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Showing posts with label Streambank. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Streambank. Show all posts

10 December 2018

Frozen - On Grant Creek, Missoula, Montana

Stream ice is mesmerizing.
& crazy in how fast it changes. 
This view is along same stretch of creek as in the previous post, but on the very next day, and looking back toward the bridge.

This daily drastic-change aspect observed during my lunchtime walks is making me think how cool would be a photo flip book of the same view, every day, for a year. Bzzzzzp! - you would traverse four seasons in under 5 seconds, and then do it again - bzzzzzzzzp! - and then again, flipping slower - bzzp-bzzzzzp-bzzzzp-bzzzp... pausing to examine a particularly drastic shift....

Years ago, I checked out from the library a small, hardcover book (but not a flip book) of photos taken by a shopkeeper. For years, he walked out in front of his store and snapped a 35mm photo of the same view directly in front of him. His photos illustrated not only how his neighborhood changed - and didn't change - over time, but also how the culture and country shifted and adapted and was at turns neglected and reinvigorated.
It was mesmerizing. 
And so was his commitment.
I personally find it a bit daunting to consider 365 days all at once...BUT maybe even 30 days would still provide enough flippy shift.....the pondering continues...

15 January 2018

On Being Aware - Missoula, Montana



The following quote on our habits of sight - and a few others from the good Baron - provoked a solid "Yes!" from me. 

I have noticed that amidst circumstance's overwhelm, there will come a time of pause - even if it's the eye of the storm! -  when we can stop and choose how we see. If we will, we can see the bigger picture - not as a head-in-the-sand false optimism, but in the clear light of hope and generosity.
 
“To romanticize the world is 
to make us aware 
of the magic, mystery and wonder 
of the world; 

it is to educate the senses 
to see the ordinary as extraordinary, 
the familiar as strange, 
the mundane as sacred, 
the finite as infinite.”


 -Novalis 
(aka Baron Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg 1772-1802,

As quoted in "Bildung in Early German Romanticism" by Frederick C. Beiser, in Philosophers on Education : Historical Perspectives (1998) by Amélie Rorty, p. 294)

& for those who will wonder: This tenacious little leaf was small as a trim, smallish index fingernail.