Asakiyume mita

Across the sky, wispy white vertebrae from some decomposing heavenly beast.


photo by Flickr user Jen Scheer; cirrus vertebratus is an actual cloud type, apparently

"Sky creatures never stink when they decay," granddad says, "because they're half made of light. Down here we're made of heavy stuff and we stink when we decay. But the sky creatures have no sweet fragrances or intoxicating aromas, either. All the tantalizing scents we love come from the fact that earthly flesh is rich and heavy.

These cows are here, winter and summer--under these pine trees. Up the hill from them right now is a huge pile of butternut squash which I think? they must be eating? I like them; they are shaggy.





BTW... there are two entries before this one that I think possibly didn't make it into people's feeds. I did some hijinks with postdating and initially making private entries and then changing them to public, and I think they may have fallen into a friends feed oubliette.

duccio took this photo of his neighbor feeding the pigeons, watched over, sidelong-secretly, by a statue of an angel or a saint or a contemplative someone.

duccio and some others on LJ/DW have this thing where they draw each other's black-and-white photos. He invited me to give it a try, and I did, twice (actually many many times, but only twice that I'm sharing), once trying to copy the photo, and once trying to show what I see in it.

It's hard, yo. The photo tells the story so perfectly; I can't represent it any better.





In my mind, Davi delights in the birds, loves the sound of their wings, loves their milling around his feet, loves that he can give them this gift. And the angel loves Davi. Not romantically. Angelically.

The British Journal of Photography has a post featuring classrooms around the world, taken by Julian Germain.

I found them so attractive and thought provoking that I went to his page for the classroom project, which includes photos not included in that article. The international photos start around image 9.

They conveyed a lot not just in what each photo contained or lacked (though my eye was drawn to the stamp "donated by Ogean Energy" on a desk in a captionless photo--donors always having to get their due), but in their side-by-side contrasts. An all-black classroom in St. Louis, followed by an all-white classroom, also in St. Louis:





A class in Peru where everyone is in uniform, followed by another Peruvian classroom where the kids are in ordinary dress:





And, of course, classrooms of all boys or all girls.

Germain says,

We are responsible for the world they’re growing up in ... Despite being absent from the images, adults permeate every corner of every image. I like to think the work is confrontational; hundreds and hundreds of children and young people looking back at us with such intensity. I find that challenging.

I saw the beautiful image below--straight out of a children's story or a fable--on Facebook, but with no attribution. Some clever photographer had caught this moment of convivial interspecies refreshment, but who?

Fortunately, these days, you can put a photo's url into Google Images and search it out, and by doing so, I found it was by Toshiyasu Morita, a photographer who mainly makes portraits of cosplayers--but who also likes to photograph hummingbirds (and their bee friends).

Its original location on the interwebs is this post on Audubon California's blog.

So now we can make up stories about this hummingbird and those bees, and we can thank Mr. Morita for capturing the moment and sharing it with us.

Tomorrow, in the small hours in the morning--the 3:00 am hour, to be precise, I get in the car and drive two hours to the airport, on my way to the Sirens Conference, which this year is on the theme of spies and revolutionaries (awesome). I have some excellent roommates, and will be meeting some LJ friends in person for the first time and other old friends whom I haven't seen since summer--very excited for that.

... I've been even more scarce than I thought I would be, these days. I've gotten notification of entries posted, and been unable to take the time to read them, because Wakanomori's family is here, and I've been kept busy with that. I apologize. When I come back from Sirens, I'll catch up somewhat, though probably not entirely. But I've thought of you all each day.

One thing Waka's mother had been really eager to do was see Old Sturbridge Village, so I took them there. I didn't go in myself, but I took these photos on the outside.

Iris seeds



They look like blackberries, but they are hard and seedy. A man from Mississippi was marveling at them, and we got to talking. He told me about when Hurricane Katrina came through and knocked down a tree of his, how he planted a replacement tree, and it sent a branch or runner, I can't remember which, scooting along the ground, and then lifted up one blossom, like cupped hands. I loved that.

Dark wood, bright window, red impatiens, lantern



Doesn't it seem very serious, almost foreboding? And yet the flowers. Like a grim old minister who then smiles, like an ogre who lifts a baby bird gently and sets it back in a nest.

Grasshoppers and Butterflies





They seem metaphoric but the metaphors keep changing, and meanwhile they're real in themselves.

Apples



Autumnal abundance, a garden of peace and plenty.

Feel free to just look at the photos without commenting. I may get a chance to answer a comment or two this evening, but then I'm back to silence until Monday at the earliest.

Train tracks run behind my neighborhood, where I walk. I often see trains go by: long New England Central Railroad freight trains and the Amtrak passenger train--the Vermonter.

On Christmas I learned that in January, the route of the Vermonter will change--it will no longer travel the length of track near my house. We've often talked of riding it, but our chance was fast disappearing, so on Saturday, December 27, wakanomori and I bought tickets to ride from Springfield, Massachusetts, to Amherst. Here are some photos of that journey (to see more in the series, or to see any of the pictures bigger, click through to Flickr):

In Springfield, waiting



Long evening light off the old mill buildings





( a river and a railroad crossing )

( ridiculously blurry photos of my haunts )

And here is a picture of the setting sun that Amtrak liked so much it asked to use it--I said yes.



And here we are in Amherst. I heard other people talking about how this was near to the last journey. Others were also commemorating it, as you can see.



Then we drove home in the deepening sunset

Sometimes the most ordinary of places is beautiful. This parking lot, with those big clouds, in fresh after-rain light.

It's just a parking lot, but there's a big sky up above it and trees on its margins, and even its asphalt seems . . . all right.

(It's another phone picture. My phone takes impressionist paintings. My phone's name is Cezanne.)


I had to pick up the healing angel from a friend's house. On our way home, we passed a bus-hive. All the school buses were there, all yellowy-orange and black, like fancy hornets. We thought we might see the queen, but we didn't; we only saw the worker buses. (A queen, as you probably know, is just a worker bus that has been fed royal petroleum jelly.) I didn't have the presence of mind to take a picture, but this picture, though it's from more than a thousand miles away, has something of the feel.

Bus-hive in Ann Arbor, Michigan


And hey, while I was searching for appropriate bus-hive pictures, look what I found: mini edible school buses made out of Twinkies.


Photo by Kendra Arch; recipe at "Stop Lookin' Get Cookin'"

You have heard of polecats? (They're actually ferrets--or the word can also be used to refer to skunks.) Well this is a postcat:



From pole to post --like pillar to post--driven from pillar to post--it's like pacing, pacing back and forth . . . and where better to pace than a widow's walk, with its view out to the harbor and the sea. Is that a ship's mast appearing over the horizon? Has the sea returned your beloved to you? A hurricane wind will push anchored ships ashore, and a really, really monstrous wind will fling a widow's walk far inland, into the trees. . .

Every morning, a bus leaves the market in Dili, Timor-Leste's capital, and six hours later it arrives in Ainaro. Ainaro is only 70 miles away, but the road is rough and mountainous.

Then every night, a bus leaves Ainaro to go to Dili. It leaves at 9:30 or so at night, and it gets in around 4:30 in the morning. This was the bus I rode to get back to Dili, the day before my journey home. One of the local assistants of the program I volunteered with gallantly offered to accompany me on the bus journey, so I wouldn't have to sit in Dili market by myself for four-and-a-half hours until the hostel where I was staying in Dili opened.

We waited on the porch of the house where I'd been staying. Everything was quiet out, and dark, and then here comes the bus, its cheerful music blaring. The bus picks up people all through Ainaro. It's cold in the mountains at night, and people wait for the bus wrapped in fleece blankets. Then, when they get on the bus, they're all ready to go to sleep.

We sat in the first seat after you enter the bus. People ended up sitting on the step up into the bus; they leaned against our legs to sleep. In the aisle, two people stretched out full length, wrapped in their blankets. Under the seat across the aisle were some hens and chicks, as well as one rooster, who crowed periodically to let us all know who was king of the bus.

( cigarettes and stars )

( daily bread )

Also walking the streets in the early-morning hours were small boys hawking hard-boiled eggs. I remember seeing a little girl in Ainaro, out in front of her house, peeling cassava root with a machete as long as--and thicker than--her arm. Kids work hard here.

Later that morning we walked along the seashore and saw some sights (click on the photos to see them bigger)

boats

a wooden outrigger boat


sailboats




a mural for the Tour de Timor


a dramatic, but unexplained, monument monument to the victims of the Santa Cruz massacre ... makes me wish I wasn't smiling like an idiot...