Weekly Photography Challenge:Variations

This week we are challenged to show variations on a theme , patterns, repetitions… I have a collection of old cutlery, and I do  get it out to use sometimes. I love the patina of the well used silver (well, EPNS…), and I prefer the old bone-handled knives with their Sheffield steel blades to modern ones.

I have been picking up washers where ever I see them for years. Although they are basically the same, they’re all different. Smaller ones get incorporated in junk jewellery, large ones in mixed-media art work.

Friday Poem: Where I’m Coming From

I haven’t posted a poem for ages, but I’m back for today, at least. I’ve been asked (several times) where my antecedents came from, as if it mattered to who I am. But I don’t believe it matters very much where a great great grandparent was born. What matters is how you love.

I am born of earth.
I am human,
Made of stardust and love.

I don’t care
where you or your forebears
came from;
we are all out of Africa and ash.

I care about
Kindness
Peace Love Empathy
Justice, Compassion
Freedom and Joy.

I respect the compassionate.
My heart bleeds for the withered hearts
that only know hatred and fear.

I am bodhisattva;
I am of earth
to earth I shall return.

Weekly Photography Challenge: Silence

Appropriate, considering my long silence this week – yet another almost over before I get to making a post. It’s been hot, which I find very enervating, and no rain for ages, so every evening is spent outside watering in an effort to keep the garden going. There are gangs of cockatoos around, so it’s not absolutely quiet, but it’s very pleasant to be out under the sky and out of earshot of the doom, gloom and nonsense spouted by the tv…

 

Weekly Photography Challenge: Weathered

I had thought of looking for some nice weathered timber for this challenge, but I’m going with landscape, after visiting this wind-swept lake recently. Time and the elements have ground down the mountains in the background, and filled the shallow lake with whatever it is that water birds like to eat. It was the brolgas we were looking for (they weren’t so keen to see us), but there are Black swans, pelicans, spoonbills, sandpipers, stilts, marsh harriers, marsh terns, both glossy and white ibis and various ducks.

 

There are windturbines on the hills nearby, taking advantage of the winds that sweep across the plains east of the Grampians – known locally as Pleurisy Plains because that wind can be bitter and unrelenting in winter. Even in summer, it was pretty chilly with the wind off the lake!

Weekly Photography Challenge: Growth

We are just into the new year, which seems a good time to focus on growth.

Growing things is the whole point of gardening. Growing things to eat is great, but I also love flowers for their own sake.

As for the cactus garden (more of a wilderness at present…), which my eldest son planted as an 11 year old 30 or so years ago, rain at the right time plus lack of management means that the cacti have grown upwards and outwards, obliterating the central pathway that is supposed to allow access for weeding…Since Simon assures me that there are bound to be tiger snakes in there, I think it can wait until winter!

 

 

Weekly Photography Challenge: Favourites

I had two weeks, and still I’m late, but I’m not the only one ambushed by Christmas and New Year. I’ve been thinking about my favourites for the year, and of course that means grandkids.

Banjo

Juniper, construction Queen

Matilda

We started the year with two, and finished with three. We haven’t seen Juniper and her little brother for months (maybe not quite as long as it seems, though!), but thanks to social media, we get to see them and their antics almost every day on one screen or another. Young Tilly lives further away than she used to, too, but we’ll make the most of it whenever we see any of them.

And then we get to hand them back to Mum and Dad! Stirred up, if Grandpa has anything to do with it.