Photos can be viewed full frame by clicking on any image.
All photos are mine unless otherwise noted.
Happy Holidays as we are in the Season of all sorts of celebrations. By way of holiday cheer here are two videos that are well worth a viewing as they are simply delightful clips, well made and exceptionally clever. Please enjoy these Christmas gifts from the creative people who put them together.
Be sure to turn your speakers up and watch in full screen by using the controls at the bottom of the video windows.
The Magic Piano:
Click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D9BOTXFCpQA
Four musicians who play one piano:
Click here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n543eKIdbUI
(The card above means to say, "From Maine, the very best of the Season...." )
-
A Christmas Teaching -
Inside everyone
is a
great shout of joy waiting to be born.
Even with summer so far off
we can
already feel it grow in us,
ready to arrive to life in the world.
All those years listening to those
who had
nothing to say.
All those years forgetting how everything
has its
own voice to make itself heard;
All those years forgetting how easily
we can
belong to everything,
simply by
listening.
Ours is the slow difficulty of remembering
how
everything is born
from an
opposite and miraculous otherness.
Silence and this Winter of listening
will be enough
for the new life
we can
all call our own.
Jesus, our Teacher in these matters,
was born they
say in this,
our cold Season of December -
a
teaching in itself on how to go forward from here.
Bill Lagerstrom, 12/2013
A Winter scene in Brewer, Maine.
Taken during the Winter Soltace,
the day of the year with the least hours of daylight.
Today, Sunday morning, after an ice storm left this Bluejay
to puff up on an ice laden branch trying to stay warm.
Someplace in Hampden, Maine a few days ago.
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This is the view from the window I sit in front of regularly. On the table is a pile of photos, each waiting to be matched up with a poem which will then be bound into a book - looking at the stack of images I think several books. The book on the bottom left is a guide for a new camera.
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What follows are three photos taken at the Metropolitan Museum of Art as part of my recent trip to NYC. I am still processing many of the pictures I took that week into images that appeal to my sense of viewpoint. The effect I was seeking in the first two photos tends more to what was produced for over one hundred years by so many photographers who had only film and a darkroom to work with. I am reminded of many photographs that influenced me when I first picked up a camera in my childhood and at the same time rummaged through books on photography at the Jersey City, Zabriskie Street library where I spent many a day expanding my outlook. Some of those photographers are still my mentors to this day.
The last image is from a Japanese vase created in the sixth century which has a Zen like quality to these eyes.
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A little Christmas Humor:
Happy Hollidays to all, and to all a good night.
Peace, Bill Lagerstrom
