flowers – Telling Stories

Place-based Writing

July 30, 2025July 30, 2025Posted in writingTagged flowers, national-parks, national-writing-project, nature, photography, travel, writingLeave a comment

Yesterday, I opened an email from a Substacker (The Art of Noticing) about the National Writing Project’s (NWP) annual Write Out event. Begun in 2018 in partnership with the National Park Service (NPS), the event encourages anyone to spend time outdoors observing nature and then writing about those observations. Educators, writers, and park service personnel offer prompts for all ages, children and adults alike.

I’ve been interested in the idea of place-based writing. It’s an idea that has nagged at me for quite some time, but I haven’t pursued it. This may be the year to pursue it actively. I am working on an idea of combining my Kinship exploration of the four elements of earth, air, fire, and water through photography with writing. A prompt from last year’s Write Out comes from Poet Laureate Amy Limon: What would you write in response to the landscape around you?

This is not actually a “landscape” photograph. It’s really more a “portrait” of the great egret that visits the edge of the pond in the backyard. I came home from a book club meeting to see this:

Such a beautiful and graceful bird. It stood statue-still on the bank of the pond for at least ten minutes, or perhaps longer. The egret stood perfectly still in the same spot even after I left the car and retrieved the camera with the zoom lens from inside. I was able to creep up to the edge of the pond on the opposite side to take several pictures.

I am amazed by what I see in the landscape of that big two-acre pond (known to family as “The Big Pond”): turtles sunning themselves on the bank, fish darting through the weeds growing thickly in the shallow water at the edge of the pond, clouds reflected on the smooth surface. Clouds billow above. Deer creep out of the woods to drink from it and to eat the vegetation that grows there. Red trumpet flowers fall from the vines growing high in the treetops. Breezes ripple the water. Dragonflies dart from dandelion blossom to blossom. Cicadas and grasshoppers chirp, hidden away by the grasses, weeds, and wildflowers. Blackberries ripen to the darkest purple at the edge of the woods. White and yellow fleabane bloom as stars fallen to earth.

There is no shortage of beauty here.

If you’d like more information about the NWP/NPS annual Write Out, visit the NWPWrite Out page . Resources from past years are available.

Fire, Summer, Belonging, and Upheaval

July 10, 2025July 10, 2025Posted in contemplative photography, Photo Journal, writingTagged flowers, natureLeave a comment

Yesterday, I made a fast foray into the jungle of the front yard. It was a typical July day in South Carolina–hot and humid, though the humidity had not yet reached the level of “air you can wear”. Still, if I had walked all the way around all seven ponds and through the “back forty,” I would have been hot and sticky when I came in. I took out my older Canon EOS 7D with the Lensbaby Velvet 56 lens to make some images. I am out of practice with fully manual modes of photographing. I kept forgetting to check the exposure before pressing the shutter button. I had to make numerous post-processing corrections in Lightroom.

During our Kinship “An Elemental Year” practice circle discussion, we were given the question: what does summer feel like right now? Besides the usual responses of hot, humid, buggy, stormy, I threw in the word “upheaval.” This has been a summer of upheaval, especially regarding the status of my church. The question of disaffiliation and dissolution has caused a rift among the members (and families) that I’m not sure time will even heal or repair. My heart has gone beyond “broken” to “wounded.” The question I had after the practice circle is one of how I can capture those emotions in photography.

A subject that has caught my eye in the last several walks through the yard is the common thistle plant growing at the edge of the woods in the front yard. I have photographed it when it was in full bloom with lovely purple flowers and now when it is the fluffy seed head stage. Those seeds are ready to spread themselves in the wind. The yellow black-eyed Susans (or are they coneflowers?) are also in bloom now. I even catch the yellow jackets or honey bees or whatever insect they are on them. The bees belong on those flowers. The seeds are ready to leave the plant.

Belonging and upheaval. Stasis and movement. Longing and contentment.

It has been a summer of inversions and contradictions. It will take some time for me to sort everything out and find a sense of peace again. But I will continue to walk as often as I can with and without my camera. I will still look for the beauty in the world in the extraordinary and the mundane. It is cliche that “beauty is in the eye of the beholder.” Yet it is true. There is beauty. I just have to look for it, even if it is the upheaval.

Thursday Thanksgiving—Picture Spring

May 4, 2017May 4, 2017Posted in Photo ProjectsTagged childhood, flowers, memories, picture spring1 Comment

There are some days that are just made for giving thanks, and today is one of them. The meteorologists in our area are calling today an Alert Day because we will probably have some kind of severe weather this afternoon. Right now, it’s breezy and partly cloudy. The sun peeps out every once and a while, just to let me know it’s still there behind the light gray clouds.

I ran outside this morning for just a little bit to get some images of some of the wild things blooming. I think I am resigned to the fact that I am not a gardener. It’s not that I have brown or black thumbs; I certainly don’t kill everything I plant, but I have no sense of gardening. But I do love beautiful flower gardens. I could (almost) live in a botanical garden—if it weren’t for this thing called pollen.

Saturday, I stopped at a newly relocated, reopened garden shop and bought some tomato, pepper, and herb plants as well as some flowers to put in my planter by the bird feeders—red ones, orange, dark blue. I can look out my living room window and see them, bright and colorful, joyfully bobbing their heads in the wind.

I wonder how many children today can boast that they sucked the honey out of honeysuckle flowers. I know I did when I was a child, and I showed my own children how to do that as well. I wonder what the health professionals would say about doing that. What kind of diseases did I open myself up to by sipping that sweet nectar? I remember standing before those vines with my cousins Virginia, Franklin, and Janet, and my sister Elaine, picking the flowers, pinching off the ends, and sucking the nectar. I almost pulled a few this morning to do that very thing. I hope I haven’t gotten too old to enjoy simple pleasures.

This morning, one of my sons sent me a face book message early with good news. It is always such a joy to know that my children still want to share their news with me.

During this month, my project is to make images of spring. I will be sharing these images off and on. I am also collecting prints in a handmade journal. I will probably be posting some images of the journal and describing the techniques I used later on. I’m still in the assembling stage.

Thursday Thanksgiving

November 12, 2015November 12, 2015Posted in writingTagged beauty, Bennetts Point, florals, flowers, mother, nature, parents, thankfulness, thanksgivingLeave a comment

I mentioned Monday (or was it Tuesday?) that I spent the weekend in Bennetts Point with Mama. It was a “girls’ weekend.” Mama wanted to check up on the place down there, visit with some friends, and attend the community meeting to see what was going on. She also planned to attend services at the new community church, but it is not yet ready for occupancy. We had hoped to take pictures of the new church, too, but the weather interfered with that project!

It has been a long time since Mama and I have had some extended one-on-one time. You know, she has always been my parent, but also my friend. We connect on many levels. She enjoys reading; I love to read. She has been crafty in her years—sewing, knitting, wood working, some painting. She loves to learn stuff. She is interested in many things. She has taught me much about being independent. I think she was a women’s libber before it was popular! I could easily picture her as one of the original suffragettes!

Daddy was often on the road for his job through the week. He worked construction as a laborer, foreman, and finally job superintendent, until his retirement. That meant he often went where the work was—Owensboro, Kentucky; Hattiesburg, Mississippi; various places in North and South Carolina and Georgia, leaving Mama to raise three children and keep the small farm going. I learned a great deal about being independent, making decisions, and being strong from Mama during those years. Even during these last months of Daddy’s life, Mama was strong. She told me that she had been preparing herself to be a widow for the last thirty-five years or so, ever since Daddy was diagnosed with cancer the first time in 1976.

This week, I am thankful for Mama’s presence and guidance, and most of all, for her love and support. I am thankful that she “gets” me, even though I am sometimes the “odd one out” in my family. She understands my introversion (my brother is the same. It’s my sister who is the extrovert!); she gets my need to create things. She knows who I am perhaps better than I know myself sometimes.

Mama is not exactly camera-shy, but she does not like us to take her picture unless she is ready for it, so I don’t have a candid to share from this weekend. But I do have one image that I love. The bottle bush at the end of the driveway is still blooming in November. There were maybe a half-dozen “brushes” still on the bush. And they were such a vibrant and deep red. (I wonder if they would grow this far inland. I know the oleander that grows around the house at Bennetts Point does not like the Midlands of South Carolina. Mama tried to grow one at her house in Peak.)

Beauty is all around us in all places and in all weather. It just takes us being wide awake to the world.

(I “messed” with the editing. The red is more muted in this image, and a little “bluer” than it was in real life, but art is about vision, and this is what I “see” in my head.)