Month: March 2021

Old tapestories wear thin!

Old Tapestories Wear Thin

Tapestories. No that’s not a typo: Tapes, stories! This is made from a photo of a tapestry, which did indeed wear thin. It was also attacked by moths and it became so worn that, sadly, I had to throw it out.

Stories, Tapes, are a part of everyone’s life: family stories, family histories, (not to mention history and herstory), religious and cultural histories, myths and folk tales, even nursery rhymes. Then there’s the personal stories, the ones we tell ourselves and those we tell other people, not necessarily the same thing!

There are schools of thought which say that we are just our stories, our self is our story! All these stories, from those of our culture, to the personal ones we hold inside ourselves, play a large part in who we are.

The stories we tell ourselves can often be very limiting. “I’m just a person who can’t do this or that”; “this is the way it’s meant to be”; “it’s all so-and-so’s fault I am the way I am”; “I’ll never get over it”; or whatever! We run these tapes, stories, over and over again in our minds. Part of growing older is the joy of finally seeing that these tapes/ stories are wearing thin, and we can toss them!

Once, a Church.

Once, a church.

I made this one after looking at a wonderful, but very sad, album on Flickr by someone who had photographed dozens of derelict or abandoned buildings of all kinds: municipal buildings; railway stations; schools, concert halls, and many many churches and other places of worship, often places with amazing historical architecture or interior design. It’s hard to imagine what could have led to them becoming abandoned.

Coincidentally, soon after that, I saw on the news that there had been a disastrous fire in Paris ,which destroyed part of Notre Dame Cathedral.

Although I am not a churchgoer, I find old churches very interesting and moving. During my childhood in England I lived in a fairly rural county which abounded in churches, many of them medieval and some dating right back to the Saxon period. Those old stone churches were the centre of village life in those small towns. My uncle, who was an artist, used to take me along on some of his sketching trips as we visited village squares, castles, seashores and meadows and lots of churches and their graveyards where various poets and people of historical importance were buried. At the churches, I loved to look at the gargoyles on the pillars and the stained glass windows from inside. Those windows taught me that something which looks dark and boring from the outside, can be light and colourful from the inside. I particularly liked the mandalic-shaped rose windows!

During my last visit back to England i a few years ago, I was saddened to see that a lot of church buildings, some with beautiful architecture, had been turned into restaurants, bars, bingo halls and flats and so on. I don’t know what I’d want for them, some kind of community gathering place, perhaps, but not businesses!

The Tree of Five Minutes to Midnight

From the Tree as Symbol Series :The Tree of Five Minutes to Midnight

“The Tree” in this series, represents the individual person or our society in general.

Five minutes to midnight refers to the Doomsday Clock. It’s MUCH closer now ! The poor tree here (in this case representing the world and its peoples, of whom we individuals are each a part) has got some kind of blight and has lost its leaves; the trunk has been shored up with bricks. The wheel represents overproduction, misuse of resources and the environment.

I made this maybe a decade ago, when the Doomsday Clock was “only” at five minutes to midnight; it is a lot closer now. Shockingly close! If you want to see how close, check the URL below. Warning: It’s “seconds” now, not minutes! Symbolic seconds, of course.

The Doomsday Clock, in case you don’t remember, represents the danger that scientists feel that the world is in. It started out in 1945 standing for the risk of atomic destruction but now, “The Clock has become a universally recognized indicator of the world’s vulnerability to catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, and disruptive technologies.” The good news is that the clock setting has sometimes gone backwards as well as forwards.

(If you want to know more ): https://thebulletin.org/doomsday-clock/current-time/

A City Called Life: The Path Less Travelled

From the City called Life series: The Path less travelled.

ROBERT FROST

The Road Not Taken
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves, no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by.
And that has made all the difference.


A City Called Life Series : Home

A City Called Life : “Home”

This picture is in one of the first series which I made and is the only one in which I left a recognizable person, only slightly photo-shopped, because I did ask his permission, and gave him something in return.

“Home is not a place, it’s a feeling”, said someone, I forget who!

I don’t think it’s necessary to say much about this pic, but I invite you to ask yourself what the idea of Home means to you.

More about the Series, A City Called Life

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Blue Skies, Some Rain!

Blue Skies, Some Rain.

As for the “meaning” of it, the meaning is whatever you want to give it!  This morning I looked up the meaning of “blue sky” on the web and was amazed to find that there are some negative meanings, not to mention many more songs than the one I remembered, mostly songs with positive meanings.
For me, it just means: there are blue skies, and there is rain!  Sometimes one, sometimes the other, sometimes both at once or both in a day. (And when skies are grey too long,  I try to remember that rain is needed, and blue sky will return!)