Weekly Photo Challenge – Page 2

Broken Rock Face

May 23, 2015September 14, 2016 Katharine Asals33 Comments

Friday afternoons are sketching class – the best day of the week.
Each week we go to a different location, a park somewhere close by, in the ‘hood, and set up to draw whatever presents itself.
This week was the Scarborough Bluffs.

Such an amazing place – I’d never been this far east and south before, and wow, what a fascinating, strange place, almost like being at the ocean with the strong winds, the sound of waves on the beach, the gulls and kingfishers diving for fish –

A place to come back to when the sun is low on the horizon and the skies glow orange and magenta.
But it was interesting too how harsh and desolate the cliff faces looked in the bright afternoon light, the ravages of time and water on the shapes of the rocks –

My drawing companions tease me that no matter what I draw – a rock, a tree, an animal – it ends up looking vaguely like the human figure.
A drawing of a cliff face also seems to hold a variety of human faces, snouts and orifices –

Another rock drawing suggest reclining figures, hairy crevices and the folds of flesh –

A drawing of tree hints at perhaps a headless torso, arms, a belly-button –

Another tree could be an underarm, or a knee –

That is my hand, my mark, apparently.
Out in the sun and wind, facing these cliffs, blown away by the sheer force of the place, it’s hard to even put pencil to paper, the desire to simply soak in the splendour of the day is so overpowering.
Yes, this too is Toronto…
Weekly Photo Challenge – Broken

Force of nature in the ‘hood

May 9, 2015May 9, 2015 Katharine Asals21 Comments

The other night was a full moon.
I hopped on my bike, heading east on side streets I haven’t explored yet, past, along and through streets I’ve only heard about in the news – gangs, a shooting, a funeral.
I ended up looking over some kind of park at the back of a community centre. A neighbourhood of tall apartment buildings and bungalows. Tons of kids still out playing, even in the dark. Funny thing, how the most notorious neighbourhoods of the city are also raising the most children.Sitting on a bench, listening to the kids and watching the moon, I thought of Em in France, wondered if she was looking at this very moon over there, walking her dog in the evening.
I love this about the moon, it makes me feel how small we are on a spinning planet, all looking out at the same moon.Em tells me she was indeed out seeing that very same full moon, and sends a picture of a glorious, blooming rose.
Here the roses are maybe a month away and everyone is still licking their wounds from the long brutal winter – it’s fierce frigid temperatures and endless quantities of snow, as if somehow it’s responsible for the state of the economy, tension in marriages, the deteriorating health of aging parents, aside from the devastation to any number of tender plants in gardens.
The sudden spring is still a shock of disbelief.Each morning I’m on the patio doing sunrise ceremony, grateful for the new day and hot coffee, delighting in the variations in the clouds, watching them move from wispy vertebrae to fingers of god, hinting at summer storms to come.Even here in the crummy, notorious neighbourhoods, the skies reveal their splendour every day, and up amongst the clouds, geese and ducks pass, looking for places to settle in for the season, seagulls hurry by in singles – this one heading south, that one heading north, another crossing by east to west. Like business men they seem, rushing about with self-important determination.From France Em reminds me: Each fleeting moment is real and true.
And it occurs to me that even weeds have their own kind of beauty.Weekly Photo Challenge – Forces of Nature

Intricate worlds

May 7, 2015May 7, 2015 Katharine Asals230 Comments

The sun is already well above the horizon, but I go on down anyway.
It’s a tiny paradise of riotous sound down here, a cacophony of birds – funny to think we associate being in nature with quiet, when it can be so very noisy.
A red-winged blackbird flies straight at me as if to say, Hello! Where have you been? It’s been a few days, and you’ve missed all kinds of things – the buds are all over the trees, the geese have taken over the duck ponds, and they fight with the muskrat who’s always after their eggs, and the turtles are back, and so much is going on… what happened to you?The push-pull – some days I think, really I don’t need any more half-assed nature photos, so I skip it, stay home and do yoga.
Other days I head out, starting with a kind of fast walk exercise intention, and then inevitably there’s an image – a flicker of light in the trees, the grasses, the movement of a bird, an animal, and I pull my camera out of my bag and I’m in, disappearing for hours into this world.But although I love taking pictures, I know that for me the camera is really more of a pretext to hang out here.
A raccoon lumbers up a tree and I watch his slow lazy movements, camera idle over my shoulder.
A hawk circles above, a spiral climbing higher and higher on unseen currents.
Yellow finches dot the tops of trees, the red-winged blackbirds chase each other through shrubs and grasses, the ducks appear suddenly from the sky in a chaos of clumsy squawking and crashing down into the water.
I watch. I listen.A tiny bird sits atop an old dead tree. Minutes pass. The bird looks around, curious, assessing, no hurry.
There’s a quiet shifting sound as another turtle comes onto the rock and the first turtle makes room for him.
I think about this lack of urgency. The rhythm of birds and animals at rest and their freedom without the pressures of money and traffic and jobs and social mores and the feeling that all us humans have been sucked into some grinding soulless machinery that is modern society. I remember that amazing, devastating article by George Monbiot –

In a society bombarded by advertising and driven by the growth imperative, pleasure is reduced to hedonism and hedonism is reduced to consumption. We use consumption as a cure for boredom, to fill the void that an affectless, grasping, atomised culture creates, to brighten the grey world we have created…
Working hours rise, wages stagnate or fall, tasks become duller, more stressful and harder to fulfill, emails and texts and endless demands clatter inside our heads, shutting down the ability to think, corners are cut, services deteriorate, housing becomes almost impossible to afford, there’s ever less money for essential public services. What and whom is this growth for?

Yes, exactly.
Why do we feel the need to live our lives as if at war with our very selves?
When was it decided that joy was something we have to quash as children so we can be obedient enough to work at a job we hate and subscribe to some ThankGodItsFriday existence and care about celebrities we’ll never meet?
For whom, exactly, are we doing this?
The sun is getting higher.
Here and there I take a photo – a tree, a duck, a nesting goose.The ducks and geese meander about the pond, delighting in sensation, joy palpable as they douse themselves, ducking under again and again, bathing, covering themselves in water.The light dances in the bubbling creek, but in the viewfinder I feel like I’m looking at pixels, looking at 1’s and 0’s and it separates me from this place, and I go back to just watching and listening… And then I feel it begin, the moment when the light, the air, some magic comes over me like a lover’s gust from behind and I suddenly feel it – lift off.
Lift off is my word for it, but it’s a sensation that comes like a rain shower – not so much over my body as some inner spirit thing where I feel like the “I”, the “me” disappears, my brain finally shuts up and I am no longer a person per se, I am just alive, breathing, experiencing this world.
It is bliss.
I wonder if it’s why some people meditate.
I wonder if it’s what runners feel during runners high.
It is a feeling of such freedom – so far far away from Monbiot’s grasping atomised culture, it is the place where time disappears.
It’s the reason I come here.
Weekly Photo Challenge – Intricate