The winter of listening

The Winter of Listening

No one but me by the fire,
my hands burning
red in the palms while
the night wind carries
everything away outside.

All this petty worry
while the great cloak
of the sky grows dark
and intense
round every living thing.

What is precious
inside us does not
care to be known
by the mind
in ways that diminish
its presence.

What we strive for
in perfection
is not what turns us
into the lit angel
we desire,

what disturbs
and then nourishes
has everything
we need.

What we hate
in ourselves
is what we cannot know
in ourselves but
what is true to the pattern
does not need
to be explained.

Inside everyone
is a great shout of joy
waiting to be born.

Even with the summer
so far off
I feel it grown in me
now and ready
to arrive 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
you can belong
to everything
simply by listening.

And the slow
difficulty
of remembering
how everything
is born from
an opposite
and miraculous
otherness.
Silence and winter
has led me to that
otherness.

So let this winter
of listening
be enough
for the new life
I must call my own.

~  David Whyte  ~

(The House of Belonging)

Best part of winter

There are struggles for territory going on a few feet from this desk.

Two blackbirds are dancing in and out of a boundary. On one side a large rock and a gravel drive way, on the other a couple of flower beds and a group of willow trees. The dancing, flying and hopping continue at the very edge of where the two territories meet, day in and out.

The boys are back in town and are making their presence felt all across this couple of acres.

Winter for all it's darkness is the best time for getting up close with birds. Every morsel and scrap is welcome as they build up their reserves for the mating season. Come Spring there will be even more frantic activity as they feed their families and then in the summer they will be reabsorbed into the leaves and branches of the bushier hedgerows.

For now they skid and flutter into my "all you can eat buffet" and dine out while we wait for Spring.

Just one more time?

I had a lovely bunch of spring crocuses ready for this week's blog, then on Monday morning we woke up to snow.

We were on our way to the National Concert Hall. The Gloaming a group of musical wizards led by Martin Hayes, were about to play to a packed house. It's like Irish traditional music, jazz and trance blended into a new genre, uniquely theirs. 

When Martin, the King of the Faeries takes off with this wild fiddle playing, the rest of them follow, barely hanging onto his coat-tails.  And then the audience is swept away with them, until we are all circling the lofty hall soaring through these dramatic riffs, in the flow of the old stories from the time before time. 

Even their opening piece of about 15 minutes long, got a standing ovation.....

Then afterwards, fan that I am didn't I run into Martin standing beside the cloakroom just as I collected my coat, twas still sleeting and snowing a bit. He held out his hand and I told him about my favourite quote of his "knowing the wisdom of what's all around you and playing that" and how it relates to contemplative photography. (I now KNOW he has a set of gossamer wings hidden under those clothes) 

They play in Australia and New Zealand next week.  Never, ever pass up a chance to spend an evening with them.....

Find out more here

Comeragh Mountains

The Comeragh Mountains lie towards the west of County Waterford. All year long we can track the sun as it sets further north or south along the high ridges, from one solstice extreme to the other. Like our elders, we tell the season and the hour by it.

The weather comes to us from these mountains too and so every morning we check to see what's on it's way. As in the old joke, if we can see the mountains there is rain coming and if we can't see the mountains it is already raining. 

Up here now there's a bitter wind: eyes watering with warm tears, breath fogging up the viewfinder. The walk to the waterfall has us bent double against the force of it.

Over the other side beyond the summit, the road heads out west towards the Atlantic; Dungarvan, Youghal, Cork, Killarney, Dingle. 

And as we turn for home I remember that it's time to start planning a longer road trip again......

Studying light

I'm going to write more about contemplative photography and unravelling what it means. How it can enrich your life and your creative practice, no matter what that is. How it can help to infuse more soul into your work. How it can help to develop your visual sensibilities and enhance the quality of what you do.

Its just like any other contemplative practice, a very personal experience. But the inklings I am following for 2015 suggest that my own developing practice might be something worth sharing. I'd love to know if there are questions you would ask about either improving your photography or about a contemplative approach to photography? Just leave a comment with your thoughts or questions and it will help me greatly in knowing where to begin with this.....or even if to begin!

Light is everything, and I once spent a full year studying nothing else. It is a wonderful starting point for observation; for seeing everything with new eyes. These rare icy mornings can be overcast and misty. But sometimes there is a delicious combination of ice and sunlight which creates little rainbow coloured bubbles. Known in photography as bokeh, it's from a Japanese word meaning blur or haze.

Today it's like the morning sun just spread handfuls of silvery bokeh glitter on everything.....

These photos were taken at ground level with a fully open aperture and very particular conditions that don't happen around here too often. That moment when the ice softens and the moisture picks up the light just enough to shine.

If you are interested in beginning a photography practice then start by studying light. Where the sun rises and sets. How subjects alter at different times of the day. The way the seasons influence the shadow falls on the landscape. How light falling softly on a child's face creates a special radiance.

Meanwhile in the spirit of contemplative photography look out for what is going on around you and above all else open your heart to it......

Seeing red

It's not something we see around here in the dead of winter. Red, the colour of vibrance, heat, attention. So any little pop of red here on the lane is precious and impossible to ignore.

I've gone through most of life not wanting to stand out or be too brash. The (so called) worst thing a girl can be, is a bit of a show off. And yet when I meet a young girl with a twinkling sense of her own mischief I love it. Don't you?

Look here how a bit of showing off cheers up the day, sparkles in the greyness of January and brings such happiness? And anyway for a photographer, one of the ground rules is always photograph RED!

A hint of frost

The sky changes by the minute. As I am writing this, the calm ice covered landscape I was loving this morning is being battered by a westerly gale and driving heavy rain. Unsettling and mind numbingly grey to boot.

I could complain, moan, slump. Every part of me wants to go horizontal, hide under the warm duvet, dream about Greece. The evening is setting in again and the heat will have to be cranked up another few notches.

Winter can sometimes be a matter of holding on for dear life until the light returns. A time of hibernation and low energy. So I write out the slump here and ride out the darkness in my head. A combination of gritting the teeth and letting go the effort. 

The news is bad here but worse in other places. The fragility of life and the lack of certainty seeps through every bit of the veneer. Uncontainable. 

The silvery foliage I snapped in the frosty early hours lights up the screen. I put on another pair of socks knowing that the only thing to do is get back to work.

Winter blues

Winter reveals what's underneath; a rusty gate usually overwhelmed by briars, the cattle shed at the ruined cottage. Tantalising glimpses into what is out of reach during the leafier seasons.

Strangely today it was all in shades of blue, or at least that's how I saw things under the cool January sky.....

An icy road trip

Our Celitc Tiger motorway from Waterford to Dublin, the M9, bypasses Thomastown, Kilkenny, Carlow and all the narrow villages we used to know so intimately. Unfortunately it's also now against the rules of the road to stop and photograph the landscape. 

This part of Ireland has it's own story; gentle rolling hills, the flat plains of the midlands, and lots of old trees. A journey through an inland maze of fields, all sky and agriculture.

So on this eerie early morning road trip, I shot these frosty trees and fog as the sun came up, just because I was a passenger and for once and I could..... 



PS 

Thank you so much to everyone who shopped here in the Foxglove Lane Studio over Christmas. While it was a very busy time it was also good to connect with so many of you who are becoming like old friends at this stage! Thank you from the bottom of my heart, it has been very encouraging.

I'm having a short SALE at the moment and while the hardback book is still available you can now get the download version of the book here  here reduced to 1.99 euros.  

In other news I have just begun to sell a new range of Limited Edition Fine Art Prints  Each one is a result of layering paintings, textures and photographs and is something I hope to explore much more in 2015. 

Here's to a fresh New Year! 

The gloaming

In winter our planet moves around to the best possible angle for evening sun. Through my kitchen window, night after December night, the gloaming envelops everything with it's vibrance. And as 2014 is coming to an end, it's now time to hibernate, look back and look forward.

Every year around this time I choose a word to guide me through the following year. Last year it was Pilgrimage which allowed me to sail into my sixties with imagination. This year I am being drawn in another direction.

Here's how it works.

Around this time of the year I start to doodle in a journal. Spider mind maps, lists, words. I started one thread recently by thinking about the lake, then lake goddesses, then deep water, deep-end, out of my depth, deeper, and so on...... it's about exploring rather than planning, it's playing.

Later in the New Year of 2015  I will settle on a word which becomes like a loose web into which my life and work fall. Something like that anyway! In 2012 I chose EXPAND, in 2013 I chose LIGHT.

So maybe you would like to have a go this year? Susannah Conway has a Workbook which might help. Or you could design your own method? Just choose a word that will light you up and allow your mind to run amuck with delight! For some reason the vagueness and focus of choosing ONE word, works a kind of alchemy.... if you let it.

Have you ever experimented with choosing a word for your year? If so I'd love to hear about it. If not then I hope you will enjoy the hibernation of advent and these December skies