to you and me—but it does to them. Look at her!” Quote from Stranger in a Strange Land
Beautiful, EH?
Below are photos of a faded daisy that I took on my first semi-long walk after my aortic valve replacement. I was feeling as faded as this Daisy! They are all versions of the same photograph.
Manifestations of Beauty: Red Flower Huntington Library California 2013
Manifestations of Beauty: Red Flower Huntington Library California 2013
Just wanted to share variation on the theme of beauty for this flower using different filters.
General Information on my manifestations of beauty blog posts:
Beauty dances in many forms, in many manifestations, for example, over time a caterpillar becomes a larvae becomes a butterfly. This is beauty observed through time.
Yet Beauty can also be a single moment, a single photograph. Single moment beauty can viewed through many different filters. The same beauty, the same moment, seen differently, With each filter bringing out a different aspect of the unspeakable and multilayered beauty in each object.
I have been red green colorblind all my life, I see the world differently than those who are not colorblind. I often wonder how they see. Perhaps because of this, I love taking the same photograph and looking at it through different filters using programs like aperture, Lightroom, and Photoshop.
Monet’s Garden Red Flower
Monet’s Garden was on my bucket list. I was so happy to visit it with Susan on a wonderful June day. So Beautiful! I’ll be posting many pictures from my amazing, beautiful, and magical visit there. This one is of a red flower so gorgeous it moved me with its beauty.
Esalen Flowers after Rain
Esalen Flowers after Rain
It has been a long time since my last post. 4 eye surgeries (cataract surgery with new lenses for both eyes! Laser surgery for 6 bleeds in my left eye, then emergency retinal detachment surgery that involved 2 weeks for me to regain sight in that eye) make me appreciate my vision even more. Visual beauty is so precious to me.
I am now back at Esalen Institute for a Mindfulness and Loving Kindness Workshop that I plan to teach my students when I get back.
Yesterday it rained. Below are photos of the beautiful flowers here after the rain in early morning light. Hope you enjoy! All photos were taken with my iphone 5 and edited with Lightroom.
Favorite Photos: Hollyhock B.C. Tree, Empty Chair, Sea, Boat, and Me, and 3 others!
Hollyhock Tree, Empty Chair, Sea, Boat, and Me
Today, February 1, 2015 is my 66th Birthday. I can think of no better favorite photos to celebrate my Birthday than these four from one of my favorite holy spaces/learning centers/ and retreat Centers in the world: Hollyhock Retreat/Learning Center on Cortes Island in British Columbia, Canada.
I first attended when this sacred beautiful place was called Cold Mountain Institute and I spent 13 weeks there are as a “resident Fellow” in 1978? working on the retreat center and taking weeklong workshops on everything from “Tarot Carots” to “Kuan Yin: Goddess of Compassion” to “Dreams” and the “I Ching.”
My favorite photo for Birthdays and other new beginnings is my “Empty Chair, Sea, Boat, Tree, and Me” photo. The empty chair and empty boat wait for me (or you), in sunshine as tides turn and gentle waves lap gemtly to the shore in early morning sunshine. Beckoned.
Graceful, slow moving, herons in the early morning, with low tide and such blue waters, and forest, and mountains in the distance; these provide peaceful meditative moments that help make this place sacred and healing.
The gorgeous twisting shapes of trees silhouetted against blue incoming seas, and nearby islands, and the wooden deck where I, and many others, have laid nude in the summer sun over these many years. These bring back soft, warm, breeze memories, and memories of the sounds of water lapping to the shore.
The poppies, one in sunshine one in shade, yings and yangs of colors. Parchment thin colors, beauty. They dazzle me quietly with their sun opened color and brilliance.
Holy Hollyhock, Holy Cold Mountain. Thank you for helping shape me with your nature, and your beauty.
Manifestation of Beauty: Raindrop on Flower
Raindrop on Flower
These are all different versions of the same photograph. So many ways to see/be beauty!
Favorite Photos: Springtime Flowers Remembered!
Springtime Flowers Remembered!
With the rain and short days of winter it is good to remember that spring will come again!
Yellow daffodils and red tulips opening to the warmth of the sun,
bordering green lily pads and quiet pond.
Butchart Garden in Springtime!
by Dan Windisch
Favorite Photos: Red White Rose Shining
Red White Rose Shining
Delicate petals, transparently shining
reds, yellow, whites,
layers of beauty,
shapes unfolding to the light.
Favorite Photos: Poppies Light and Dark
Poppies Light and Dark
This photos is from the beautiful Hollyhock B.C. Gardens, where I’ve been attending workshops since it was called Cold Mountain Institute in 1980 and I was there for a full summer of workshops that influenced my life.
The flower beauty shared of being in the light and being in the shadow. Petals unfolding into the sun, layers of symmetry, yellow petal halo yellow center, red poppy shadowed in background beauty.
New poppies folded, all around waiting, not knowing, that they too, shall bloom into the light.
This is a photo I just like looking at. Gives me peace.