Category: Photos

Landscapes lately

Katharine Asals2 Comments

At the grocery store checkout today, I lined up behind a woman with a massive stack of stuff in her cart, 6th or 7th in line. There was only one cashier open out of the 8 potential spots, and an absurd line up behind the one open cash.

She turned to me, impatience percolating. “I can’t believe they have 8 wickets and only one cashier on”.

“Profits are up”, I answered. There’d been a headline in the papers just yesterday – better than expected profits this quarter. Easy to see how they do it.

She took a beat, as if shifting into second gear, the better able to tell me what she really thought. “The greediest family! The only ones greedier are the Walmart family”.

THIS is the landscape everywhere. Across this country, and from the sounds of it, most others as well.

In our neighbourhood, all three businesses within view are closing their doors. The bank of course, it’s just the branch; the Popeyes, also a bit of a regional franchise failure; and the cannabis store beside the Popeyes, well… hard as we all tried, they just didn’t survive.

During my summer out west, I heard jokes about how BC stands for “bring cash”. Plenty of struggles out there as well.

But it was summertime, and so it was time to kick back and enjoy the good weather, and we went to all the beaches up and down the coast – one afternoon of full on Pacific Ocean, but mostly up and down the Strait of Georgia.

Everywhere we went was breathtakingly spectacular. Just insanely beautiful.

But I realized there was one beach that stayed with me especially.

There was something about the proximity of the mountains just across the way on the mainland and the almost protected feeling of the waters in between.

Tiny fish darting at every step, seaweed waving lazily, crabs scuttling in all directions.

Something about this grove of Ocean and Mountains and primeval life forms gave me a sense of a kind of Birth of the World, or the Origins of All Species.

Swimming there I felt almost as if I was swimming in the dawn of creation.

This sensation was the most beautiful reminder of all the stages of the world – all the mysterious pre-human stages, the early human hunter-gatherers, and then the slow slow move to agriculture… and only just recently the massive shifts to industry, to technology, to predatory capitalism.

Nothing is forever.

We can dream a better dream any time we want.

Lens Artists Challenge – Landscape

The Journey

Katharine AsalsLeave a comment

Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light again

painting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.

Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavens

so you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.

Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find that

first, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.

Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone out

someone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.

You are not leaving.
Even as the light fades quickly now,
you are arriving.

~ David Whyte

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