Category Archives: photography

“…the Year that for you waits…”

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A Flower unblown: a Book unread:
A Tree with fruit unharvested :
A Path untrod : a House whose rooms
Lack yet the heart s divine perfumes:
This is the Year that for you waits
Beyond Tomorrow s mystic gates.

– Horatio Nelson Power

Flowers and books and harvests, new paths and new friends – 2013 brought me an abundance of all of those things…  my Secret Garden gave me flowers like never before; my work  brought me wonderful new students and colleagues and adventures; and Goodreads tells me I recorded reading 20 new books – amongst them Over the Edge of the World: Magellan’s Terrifying Navigation of the Globe, The  Boys in the Boat, The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, Born to Run, Biocentrism, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Hiroshima, The Aviator’s Wife, Miss Buncle’s Book, and this was the year when I finally discovered Kurt Vonnegut and read his Breakfast of Champions, Sirens of Titan, Slaughterhouse-Five, and Cat’s Cradle. 

And now we stand at the threshold of 2014. What new friends await us on the other side of the door? What new paths will we discover? What new adventures? And what new books?  I’m looking forward to the discovering… 🙂

Time is a mortal thought, the divisor of which  is the solar year. Eternity is God’s measurement of Soul- filled years.  – from Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures by Mary Baker Eddy

 

“Go into the arts…”

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??????????photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell

Go into the arts. I’m not kidding. The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or how badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven’s sake. Sing in the shower. Dance to the radio. Tell stories. Write a poem to a friend, even a lousy poem. Do it as well as you possibly can. You will get an enormous reward. You will have created something. – Kurt Vonnegut

***

I love the Vonnegut quote above.  It expresses really well how I feel about the creative arts in my own life. I’ve come to feel that art is the purest expression of Soul, and I’ve found that the older I get the more important the expression of Soul has become in my life.  Photography, singing, writing – these things help me stay focused and help me stay sane. Literally help me stay sane. Looking back, I think photography was a big help in pulling me out of the whatever-that-was several years ago. When I’m out taking pictures I’m always looking for the magic – for the beautiful and joy-filled – for the “idea of truth”; and the other things – the things that would distract me from the beautiful and good – are stilled in my thought. When I’m out and about with my camera, the dialogue of mortal mind is silenced for a while, and I’m on a vacation from it.

In photography there’s that moment when the photographer spots something remarkable and captures it – to get that moment the photographer has to have appreciation for the beauty around her- she has to be able to recognize it when she sees it. And then the photographer takes home that moment and downloads it to the computer and does the art thing – crops and contrasts and highlights and saturates and leaches out the color until the artist in her recognizes that something has popped out that’s just perfect. And then she gets to share that moment with other people – gift an audience with that moment, too.

The audience is a huge part of the art – the people who read the books, or listen to the music, or look at the pictures, become, themselves, a part of the expression and experience.  When the audience members laugh or gasp at the right time during a play – they are working with the actors, helping them create their expression.  When the artist’s audience applauds or writes a review – laughs and cries and feels and learns because of the art – the audience becomes a part of the artistic endeavor, too.  🙂

In Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy writes: “Mortals are egotists. They believe themselves to be independent workers, personal authors, and even privileged originators of something which Deity would not or could not create.”  I’ve found that when what I’m seeking in my work is applause or personal recognition – when I’m creating something to show-off and impress – rather than to share and express – the work never turns out quite right. It’s lacking something genuine in it. Something real.  It’s a stilted, self-conscious, self-indulgent, self-absorbed, SELFED and ridiculous thing.  It really stinks.

But when the work comes from the inspiration of Love (God) – from the beauty, joy, and kindness I see around me and just HAVE to share with everybody else – then it’s real. Then it’s WORTH sharing.

Whatever furnishes the semblance of an idea governed by its Principle, furnishes food for thought. Through astronomy, natural history, chemistry, music, mathematics, thought passes naturally from effect back to cause. Academics of the right sort are requisite. Observation, invention, study, and original thought are expansive and should promote the growth of mortal mind out of itself, out of all that is mortal. – Mary Baker Eddy

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“Delicious autumn!”

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Delicious autumn! My very soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about the earth

seeking the successive autumns. – George Eliot

***

I trust in nature for the stable laws of beauty and utility.

Spring shall plant and autumn garner to the end of time. – Robert Browning

***

In seed time learn, in harvest teach, in winter enjoy. – William Blake

I love this time of year.  I love the musky, cidery smell in the air, the sunny days that have just a little bite to them, the gold and crimson in the leaves, and the gathering of the harvest.  There’s a huge satisfaction in bringing in the harvest and squirreling stuff away for winter, isn’t  there?  I feel a connection to the generations of peasant ancestors that came before me, and to the world that gifts us with the seasons and earth’s bounty. I feel connected to Life.

Last July, being the cheapskate I am and not wanting to spend a whole lot of money on a factory-made arbor, I asked my son – the engineering student – if he would design and construct an arbor for my grape vines from the flotsam and jetsam we have stashed away around our property.  With an old gate and four posts he found in a pile of wood, the son and his friend built a really cool grape arbor for me.  I wove the vines into the mesh of the old gate at the top of the arbor and awaited developments.

Soon clusters of little grapes were beading on the vines. And then, in due time, the beads became full-fledged grapes – ripe and purple and ready for harvesting.

And yesterday it was time to turn the grapes into my very first ever batch of grape jelly! Et voila! Behold…

photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell

photo by Karen Molenaar Terrell

Yup. I made the grape jelly glowing in the morning sunshine in the jars on my kitchen counter. Aren’t those jars beautiful?  I look at those jars of jelly with a kind of awe. That jelly came from the grapes that grew on the arbor my son built for me.

Cool. 🙂

And God said, Behold, I have given you every herb bearing seed, which is upon the face of all the earth, and every tree, in the which is the fruit of a tree yielding seed; to you it shall be for meat. – Genesis 1: 29

While the earth remaineth, seedtime and harvest, and cold and heat, and summer and winter, and day and night shall not cease. – Matthew  8: 22

(all photos by Karen Molenaar Terrell)

Waiting for Approval

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I’m on the patch right now. Where it releases small dosages of approval until I no longer need it, and then I’m gonna rip it off. – Ellen DeGeneres

Study to shew thyself approved unto God, a workman that needeth not to be ashamed, rightly dividing the word of truth. – II Timothy 2: 15

In the textbook for Christian Science, Science and Health with Key to the Scriptures, Mary Baker Eddy points out that “Jesus’  system of healing received no aid nor approval from other sanitary or religious systems, from doctrines  of physics or of divinity…”  Did this lack of approval stop Jesus from fulfilling his mission, from healing, and accomplishing what he was sent here to accomplish? Did he wait around for permission to heal and do his life’s work? Nope.  He had the approval of God, Love, and that’s the only approval that concerned him.

Okay, listen, if you want to paint your neighbor’s house or rearrange his furniture or drive his car to work – it might be a good thing to wait for his approval before doing these things.  His house, furniture, and car do not belong to you, and it is not your business to take it upon yourself to paint, rearrange, or drive what doesn’t belong to you, without permission.

However, if you are waiting for someone else’s approval to be who YOU are and to live YOUR life – well, that’s just silly. We who live in the U.S. of A. live in a time of wonderful freedom and incredible invention, and it behooves us to take advantage of this. If you want to move or travel – you don’t need to wait for the government’s approval. Just do it. If you want to leave your job, or switch schools , or switch majors – that is your choice, not anyone else’s.  You need no one else’s approval to attend the church of your choice, or to choose not to attend a church at all.  If consenting adults of whatever gender, sexual orientation, race, or religion choose to build a life together – they don’t need anyone else’s permission or approval. And we live at a time when we no longer have to wait for someone else to decide if our writing is book-worthy or our voice is worth recording – the technology to put our words and voices out there is available to anyone with access to a computer – and no one else’s approval is necessary.

You need not wait for approval, my friend

You need not wait to practice zen

You need not wait to sing and soar

You need not wait –  not one second more!

You need no one’s permission to be who you are,

to express and reflect and travel far.

If you want to write and publish a book

or cook up the recipes of a cordon bleu cook

If you want to dance or hop or run

don’t wait for permission – just get ‘er done.

You don’t need permission to love one another –

to be a partner, or friend, or sister or brother.

No, you need no approval to your life live.

You were MADE to express your you-ness,

and your talents to give.

(All photos by Karen Molenaar Terrell.)

Lincoln City, Oregon: 1984-2013

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The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here. – Robert Ingersoll, The Great Agnostic

Ocean is more ancient than the mountains, and freighted with the memories and dreams of Time. –  H.P. Lovecraft

I think it would be interesting if old people got anti-Alzheimer’s disease where they slowly began to recover other peoples’ memories. – George Carlin

My husband and I just returned from our most recent trip to Lincoln City, Oregon. We’ve been going there since 1984 – when we discovered the magic of Lincoln City  on our honeymoon.  We were trying to figure out how many times we’ve been there in the last 29 years, and we figured we’ve made a pilgrimage to Lincoln City probably 27 times – every year, with one or two exceptions.

You know how photographers do time lapse photography to show Nature unfolding in quick time? Yeah, I’m thinking if we took the days my family has spent in Lincoln City and sort of condensed them into a time lapse photography kind of deal, we’d see something like this…

There we are in 1984 – young, confident, and hopeful – starting our life together – unaware of the challenges ahead, and unaware of the blessings, either – running on the beach – limbs strong and quick and joints well-oiled. My aunt Junie showed me the art of agate-hunting when I was a youngster, and now I’m teaching my new husband how to pick up the glow of an agate on the beach – how to discern the difference between a bona fide agate and a rough piece of quartz…

1992:  Introducing our firstborn to the ocean for the first time. His baby body rests on my knee, facing out to the sea. His eyes have locked onto the ocean and taken note of it – he’s chewing his lower lip, eyes moving back and forth along the sea’s horizon, taking in the sights and sounds and smells. It’s becoming a part of him.

1994: We have come to Lincoln City as parents of childREN. We are old hands at parenthood now. Today it is our youngest son’s turn to meet the ocean. We take off his booties and lower his toes into the water. It is a sort of ritual baptism of baby feet – a bonding with the Pacific.

1999: The sons are playing with the surf – letting the waves chase them up the beach. The ocean is their comfortable old friend now.

Jump to April, 2008: I am in crisis.   Struggling with severe depression. I am desperate to escape from myself and my constantly-churning thoughts. Oldest son knows I need to get away and asks me if I’d like him to go to Lincoln City with me for Spring Break. How many 16 year-old sons do you know who’d be willing to accompany their moms on a 14-hour (round trip) road trip? I am blest beyond words. On the way to Lincoln City we stop and visit my Aunt Junie, who shares our kinship with the ocean and lives in Depoe Bay, an hour north of Lincoln City.  I confide my struggles to Junie, and the feelings of guilt and unworthiness that seem to be a symptom of my illness. Junie is appalled at my feelings of worthlessness. “All her instincts” tell her that I am a good person, she says.  “There are no unrightable wrongs, no unforgiveable sins, no fatal mistakes, no fatal diseases, only the eternal now.” She is like Yoda.

July, 2008: Still struggling with the  depression. Lincoln City is my respite. I sit on the balcony in the sun and look down on the beach and watch the sons running and cavorting on the sand below.  There have been times lately when I’ve wished myself not born. But, watching my sons, it hits me that if I hadn’t been born, they wouldn’t have been born, either. They give me purpose. And the ocean gives me comfort. We stop in Tilamook on the way home and I am drawn to a garden plaque that quotes The Great Agnostic, Robert Ingersoll: “The time to be happy is now. The place to be happy is here.” On impulse, I buy it. It will sit in a place of honor on our mantel when we return home.

2009:  The family meets on the Oregon coast to celebrate Aunt Junie’s life, and spread her ashes on the ocean.  We will not get as far as Lincoln City this time, but the ocean that she is now a part of will touch the beaches that have provided such solace to me over the years.  And every time I’m near the ocean, I’ll think of Junie – her humor and wisdom and kindness to me.

2010:  Hoping, but not with high expectations, I ask my youngest son, who’s just turned 16, if he’d like to make the same road trip that I made with his older brother two years ago. To my surprise and delight, he says he would! We spend two days at the ocean – flying a kite, looking for agates, running (well, okay, he’s doing most of the running now) along the beach.  Before we leave on our trip I ask Xander if he’s remembered his swimsuit, long pants, shorts, sweatshirt, sneakers, toothbrush, and sandals. He assures me he has. When we arrive at Lincoln City, I realize that I am the one who’s left her clothes, laptop, and toothbrush back home. It is all very humbling. But there’s a certain freedom in the forgetting, too. I’m scraped down to the bare essentials. Having no laptop is a good thing.  I have become big into photography in the last couple years, and I have, at least, remembered my camera. Camera, son, ocean, and the clothes on my back – what else does a person really need? 🙂

2013: The sons are all grown-up now. They have jobs and things to do.  For the first time since we became parents, we will be making our Lincoln City pilgrimage alone.  We eat at our favorite eatery there – The Lighthouse Brew Pub – take long walks together, hunt for agates, and remember together who we were when we first found Lincoln City.  Young, strong, confident, hopeful. Our lives stretched out ahead of us.  And we think about all that’s happened in the 29 years since. And it’s all been good. All of it. Even the bad stuff has been good, really. Just like those blossoms unfolding in time lapse photography – our life together has unfolded most wonderfully.

How lovely are thy branches…

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“There’s nothing more beautiful than a tree,” Alain Le Goff liked to say…

“Look how they’re working …They’re linking the earth to the tree and sunsetsky. That’s very difficult, son. The sky is so lightweight that it’s always at the point of taking off. If there were no trees, it would bid us farewell …You can see that the trunk of a tree is a thick rope. Sometimes there are knots inside. The strands of the rope work themselves loose at each end so that they can fasten onto the sky and the earth. At the top they’re called branches, and at the bottom, roots. But it comes to the same thing.”– Pierre-Jakez Helias, Horse of Pride

I love trees. They give us shade, shelter, and oxygen. They hold the soil to the hillside, fruit on their branches, and our tire swings above the ground.

When I was a little girl I walked home from school by a property that had a line  of little fir trees which were left, unplanted and drying up, next to dusty holes that someone had dug for them. The trees seemed to have been forgotten and abandoned. My heart went out to them. I plucked one of the little firs up and brought it home to Mom. Mom tried to explain that those trees belonged to someone, but it did not compute – it was obvious to me that those trees deserved a better care-giver than the person who had left them, with their little roots drying up in the open air. Mom must have realized that if that tree was going to survive it needed to be planted post haste – so she found me a planter big enough to accommodate a tree’s roots, and provided a home for “Treesa” (the name I gave her). When we moved several years later, we brought Treesa with us and planted her on our new property, where she lived, grew, and prospered. (Treesa’s sister trees – the other little firs that had been waiting with her to be planted the day I walked past them – never did get planted, and didn’t make it.)

Every year a little fir tree on the path along Bellingham Bay slowly begins accumulating Christmas decorations on its branches. Why this particular tree was picked to be the path’s annual Christmas tree, I do not know. But she’s a very jaunty little tree, and it brings me great joy to contribute to her Christmas finery, and to see her all gussied-up for Christmas.

Christmas tree 2

“For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” – Isaiah 55: 12

“And he shall be like a tree planted by the rivers of water, that bringeth forth his fruit in his season; his leaf also shall not wither; and whatsoever he doeth shall prosper.” – Psalms 1: 3

green Padden         winter trees in upstate NY 600 year-old tree in Deception Pass, WA      Adirondack winter trees (2) autumn trees            Bellingham tree autumn trees            Padden trees    boy in tree

 

all photos by Karen Molenaar Terrell

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Celebrating Earth!

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“EARTH.  A sphere; a type of eternity and immortality, which are likewise without beginning or end…To material sense, earth is matter; to spiritual sense, it is a compound idea.” – Mary Baker Eddy

“In the beginning God created the heaven and the earth…And God saw everything that he had made, and, behold, it was very good.” – Genesis 1: 31

“For ye shall go out with joy, and be led forth with peace: the mountains and the hills shall break forth before you into singing, and all the trees of the field shall clap their hands.” – Isaiah 55: 12

***

Today I celebrate all of my Father-Mother God’s beautiful creation – all the glories of forest and meadow, mountain and sea, desert and valley and dale. I celebrate the infinite expression of God, Good – the beauty, harmony, and life that are evidence and proof of Good.  Today I recognize and appreciate The Artist’s work, I rejoice in it, take note of it, and re-commit myself to protecting it.

***

“Nature voices natural, spiritual law and divine Love,  but human belief misinterprets nature. Arctic regions, sunny tropics, giant hills, winged winds,  mighty billows, verdant vales, festive flowers,  and glorious heavens, – all point to Mind, the spiritual intelligence they reflect. The floral apostles are hieroglyphs of Deity. Suns and planets teach grand lessons.  The stars make night beautiful, and the leaflet turns naturally towards the light.” – Mary Baker Eddy

“Presence is needed to become aware of the beauty, the majesty, the sacredness of nature…You have to put down for a moment your personal baggage of problems, of past and future, as well as your knowledge; otherwise, you will see but not see, hear but not hear.  Your total presence is required.” – from The Power of Now by Eckhart Tolle

With The Eyes of a Tourist…

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“Having eyes, see ye not?” – Mark 8: 18

***

It feels like there’s something reawakening inside of me –  something that had been  asleep for a long time.  I find myself looking at the world around me in the same way I did as a child – like everything I see is new to me, and the world is full of new things to explore and discover.  I like it.

Several years ago I made a new friend through the internet – how I met her and how we became friends is a whole book in itself – and maybe someday I’ll write it.  But what I want to talk about today is how that new friendship affected the way I see things.

My friend, Kathi, lives on the other side of the continent in Nova Scotia.  For reasons I don’t need to explain here, early in our friendship I realized that Kathi would probably never be able to visit me in my part of the world, and I had an overwhelming desire to share the beauty of what I see here with her somehow.  And because Kathi is an artist, I felt a special desire to present her with images an artist would be able to appreciate.

Ever since childhood I’d enjoyed taking photos, but, in my late twenties, I married a gifted professional photographer, and, humbled by his talent, I began limiting my own photography to mostly snapshots of family and friends – capturing birthday parties and anniversaries and family outings for the family photo album.

Now, because of my friendship with Kathi, I started taking a different kind of photo.  I wanted to show off the scenes – the flora and fauna, the mountains and beaches – of the Pacific Northwest to her.  And I wanted to try to present her with photos of images in the way she might see them herself if she were here – as an artist would see them, and as a tourist from Nova Scotia would see them.

This opened up a whole new world for me, and I think this is when my “reawakening” began.  I began noticing line, patterns, textures, small details, colors – all the magic in the world around me – in a way I hadn’t for years.

***

Yesterday was an amazing day. I stepped outside my house for an afternoon “photo walk” and entered an awe-inspiring world. Trumpeter swans flew in the sky to the south of me, and a pair of bald eagles swooped around in the sky to the north of me, and I was just blown away by the magnificence of it.  Totally oblivious to everything but those eagles and those trumpeters, I stood in the middle of the street, mouth open in wonder, focused on capturing what I was seeing in my camera.

I didn’t realize that a car had stopped for me, and the driver was watching me in sort of amused fascination, until I finally took my eyes off the sky. Kind of embarrassed, but still full of the wonder of my world, I laughed and apologized for making him stop. The driver grinned back at me. He said I looked like I was really concentrating. Waving my arm towards the heavens, I said, “We live in a beautiful part of the world! – eagles and swans filling the sky!”

He smiled and kind of shrugged and said, “Nothing new.”

I smiled back at him and said, “It’s all new! I’m looking at the world with new eyes. I’m a tourist here.”

He chuckled. I think he thought I was a little daft. And perhaps I am. But I’m sure enjoying it.