For today's entry, my original plan was to continue yesterday's comparison of the Buffalo, NY and Minneapolis, MN park systems, but when the dogs got me up this morning, a glance out the window told me immediately that it wasn't going to be a park kind of day.
It was chilly, cloudy, and pouring rain. It stopped for a a couple of hours, but has just started up again in the last few minutes... this time with lightning and thunder added in. As a result, I have a neurotic German Shepherd/Akita mix wedged under my legs and squeezed against the couch trying to hide from the storm, and a ditzy Rottweiler bounding around the apartment with a squeaky toy that quite frankly, I am not motivated to take away from her, because she'll just dig another one out from wherever she stashes them.
It's a pretty blah day here in the Twin Cities.
For those who have noticed, the photos that appear at the top of this blog are usually relevant to the subject matter, but I gave you a gray, rainy photo last Friday. So I decided to sort through a folder of 200 or so images I took back at the end of June of this year, but never got around to looking at. The "artiste" photographer that lives somewhere deep inside me has gotten into the habit of NOT immediately looking at a set of images I have recorded, and manipulated in some way if I think there is something REALLY special in amongst them.
I was pleasantly surprised to see the above image, as I had completely forgotten about the strange and wonderful light and shadows that were evident about an hour before sundown, and my first attempts with HDR. Originally, my game plan for that weekend had been to attend the Western Fest Stampede and Rodeo in Granite Falls, but those plans changed when it was made apparent to me that Granite Falls was someplace I wasn't exactly welcome that weekend. I was pretty bummed out by that, because I knew it was the beginning of the end of my relationship with Yellow Medicine County... I had actually begun to think of rural southwestern Minnesota as home. It was a harsh reality check to suddenly realize that someplace actually existed that wouldn't accept me... especially considering that I had easily assimilated into every other community that I had ever lived in... even in some of the more redneck areas that abound near Ft. Benning, GA, and Ft. Bragg, NC. It sucked, because Western Fest was an event that I had been looking forward to, and 2009 would have been my third year in a row there.
When I found the above image, and the reasons I was actually IN Minneapolis to take it came back, I felt an odd rush of emotions. Sadness, which morphed into anger, which out of the blue suddenly became acceptance, and the feeling that everything was okay.
Not great.
But okay.
That image reminded me that regardless of what else was happening in my life at the time, I could find moments of order and beauty everywhere around me if I remembered to look for them, and with a little coaxing on my part, find another level of beauty altogether.
Yeah, it's been cold and stormy and gray all day.
So what?
Today's a beautiful day anyway.
NEXT: Something Not Quite So Maudlin
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