Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: The Colors Blue & White

First, many thanks to Cee for featuring my post last week – Freeways, Expressways, and Highways – among many other wonderful ones. I’m very humbled, since my expertise lies in the photography of humans from the inside out – though I have just as great an amateur passion for trying to capture the beauty I find in the world around me to share with others. So thank you for allowing me a venue for that. 🙂

Now onward to Cee’s challenge for this week, highlighting the colors white and/or blue. For this one, I thought I’d share a few my own little C’s photos that she took at her uncle’s (and now new aunt’s) wedding, using my camera. Whereas I most enjoy taking wider expanse landscapes, she most enjoys closer views of flora and fauna (often mixed with eclectic angles of life from her perspective).

She had no direction, assistance or editing help with these – she just took off with ‘camera in 10-year-old hand.’ So it was great fun for me when I later downloaded the SD card and got to see segments of the day through her eyes!

I often wonder how much more wondrous this wounded world would be –
If we too but tarried and took the time through others’ eyes to see.

Here’s to time well taken,

-jody

 

Cee’s Fun Foto Challenge: Freeways, Expressways, Highways

Cee threw out another of her Photo Challenges this week, the topic being: Freeways, Expressways, Highways – in another words, roads where you can travel fast on.

She left me thinking of how very many places I’ve gotten to travel this past year, and how very different those places often were. I thought I’d put a couple of high contrast images on here as examples (contrast of places and temperatures, not necessarily photo technique).

The first was taken on my iPhone-5 (yes, I still have a 5 & would have my 4 if I hadn’t fallen on it while crossing a creek – what’s your point?)… while traveling on I-70, I believe, on my way toward Idaho Springs. It was last late July; but as we went up into those mountains on the Guanella Pass, the temperature dropped quickly from 80-something degrees to 40 degrees at the top.

Contrast that with the second image from the first of March this year in the Yei, South Sudan area (in which I dug quickly for my Nikon and stuck it against a dusted plane window around the propeller). I believe this should be the Kaya Highway down below (the large dirt road in front of the mountain range). You might also imagine the contrast in temperature, which was around 105 degrees when we flew out that day (and felt like 140 degrees on the plane), with temperatures that didn’t dip below 90 degrees even in the middle of the nights. I also don’t have to point out the contrast in the types of roadways.

As for speed…were you to see the ruts on the Kaya Highway, you would think, “that doesn’t meet Cee’s criterion of roads you can travel fast on.” True…unless you put it into perspective compared to the roads back in the gaba (the bush)…or unless you’re a UN truck on Kaya Hwy. You should see those convoys barreling down that road while waving all pedestrians, livestock, boda-bodas, and four-wheel vehicles out of their way (as if we’re not already wanting to give right of way of our own accord). “What ruts, they say? Only you, if you don’t get out of the way!” (Besides that, I was in a plane when I took this picture – okay, a puddle-jumper, to be exact – but I figure that added some extra speed when my photo was taken!)

Happy trails (and byways) to you!

-jody

Weekly Photo Challenge: Half-Light

The  PHOTO CHALLENGE for this week is:

Half-Light

Share a photo inspired by a poem, verse, song lyric or story.

I took this photo while in the Holy Land a few years ago with an early version pocket digital camera and added a little editing effect.

For my poetry, I’m selecting a couple of excerpts from Joseph Brodsky’s reflective piece, “I Sit by the Window.”

I sit by the window.
 And while I sit
my youth comes back.
 Sometimes I'd smile.
 Or spit.

I sit in the dark.
 And it would be hard to figure out
which is worse; the dark inside, or the darkness out.

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: One Love

During a school screening in one of the villages after only a few days in South Sudan, I tried to soothe the children who waited, some a little uncertainly, as they sat upon benches to receive their wellness exams from the medical doctors. I only had so many words with which I could communicate in Juba Arabic, and I had already used most of those to take their arm and height measurements and get them to their seats; so I tried a universal language – song.

I understood that part of the reason for these children’s fears was because medical exams can be scary, even for adults. But these children also were not used to seeing “Khawaaja” – a word that technically means “foreigner” but they use for “white people” (who are recognizably foreign in the region of the very dark-skinned Southern Sudanese people). These children had displayed a realm of emotions about us being there – from open curiosity to unconcealed fear.

While sitting among these children, I began to sing “Jesus loves the little children, all the children of the world. Red and yellow, black and white, they are precious in his sight. Jesus loves the little children of the world.” One of the teachers came up to the children with a big smile and assured them, “This is a good song.” In a world that sometimes acts otherwise, it’s one that has always comforted my heart. I wanted it to comfort theirs too.

This field trip into the bush also emphasized to me how very easy it is to love children, even when they do not/cannot always reciprocate that emotion. And that makes me understand how it must be so easy for Jesus to love us – because even when we are rejecting his love, or not reciprocating it, He still sees us as his children. We are precious in his sight.

Can you imagine the world in which we could live if we could all see one another through that same lens? What if we saw everyone through the lens that showed each person as a broken, hurting, fearful, precious child, in need of comfort and reassurance? Would we be so quick to dismiss others from our presence who weren’t like us, in any number of ways?

Amer, asfar, asuwed, abiyad,
We are precious in His sight.
Jesus loves the little children of the world.

So those are the thoughts that came to my mind when I read the Weekly Photo Challenge on One Love this week. And it caused me to take a little photo editing liberty to make my own “abiyad” as freakishly obvious in this portrait as it may sometimes appear to those little ones, while still portraying the contrasting oneness of a precious shared moment across the world.

Asuwed + Abiyad = One Love

Weekly Photo Challenge: Harmony

Even though I’ve learned a little Juba Arabic for communication purposes in South Sudan, these little ones don’t speak either that or English. They speak Kakwa. Regardless, that didn’t keep us from our own universal communication –

Living, laughing, and loving harmoniously…

(Nor did it keep me from learning to mingle the posho!)

(In response to the Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge on Harmony)

Be a blessing & be blessed!

-jody

 

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: State of Mind

As I walked through the bush in an unforgiving heat during the end of the dry season in South Sudan this past week, the scorched brush bristled beneath my feet. Yet, I was reminded of how, even in the harshest of environments, beauty will always struggle to come forth and be seen.

Take notice around yourself today and see what hidden beauty can spring forth!

This photo is in response to the DailyPost Weekly Photo Challenge on State of Mind.

Be blessed!

-jody

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Life Imitates Art

Clandestine garden meetings among young lovers has long been the stuff of which art is made – whether in an historical romance, or a drawing or painting throughout various periods in history.

Garden Gate etching found advertised on ebay

A very impressive piece of collage art by Laura at:  http://artfullymusing.blogspot.com/2014/02/secret-rendezvous-or-maybe-not-so-secret.html

Modern anime located at: http://static.zerochan.net/Livly.Garden.full.13509.jpg

My Weekly Photo Challenge response is meant to capture that same enchanted spirit – perhaps not so covert, but with double the fun.

Weekly Photo Challenge: Vibrant

My last eclectic view of Columbia, Missouri this week, grabbed on my iPhone while turning the street corner. (No, I wasn’t the one driving.)

Hope your moments are as timelessly bright!  -Jody

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For: https://dailypost.wordpress.com/photo-challenges/vibrant/

 

 

Weekly Photo Challenge: Optimism

In the Daily Post Weekly Photo Challenge, we were challenged to reflect on Optimism.
Specifically, “How do you fuel the fires of optimism?”

The other night, as the winter day seemed particularly short and dreary, I climbed atop my bicycle in the warm indoors, attached to a trainer that allows me to travel no further than my imagination can take me this time of year. About 35 minutes into my ride, my brain became more complacent than my legs. I reached over to grab my iPhone, switched from the MapMyRide app that was faithfully ticking away with nothing more than time, likely anxious as to why it wasn’t being allowed to log a more interesting route of progress. After thumbing myself into boredom with a few other apps, I noticed a new email had popped up a few hours earlier in my special email account – the one that has, as of late, been reserved for receiving polite rejection letters on my finished novel, Rolling River. (Granted, I’m convinced there’s a steeper learning curve to writing query letters than the actual book, itself. Yet, I’m also determined to woman-up and keep at it for the sake of all my wonderful friends who continually encourage me to persist.)

Lo and behold, I had something completely unexpected and earth-shattering happen! I opened an email response to my query that began with, “Sounds intriguing!  Please send the full manuscript + synopsis as attachments to my direct email.  I look forward to reading your material.” By the second reading (the one where I realized this wasn’t just an encouraging “this isn’t quite right for me, but best wishes” response), I nearly toppled off my trainer! Seriously. I forgot I was clipped in, as I tried to climb off to greedily gobble up those delicious words again.

Let’s be clear. I understand that, as of this moment, this doesn’t mean my book will be published. But this event is still magnanimous, as I won’t ever forget the literary agent who gave me that gift of optimism. (I may surely share her name at some point in the future, but I won’t put that pressure on her today.) She will always be my first non-rejection hopeful response – the person (beyond those who already loved me) to say that my project had enough value to earn her attention. It was a mountain-top experience, to be certain!

And I surely yearn for mountain-top experiences. Admittedly, I’ve had some colder-weather ones lately; but this photo from Grandfather Mountain this past July (in near 100-degree heat) best brings the appropriate words to mind when it comes to climbing on toward your challenge:

So how have your fires of optimism been fueled lately?

Extraordinary Sunrise: Fire on the Mountain

In response to The Daily Post’s weekly photo challenge: “(Extra)ordinary.”

I’ll admit it. When I step out onto my front porch each morning, I have a beautiful view. It’s the main amenity that drew me to this home. And I know when I look to my right each and every early morning, I’m going to see the sun crest over the dip in the foothills in some form or another. In that respect, it’s an ordinary, daily event in my life.

Yet some glorious mornings, Mr. Sun wishes to attract my undivided attention more intensely than others. On this particular morning, I have to say, his show was stop-in-my-tracks spectacular. He truly dazzled me.

Fire on the Mountain

What extraordinary thing (or person) managed to catch your eye today that (who) you might otherwise have missed?