Wonderful firsts
It’s always exciting to experience the first stirrings of spring.
And even though they happen every year, it feels as if I were experiencing them
For the very first time.
It’s magical when the ice finally melts …
When the first patch of crocuses appear in the neighbours’ garden…
When we can finally get out into the woods again
And witness birds singing on trees.
Even the faded beauty of an old cottage in the woods
Takes on new beauty
And the old window
Reflects back a stately tree.
Do not wait until the conditions are perfect to begin. Beginning makes the conditions perfect. -Alan Cohen
For more fresh starts, please visit: Our World.
The Flatiron
As you read this, I’ll be enjoying a flaky croissant or three in Paris with my daughter (so won’t be around to visit until the end of the week).
Just over a year ago, we visited friends in another great city – New York – and, of course, I had to photograph some of its iconic buildings.
My daughter recognized it straight away.
“Look! It’s like one of those old-fashioned irons that people used to use in the olden days!”
Just imagine seeing it for the first time in a city that wasn’t yet used to skyscrapers back in 1902.
Alfred Stieglitz took a very famous photo of the building in 1903 –
And one that I tried to recreate for fun.
I’ll leave you with one of his quotations:
I have always been a great believer in today. Most people live either in the past or in the future, so that they really never live at all. So many people are busy worrying about the future of art or society, they have no time to preserve what is. Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere.
Tropical cold
I love the contrast between the cold of winter
And the humid tropical temperature of visiting the greenhouse of the Botanical Gardens.
First off, you are greeted by a vibrant
Splash of colour as you go in…
Wandering around the more temperate parts of the greenhouse
You can see signs on some of the trees:
Happy Winter! I’ll wake up again when it’s spring.
(The same could be said for some of those people who don’t like winter…)
As you walk further back, you enter different regions — much hotter ones.
My camera lens fogged up and as it cleared,
I could just make out some kind of orchid
Swimming towards me like a fish with petals.
I fell in love with the fronds
And patterns of some tropical ferns.
Before I left, I spied the delicate
Pink tutu of a flower.
“All the flowers of all the tomorrows are in the seeds of today.”
– Indian Proverb
For more stories, please visit: Our World Tuesday
Shades of grey
You’re not tired of snowy pictures yet, are you?
Good. Because neither am I!
The skies are often grey over here
As they are weighed down by snow clouds.
But that suits my world so full of grey and silver highlights.
Roofs are utterly delicious
As they remain hidden under white frosting
And cats smile under snowy hats.
My favourite view is this lovely grey wooden house
With a wonderful curl of roof icing.
For more lovely greys, please visit: Our World.
Here is my most popular post ever – about the beauty of grey.
Have a n-ice one!
A recent visit to the Botanical Gardens
In a cold snap
Was the icing on the cake (or dome of the greenhouse).
Disobeying the sign that says: Don’t walk on the grass
Is only something for people who don’t get cold feet.
(The snow was way beyond our knees.)
The bare branches
Looked tree-mendous against the setting sun.
Meanwhile, inside the greenhouse-cafe,
The sun created a beautiful mosaic of gold.
And then it was outside for a family snap –
Yes, we were all playing n-icely
With our ice sabres.
Wishing you all a n-ice holiday!
For more silly posts, please visit: Our World.
Musical snow
The past week has been all about music.
(AB1 goes to a music school in Stockholm these days.)
One of the high points is the Lucia concerts that take place in the silence of dawn.
The children enter the church with light and candles and song.
As they sing, their voices soar up to heaven –
And I imagined that each snowflake was a musical note
Spreading a message of hope, warmth and light.
As the concert ends, the sun has risen;
The winter darkness receded
And for a few moments, there is so much beauty
In that music
That the tears well up and fall.
For more lovely moments, please visit: Our World.
Love in a cold climate
The key to enjoying a cold climate
Is to embrace it.
It finally started snowing and
The neighbourhood echoed with
Happy cries and drawings by children on the cars.
The snow turned everything to silken
Puffs of cotton wool.
(Can you see that big puddle making a heart?)
It’s still snowing!
And we’re still enjoying
Our dreamy winterland.
For more snow and sun, please visit: Our World.
Frosted flowers
It’s still too mild and grey for November, so I’m looking back to the end of October
When the frost presented a cheery iced sun;
And a wild pink rose
Covered in cold eyelashes.
Further on, a rose bud
Shimmered with melted hopes and ice –
And I found myself
At the beating heart of nature itself.
For more flowery scenes, please visit: Our World.
Spook-tacular
A couple of weeks ago, we woke up to a world transformed.
Trees and boats floated out of the freezing fog
Like soft ghosts;
The path along the lake looked as if it was
Covered in cotton wool.
As I walked my daughter to the train station in the early morning,
Our spirits lifted in this new world of fog and cold.
On the way home, a golden splash of colour
Transported me into the world of Monet.
Genius is the ability to renew one’s emotions in daily experience. – Paul Cezanne
For more stories, please visit: Our World.
Raindrops keep falling
It’s been an unusually mild and wet autumn so far…
The soft rain makes art out of a humble fence
And turns a bench into a diamond-studded wonder.
And best of all, it lends beauty
To the graceful head of a flower:
Reminding us that bowed is not defeated
And that the best thing to do when it rains
Is to let it.
For more grace, please visit: Our World.
Early autumn light
There is a special clarity in the light of early autumn.
It bathes roses in magical golden tones
And turns lavender into glorious purple works of art.
If you get up early enough, you can drink
The dew from shy violets
And enjoy the droplets on early morning roses.
My son loves the vibrancy of autumn leaves
And brings home some leafy sunshine every day after school
To put into a vase of water,
Crying every time the leaves curl up and die.
No better way to learn about the brevity and beauty of life, I suppose.
For more colour, please visit: Our World.
Shooting from the foot
I like to try out new (slightly crazy) ways of taking shots.
Like placing the camera near the ground and letting it focus on whatever it wants.
I don’t look through the viewfinder so have no way of knowing what is in the frame.
The results? An abstract moonscape made out of mushrooms;
A family nestled close to each other for comfort;
A rainbow captured in the soft down of a dandelion –
And the deliciously dewy grass of early autumn.
For more focused shots, please visit: Our World.
Dino-mite
The last week of the school holidays saw us taking a few days away in Gothenburg.
We stayed in a huge glass hotel that was in the process of being built. Only one of the towers is ready,
But if you lego of reality and use your imagination, this is what it will look like once it’s finished.
(This is a small scale view of the three towers in LEGO.)
The hotel room had a great view of Gothenburg’s famous funfair.
Swaying in those glass bubbles 60 metres up in the sky reduced me to a blubbering mess.
You could say it took the fun out of fair and turned it more into a fun-fear.
Before hitting the funfair, we visited Universeum, Scandinavia’s largest science museum.
The museum has four floors of rainforest running through the middle of it.
It was like finding a secret slice of paradise.
After spending four hours wrestling dinosaurs and snakes and conducting science experiments
And another nine hours at the fair,
My dino-mo was running down.
(There was a great display of animatronic dinosaurs on the roof of the museum.)
Time to enjoy one last sunset and a good night’s sleep before returning home.
Not a bad way to end the summer holidays.
For more bad puns, please visit: Our World.
The Underground Fort
During the late autumn last year, my daughter and I took the dog to the woods to follow a sign that simply said: To the Fort.
Up and up we climbed until the fort appeared in the late autumn sunshine looking like a submarine rising from the ground.
The fort is mainly underground and is similar (and fairly near) to the other bunkers from the First World War that I wrote about a while back.
The main difference is that the fort is a lookout bunker up on a hill and it’s built in a semi-circle, which is great fun as you can run in and out of the various doors.
(And while doing so, if you’re a dog, you can look like Scooby-Doo running from danger!)
My daughter and Oscar had great fun playing hide-and-seek with me…
While I was fumbling through the dark bunker, I suddenly heard some ghost-like wailing.
When I got to the chimney in the middle of the fort, I looked up to see the mischief-maker.
On the way back to the car, we walked in the old trenches and discovered a memorial to an almost-forgotten 100-year-old history.
Sometimes, you find yourself lucky enough to walk the line between past and present and discover that the present is the perfect place to be.
For more adventures, please visit: Our World.
I’m still away in the UK but will be home soon.
Midsummer roses
Midsummer is one of the biggest holidays in Sweden. It’s all about eating and dancing around the maypole. Usually in the rain.
One year, I’m going to photograph it all… But this year, we spent so long at the pool before lunch that we just didn’t have the energy to go down to the local celebrations.
We did celebrate the light, the warmth and the sun in our own way.
Life may not always be a dance on roses, but that doesn’t stop you from dancing in a shower of rose petals.
It’s all about your attitude.
You can complain that roses have thorns.
Or you can rejoice that thorns have roses.
For more midsummer (or midwinter) beauty, please visit: Our World.
Spring light
Spring is all about
Flowers waiting to unfurl
And reach their full potential.
It’s about the lone wild daffodil
Growing on the shore of the lake.
It’s about the wild weeds
That are as beautiful as flowers.
(Yes – that’s Oscar in the background.)
And – most of all – it’s about
The magical light of being.
For more magic, please visit: Our World.
Love me
The huge city of New York
(I was there in February)
Seems to do nothing but reflect back itself
In its hard, shiny surfaces.
Yet, underneath its exterior,
You can find small signs of tenderness –
Like a tree trunk snuggled in a scarf of love;
And the faded yet vibrant beauty of an old emergency phone
Graced with stickers of love.
I’m away in the mountains of Norway for work and won’t be able to get around to your blogs for a few days.
For more stories, please visit: Our World.
A colourful world
February is a a time where nothing much happens;
Where life unfolds with the rhythm of the seasons –
And splashes of colour surprise and delight:
February fog
A magical parchment sky,
A glittering rainbow world.
It’s true though that change is good for the soul,
When one kind of colourful world
Is exchanged – even though briefly – for another.
It’s nice to get away and gain a little perspective –
It helps you appreciate all the good things you already have.
The true harvest of my life is intangible – a little star dust caught, a portion of the rainbow I have clutched. — Thoreau
The vibrancy of Time Square, NY
For more stories, please visit: Our World.
9/11 Memorial
For many, the Twin Towers of the World Trade Centre were an essential part of the New York skyline.
That emptiness is now commemorated in the 9/11 Memorial that opened recently at Ground Zero.
The actual footprints of the towers themselves have been turned into reflecting pools featuring the largest man-made waterfalls in North America.
In the centre of each pool, there is what seems to be a dark bottomless pit:
Those deep holes made me strangely emotional.
Perhaps because they seem to signify the emptiness and futility of lives lost, of love wasted and of senseless hatred.
Near the pools, you can see the new Freedom Tower rising up into the sky.
My hope is that the new memorial will celebrate hope and light.
Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.
– Martin Luther King
For more stories, please visit: Our World.
Of loss, love and comfort
One glorious day last autumn, I was in a terrible mood and just needed to get out the house. As I was zooming off to the local churchyard with the dog and camera, I saw two tearful faces running behind the car.
Even though I’d been trying to escape their bickering in the first place, I stopped the car and the kids jumped in.
A remarkable peace fell over us as soon as we started looking at the graves.
Churchyards are all about love and loss –
About grief but also about those cherished years of life that went before.
The inscription on this gravestone says:
Tenderly loved,
Missed
And wept over.
We left the graveyard as friends, all petty arguments forgotten.
For the dead do offer the living some comfort:
A reminder that we only have this life
And it becomes what we make it.
“Judge nothing, you will be happy. Forgive everything, you will be happier. Love everything, you will be happiest.” -Sri Chinmoy
For more stories, please visit: Our World.
The old mill
You would probably walk right past this humble old cottage
If it weren’t for the sound of rushing water.
You’ll be happy you took notice –
The house is unusually tall and narrow
With marvellous old wood that speak of its age:
Three centuries in existence as the old mill house (Olhamra Mill)
That used to distribute water to the lands around it.
Nowadays, it’s a summer house
Where the owners look as if they stopped painting one of the doors
To enjoy the delight of the singing water.
Before following the bend in the road,
Make sure you turn around one last time
To enjoy the hidden beauty of this age-old jewel.
For more hidden treasures, please visit: Our World.
The pilgrims
The secret of happiness lies in taking a genuine interest in all the details of daily life, and in elevating them to art. — William Morris
Dazzling landscapes and wide views are glorious,
But there is beauty in the details too.
The details allow us to see the emotions of nature:
How a tiny twig looks like weary traveller;
How wind-blown branches are like pilgrims
Walking to a dream destination
Where fortitude and tenacity and belief in self matter.
For more small details, please visit: Our World.
Of snow and love
At last – the snow fell as lightly as butterflies
Bringing out the child-like spirits in us all.
It turned the world
Into a snowy poem,
And leaves into fluffy pillows of white.
The magic of the snow is that it
Makes the world a softer place,
A kinder place where dreams can grow.
The Eskimos had fifty-two names for snow because it was important to them: there ought to be as many for love. — Margaret Atwood
For more poems, please visit: Our World.
Winter bouquet (or bokeh)
We’ve hardly had any snow this year – only a smattering to cover the ground for a day or two.
No matter how little – I always feel as if I’ve won the lottery when it begins to snow.
The white petals have a way of transforming life into something softer, more golden.
The bare bones of flowers look like twinkling stars;
A birdhouse becomes a cheerful red hat with white trimming;
And even a weathered post becomes a silver-haired object of beauty.
(Yes – Mum and Dad: Just like you guys!)
For more snowy (or sunny) beauty, please visit: Our World.
Who says what?