look up - at a festival

look up - bird

green parrot


on a wall in north london


pelican, tybee island GA


bird taking a bath on a wall in san francisco

the old man and the sea

Everything about him was old except his eyes and they were the same color as the sea and were cheerful and undefeated. - Ernest Hemingway

This is a photo of my cousin John. He's the young boy in the picture here. He lives in Normandy, france and this picture was taken on the Brittany coast last month.

theme thursday - mystery

It is a mystery to me how, with the first drops of rain, the barren desert flowers



how the velvet on a butterfly's wing will withstand buffeting on the air and yet fragment at a finger's touch



how the barn owl hunts - seeing with her ears



how the tide knows to come in



and go out




how clouds are so beautiful



Glory be to God for dappled things—
For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;
For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;
Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;
Landscape plotted and pieced—fold, fallow, and plough;
And áll trádes, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;
Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)
With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;
He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change:
Praise him.

Pied Beauty - Gerard Manley Hopkins

sylvia

It's 3 years since my Mum died of pancreatic cancer. She's the one in the striped top. The only one smiling at the camera. Mum was one of six girls and here she is with three of her sisters plus her Mum and Dad and her nephew and niece. The photograph was taken by her brother-in-law, Walter on September 2nd 1939. The day before war was declared in Europe. Mum was 17.

From L-R Olive, John, Walter (my grandfather) Ruby (my grandmother) Sylvia, Jo, Mabel and Josie

This rose was from my Mum's garden and now blooms in mine.

tuneful tuesday - wires

Searching through my photos for another on the Look Up theme, I found this one, taken in Portsmouth dockyard.



And it made me think of Wires by the fabulous Athlete.
The song was written after the lead singer's baby was born prematurely and had to be in neonatal intensive care.

blue sky thinking

1. thinking that is not grounded or in touch in the realities of the present.
2. open-minded thinking (i.e., as wide and clear as the blue sky).