Author: Katharine Asals

Letting go of patterns

Katharine Asals8 Comments

I find myself on a boat, quite a large boat.

But it seems I have a corpse that has come with me, or is somehow part of what I am carrying.

I’m figuring there must be some paperwork that needs taking care of, some bureaucratic machinations must surely be done for the corpse, so when a few crew members pass by, I ask them : What needs doing?

“Oh, you can just let that go”, they tell me, “just let it go into the sea”.

It’s about a week after the dream that I find myself in waking life on a ferry, and it takes me maybe half an hour to realize I am in fact on a rather large boat and that it might be a really good time to let some shit go.

Dead shit.

I’m not sure I could define or articulate exactly what the dead element consisted of, but I did have a sense of patterns of behaviour, repetitive stories, relationships that aren’t necessarily working out.

So I opened my arms to the wind there on the upper deck of the ferry and tried to let it all go.

The next day we stood on a mountaintop and looked out.

High enough that the birds floated up to us on the currents of wind.

Mostly we just looked in awe, took in the expanse, the huge sense of space, but once in a while we pulled out the binoculars and tried to identify the flash of movement in the water.

Aside from the tankers passing, all remained elusive and mysterious.

It was the following day at the eastern point of the island that we saw the fins of what we guessed must be porpoises, small and agile, making their way across the strait.

Nope, sorry, I didn’t take a photo of them.

Right now I’m carrying only my phone, no big camera, and besides, those moments seem so precious it feels more important to breathe them in than take a fuzzy terrible picture.

Breathe in the moment, the sea, the wind, and let all the dead shit go…

Lens Artists Challenge

The Quiet

Katharine Asals10 Comments

I have kind of fallen into what has turned into an extended, self directed artist’s retreat.

Originally I came out here for a wedding, but there was a house sit available and somehow, magically, that has become a two month visit to paradise.

The property where I’m staying has such a massive garden, I’m still getting to know all the areas of it, while watching the blooms come and go.

Up to one side is the orchard section, including apple trees, pear trees and hazelnuts –

And in various clumps around the property are gatherings of all kinds of ever shifting variously blossoming flowers –

The hummingbirds are plentiful, darting in and out the flowers, bickering over access.

Crows and ravens and the occasional distant eagle pass through.

And of course the songbirds….

Early morning and late evening at dusk are when the bunnies show up, but the deer wander through any time of day and will help themselves to the raspberries or the rather green looking pears on the pear tree, or sometimes they’ll just stop in for a rest in the shade –

But while all moments of the day are beautiful and peaceful, without a doubt, my favourite time is first thing in the morning, out on the balcony with a coffee, as the sun gradually finds its way up and over the tall tall trees….

Lens Artists Challenge – The Quiet Hours

First thing

Katharine Asals4 Comments

Morning on the balcony the other day, and the first thing I noticed was that a fellow had gone through the break in the fence and was digging around in the scrabbly dirt.

For a couple of summers now, as the site sits empty, we’ve fantasized about and throwing sunflower seeds or wildflower seeds in there to get a field of colour rather than the bleak dust of it, but I think the truth of the matter is there’s more pebble than soil, as even the weeds that have started to grow here and there around the edges only get so far.

So I wondered what exactly was he up to in there? I imagined a scientist taking soil samples to measure quality, or toxicity levels, something…

And then he stood and went towards a pile of random junk against the fence, and a bunny rabbit shot out from somewhere inside the stacked stuff, and froze.

If I don’t move, you can’t see me.

He’s a tiny dot there, to the right of the man, by the first bend in the fence. I went inside to get my DSLR, but alas all batteries were dead, so I was stuck with only the phone camera, waiting to see what would happen next.

Well, not so much, it turned out.

After some moments of observing the bunny from where he stood, the man slowly went back to scrabbling around in the dirt, and the bunny stayed frozen in his spot. They each did their thing without interfering with the other.

It made me think of some drawings I’d been working on recently, based on bunnies in the neighbourhood, and / or the idea that bunnies live in this ultra-urban neighbourhood and how stressful it must be for them, the highway, the cars, the bikes and scooters, the rotating base camp across the street.

How often are they in the if I don’t move, you can’t see me response?

Lens Artists Challenge – The First Thing I Thought Of