Sensei and Sensibility

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  • SUMMER'S STORY IN ONE ARRANGEMENT
  • WHAT TO DO WHEN IT SIZZLES?
  • INTO THE GARDEN
  • FLOWER POWER
  • DRAWING WITH LIGHT
  • ON PHOTOGRAPHY PRACTICE, MIKSANG STYLE
  • MEET ZOE AND WALLY!
  • MUSINGS ON 'MY' RIVER
  • FAMILY REUNION
  • THE YEAR OF THE CREATIVITY TUNE-UP COMES TO A CLOSE
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I'M CHASING CLOUDS TODAY

Have I ever seen a sky so cloud filled?  Perhaps, but, if so, I don't remember it. This one was at a beach near Bridgehampton early in June.  They were moving rapidly.  The day couldn't have been better for chasing clouds! 

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SEE ALSO: http://www.metmuseum.org/connections/clouds)/  The Metropolitan Museum has a wonderful web site that focuses on themed connections made by curators.  One hundred episodes were filmed for the series.  In each a museum staff member offers his/her personal perspectives on works of art in the Museum's vast collection.  In addition to the featured remarks, the art is presented in time (on a timeline), in the world (where it came from) and in the museum.  You can find the art and see the original!  This is a not-to-be-missed site.

June 19, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

SANTA FE MEMORIES

In May, following a trip to San Antonio, I continued on first to Albuquerque to visit family and on from there to Santa Fe for a revisiting of a place I have loved from the first time I experienced it so many years ago.  On my first morning walk in Santa Fe, I was not expecting to see a rattle snake, but there it was!  My friend heard it before she saw it. . . .  It was sunning itself in the path we were walking.  Not surprisingly, we made a detour!

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The sunset was a spectacular show of light and coming darkness, another of those things in nature that no sooner comes than it is gone.

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This is still another of my favorite images/memories of Santa Fe.

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June 19, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

THIS IS JUNE

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I'm in the process of editing and shedding "stuff and things."  It is part of the year-long Creativity Tuneup I designed for myself.  One of the delights of this particular phase of the plan is that I keep finding things I consider "golden."  This piece by Henry David Thoreau, something from his Journal, June 6, 1857, fits the bill.

"This is June, the month of grass and leaves...already the aspens are trembling, again, and a new summer is offered me.  I feel a little fluttered in my thoughts, as if I might be too late.  Each season is but an infinitesimal point.  It no sooner comes than it is gone.  It has no duration.  It simply gives a tone and hue to my thought.  Each annual phenomena is reminiscence and prompting. Our thoughts and sentiments answer to the revolution of the seasons, as two cog-wheels fit into each other.  We are conversant with only one point of contact at a time, from which we receive a prompting and impulse and instantly pass to a new season or point of contact.  A year is made up of a certain series and number of sensations and thoughts which have their language in nature.  Now I am ice, now I am sorrel.  Each experience reduces itself to a mood of the mind."

Tomorrow summer begins officially.  Light that has been lengthening will begin to diminish as we move toward winter.  I, too, feel "a little fluttered in my thoughts."

June 19, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

PEONIES: EACH ONE A GIRL ON HER FIRST DATE

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Peonies have been a favorite flower of mine forever.  When I saw my first peonies of the season Friday while visiting the New York Botanical Garden, and with special thanks to Mary Jo Salter's poem, "Peonies," I saw individual blooms "each one a girl on her first date"!  Most of the peonies are still tight in the bud, but not these.  They are glorious.

NOTE:  During the month of April, I've been receiving a Poem-A-Day from Knopf Poetry.  To read Mary JoSalter's poem--and others--in entirety, see the website: http://poem-a-day.knopfdoubleday.com/ 

 

April 24, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

EVERYWHERE WALL FLOWERS--AND PLANTS!

This was the first glimpse of what was to come in the New York Botanical Garden's Orchid Show which closed Sunday.  The orchids this year were featured in vertical gardens designed by Patrick Blanc, a botanist who specializes in the study of adaptation strategies of plants growing in unusual situations, often rock faces, in natural habitats.  

Blanc has designed vertical gardens all over the world.  "He 'jungles' concrete," it has been said.

At the botanical garden, in wall face after wall face, I saw artistically composed orchids and plants flourishing in a manner fresh and new.  Here was evidence, proof positive, that being a wall flower is not a bad thing--not at all!

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April 24, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CRABAPPLE BLOSSOMS DAZZLE AT CONSERVATORY GARDEN

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Any time is a good time to visit the Conservatory Garden at 105th Street and Fifth Avenue.  To go there is to be visited by beauty.  When the crabapples are in bloom, I am dizzied, dazzled and delighted by the magnitude and magnificence of "pretty in pink and white"!

 

April 20, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

CURLY WILLOW SHOWING GREEN--HARBINGER OF SPRING

When the curly willow begins to show green, it is a harbinger of spring.  Other "harbingers," all of which I've noticed in recent days, include flip flops, playgrounds giggling and shouting with children, daffodils flaunting their golden hew, ever so boldly, while the forsythia whisper yellow, though not for long. This moment in time is what I intended to celebrate in my most recent arrangement. 

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March 15, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

THIS CONTAINER IS A BEAUTY

Because of space limitations, acquisition of a new containers is something I consider very carefully; however, this one meets all my criteria.

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March 15, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

"FANTASTICAL" DESCRIBES SHOW

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This year's Philadelphia Flower Show was anything but "the usual."  For starters, the theme, "Hawaii Islands of Aloha,' was strong on fantasy--and orchids, anthurium, banksia, heliconia, protea, strelitzia (Bird-of-Paradise) and more!  (There were some tulips, daffodils, irises, crocuses and such, as we have come to expect, but the abundance of tropical flowers elevated this show to the sensational.)

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A word picture by Ken Frank ended just so:  The forecast for tomorrow predicts another day of high waves and higher temperatures.  But for right now, the mood is set for a Tropical Chill.

Paradise anyone?

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March 15, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

LINCOLN

 

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Sunday I made my first visit to the Metropolitan Museum's recently opened New American Wing Galleries for Paintings, Sculpture and Decorative Arts. My friend, Carole, and I focused on the Galleries of 18th-,19th- and early 20th-Century American Art, together with important examples of American sculpture. Though Carole and I viewed some of the paintings, our emphasis was on the sculpture.

The sculpture that brought me to tears was "Lincoln Standing" by Augustus Saint-Gaudens, a sculptor who first saw Lincoln when he, the sculptor, was a young boy.  It was 1860 and the image Saint-Gaudens remembered was that of Lincoln standing in a carriage about to speak to a waiting crowd.  

In "Lincoln Standing," Lincoln's head is bowed; he seems to be looking inward; one hand grips the lapel of his coat; the other he holds behind his back.   A chair of state, decorated on the back with an American eagle, wings spread, stands behind Lincoln.  We know he is President of the United States, states he is intent upon keeping "united." 

In this sculpture, Lincoln has risen from his chair but he hasn't begun to speak. He is listening inwardly for the words that will inform, engage and open his listeners to what he has to say. His audience is ready. (People in the 1860s listened to politicians for hours. It was entertainment. And Lincoln had a reputation as an extraordinary speaker/story teller.)

While so many representations of great leaders seek to impress through stature and/or posture, this one is small in size.  It is the image of a thought-"full" man, a compassionate man, one whose heart and mind were in perfect alignment.  (Lincoln didn't try to convince; he invited mutual participation in developing consciousness, to guide and shape perception and action.  He shared his thinking, the result of ongoing process, as distinct from "thoughts," the result of process.) I felt myself invited to listen and I said, "Yes!" 

February 02, 2012 | Permalink | Comments (0)

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