Happy Blogiversary

It's been two years, an eternity in the confused realm of words and emotion. I've written a million words, I've shed as many tears when confronted with my own inarticulacy. The thoughts and forms I've posted have left me facing the deadening wall of my own inadequacies, which I'm unable to tear down on my own without the help of those immediately dear who can't understand the twilight world I inhabit...


I've met so many wonderful people in the meantime in the blogosphere, who have given me hope, who have given me the courage to continue despite my own misgivings, who have believed in the images and the concepts I hold dear and have whispered encouragement into a soul shrivelling back to my mumbled middle class mediocrity I should have escaped from so long ago...


Thank you, all of you most sincerely... it's been a long, rough ride and it's not even over yet... the river flows on, the flowers continue to bloom and decay, the rhythm of existence drums out its inescapable beat in the background whilst ambition and inability gnaw away at our sanity...


Keep well...

Girl growing up

It seems only like yesterday that she was born... they grow up so quickly in whirlwinds of confused lives which echo our own from decades past.


The daughter who vowed that she'd never wanted to be photographed again in her life, asked me do so after having had her hair done by a friend.


Here, together with a painting made of the row of trees which used to live behind our house, at the other side of the canal. The trees, a symbol of particular fascination for her... take a look at her own Deviant Art site and judge for yourself.

Keep well...
-----------

Every which way, but how...

My 801st post... wondering where I've been and where I'm going, questions at a delicate moment in life and yet so poignantly cast in concrete...

High Hopes
(David Gilmour/Polly Samson)

Beyond the horizon of the place we lived when we were young
In a world of magnets and miracles
Our thoughts strayed constantly and without boundary
The ringing of the division bell had begun

Along the Long Road and on down the Causeway
Do they still meet there by the Cut

There was a ragged band that followed in our footsteps
Running before time took our dreams away
Leaving the myriad small creatures trying to tie us to the ground
To a life consumed by slow decay

The grass was greener
The light was brighter
With friends surrounded
The night of wonder

Looking beyond the embers of bridges glowing behind us
To a glimpse of how green it was on the other side
Steps taken forwards but sleepwalking back again
Dragged by the force of some inner tide

At a higher altitude with flag unfurled
We reached the dizzy heights of that dreamed of world

Encumbered forever by desire and ambition
There's a hunger still unsatisfied
Our weary eyes still stray to the horizon
Though down this road we've been so many times

The grass was greener
The light was brighter
The taste was sweeter
The nights of wonder
With friends surrounded
The dawn mist glowing
The water flowing
The endless river

Forever and ever

-----------
Keep well...

Who are we?

Occasionally I find or receive items of information which stop me dead in my tracks, in appreciation, mirth or horror... a few days ago my brother-in-law sent me something I'd known of for quite a while but for whatever reason hadn't registered properly...

It's 1993. A war is raging in the Sudan, a famine devours a helpless population. The law of the wild kicks in, the survival of the fittest becomes a daily reality.


The photographer Kevin Carter took this photo a short distance from a United Nations food camp... in the blazing sun a child tries to crawl forward to safety, at the background the vulture waits patiently in the knowledge that it might soon be rewarded...


The fate of the child is unknown, the photographer committed suicide in 1994, the war still rages on and the world which was horrified at the time has efffectively become anaesthesised to the indignities meted out to our fellow humans. The funds we collect disappear in the pockets of self-serving politicians and corrupt business people, those in a position to help leave the food we send to rot or be distributed to those who have no need of immediate help, the needs and wishes of global industry leave those who are unable to participate effectively, alone and destitute in their hour of need.

Are we human, or do we just call ourselves human? I feel ashamed.

Keep well...
-----------

Ice Dance

"It never snowed before he came down from the mountain..."

Taken from the film Tim Burton's "Edward Scissorhands", argueably one of the most wonderful love stories of our time, combining themes of innocence and inevitability, inability and despair which lead to total separation.


Johnny Depp in perhaps one of his finest roles with Winona Ryder as Kim, who managed to see and believe in Edward for being the creature he was and always would be.

The most excellent Danny Elfman composed the soundtrack which was once again so hauntingly beautiful, it so often returns to me at moments when I'm half asleep at the dawn of a new day, as an echo of a world beyond time and reality where we as humans have been disqualified from by our incompleteness and inadequacies.

Listen to the music, look at the snowflakes in wonder for their perfection and singular beauty.


A collection of many and varied fragments, set to the music of the Dutch group "Within Temptation" (Say my name)
Keep well.
----------

Worlds apart

Circling the planet Jupiter, millions of kilometers from here, the beauty of the moon Io presents itself for all those who wish to see. It's a strange and foreign place, with volcano's and seas of liquid methane


As photographed by the "Galileo" several years ago
Although it's probably a rather circular reference, I'd say we're so awfully lucky to be able to inhabit our own beautiful planet, one we should be doing a lot more to protect and preserve for our descendants.


The universe is a strange place, human beings are so strange too, but the one uniting factor is that we are all part of each other... from the stardust from which we were born and to the stardust we shall eventually return. Our mortal bodies are part of the creation as is the creation part of us.


The Galaxy Song
from Monty Python's "The Meaning of Life"

Just remember that you're standing on a planet that's evolving
And revolving at nine hundred miles an hour,
That's orbiting at nineteen miles a second, so it's reckoned,
A sun that is the source of all our power.
The sun and you and me and all the stars that we can see
Are moving at a million miles a day
In an outer spiral arm, at forty thousand miles an hour,
Of the galaxy we call the 'Milky Way'.

Our galaxy itself contains a hundred billion stars.
It's a hundred thousand light years side to side.
It bulges in the middle, sixteen thousand light years thick,
But out by us, it's just three thousand light years wide.
We're thirty thousand light years from galactic central point.
We go 'round every two hundred million years,
And our galaxy is only one of millions of billions
In this amazing and expanding universe.

The universe itself keeps on expanding and expanding
In all of the directions it can whizz
As fast as it can go, at the speed of light, you know,
Twelve million miles a minute, and that's the fastest speed there is.
So remember, when you're feeling very small and insecure,
How amazingly unlikely is your birth,
And pray that there's intelligent life somewhere up in space,
'Cause there's bugger all down here on Earth.

Lest we forget... keep well...
----------

Challenges and excellence

Last Saturday January 20th, Katie participated in the Netherlands Mid-West regional rhönrad championships, one in which she'd been looking forward to for some months now. She'd been training conscientiously, albeit a little unconcentrated at moments, but she was well prepared.


The competition consists of two parts, a well defined compulsory exercise and a "free" exercise in which the participants can combine rolls and movements to the best of their ability, whilst trying to attain an esthetic harmony so as to score as many points as possible before a critical and very determined jury.


Katie is still one of the C-participants and as such isn't in a position to qualify for the national championships as the B and A lines are able to do in the competition. She'd been so frightfully nervous during the last week before the championship, she'd been repeating the lines and the movements of her free exercise to distraction (which unfortunately was first on the agenda on the day), to such an extent that in the end she forgot what she was supposed to be doing at moments and had to be prompted by her trainer.


She did well, but lost valuable points due to hesitations and one unfortunate roll backwards (try to imagine the children who suffer from examination nerves)... she ended her free exercise in tears of frustration and perceived humiliation although she'd done quite creditably in her division, having gained a fifth place.


It was a day of mixed successes, for participants in all categories... the results in the higher categories were reasonably predictable, but in my eyes there were significant differences in input compared to half a year ago... as a photographer, I was looking for something more original, more unusual and was well rewarded...


Perhaps I'm managing to grow up in my ways of looking at the world around me, perhaps I'm becoming more receptive of things of beauty and excellence that surround me, in myriad and untold ways, perhaps I'm learning to focus on people and the different worlds they inhabit to the best of their ability... perhaps I'm finally becoming human in ways I'd never suspected.


There is such beauty in the human form, in the ways our mortal humanity can be transformed into works of art deserving of attention, as fleeting reminders that there is so much more in the world around us than the day to day dreariness we are constantly confronted with.

Rhönrad gymnastics has come to show me that the art forms we crave and which we need in order to stay effectively sane in this hostile world of ours can usefully be combined with the machines we have created, that the creator and the created can coöperate to create an experience which is much greater and more exhilarating than the "sum of their parts".

Please take a look at my own photographic record of the day, to be found here on my website, there are some shots I've felt to be particularly worthwhile and one or two of which I feel rather proud of :-)

Keep well, reel well ;-)