“April is the cruelest month, breeding lilacs out of the dead land, mixing memory and desire, stirring dull roots with spring rain.” (t.s. eliot)
we can be burning with happiness and still feel wistful and sad. it is not a contradiction, it is life.
yesterday, i had on one of those empire waist dresses in a bright yellow billowing out in folds of fabric. i ran into someone whom i haven’t seen in a good year and she was all smiles and happy for me and congratulated me on my pregnancy.
yeah. how do you respond to that really. i was ever so gracious and full of smiles and pushed the folds of fabric down revealing that i had no stomach and laughed and said that no, we were starting a photography business and had decided that babies were not in our future. she left, i hope, without feeling badly. i’m sure she didn’t because even those who were with me had no idea how shaken to the core i was inside. i am good at that ~ good at social graces and making other people feel good while pushing down my own feelings. i am a people pleaser.
i made it through the day all laughter and sunshine until about eleven last night when i had a complete meltdown, fighting with my husband in a fight he couldn’t win resulting in me curled up in a ball in the tub, the hot water streaming from our rain shower, steam billowing down on my tears.
i don’t even know why i feel compelled to write all this down but i do. the air is thick with clouds and the air conditioner in my office is leaving me chilled. i am having a hard time concentrating on work, my eyes hurt from crying and in the light of day, i am not even sure how i feel. i deliberately put on form fitting jeans this morning and a tight stretch black and white striped top and everyone in the office was all like wow … all that time spent in the gym is sure paying off. there is no way that anyone could mistake me for being pregnant today.
i am unable to analyze how i even feel. i don’t know. all i know is that for whatever reason, i am hurting inside today and while i have a whole lot to be happy about, i think it is okay to let myself feel sad too. life is simple and yet our emotions are so complicated.
my house and yard is filled with the scent of lilacs, it permeates every ounze of my being. it makes me feel nostalgic, a girl with holes in her jean knees and a brightly coloured tee, streamers dancing off her bike as her pigtails danced in the sunlight. the scent makes me miss my granny who grew up next door to me, her bright yellow house, lilac bushes and white linen blowing in the breeze, the smell of baked bread and wild blueberries, the big jars of brightly coloured buttons and fabrics that still conjur up delight. the scent makes me miss my sister, her long hair shone brown, dancing eyes and giggling wit. the way she smelled, like home and love and that bond of sisterhood that leaves me empty now as i make my way through life filled with people yet somehow alone. bees buzzing on secrets told as the sun baked the earth on the cusp of summer’s freedom.
a tear rolls down my face.
we can be wistful and sad and still be burning with happiness. it is not a contradiction, it is life.
last saturday, duke and i had the good fortune to photograph a beautiful couple who are very much in love. we spent a couple of hours wandering around the university campus capturing some of their moments. we took a ton of photos but these are a few of my favourite.
i can’t wait to capture the moments of their wedding, i think it is going to be amazing to be able to capture all that fantastic emotion and love, to provide them with beautiful memories captured in print. i think they are absolutely fantastic and i will forever be grateful to them for taking a chance on us and our fledgling business.
you can view more photos here … i am so in love with photographing the beauty of people, the expression of their emotion, the smile in their heart …
“What to do if you find yourself stuck in a crack in the ground underneath a giant boulder you can’t move, with no hope of rescue. Consider how lucky you are that life has been good to you so far. Alternatively, if life hasn’t been good to you so far, which given your current circumstances seems more likely, consider how lucky you are that it won’t be troubling you much longer.” (douglas adams)
i am not stuck in any cracks these days and am finding all the boulders move pretty easily but that wasn’t always the case and i don’t like to take my good luck for granted but i do indeed feel like a pretty lucky girl these days and i get to share it all with my best friend, the man who loves me with every ounce of his heart. its lovely to be loved and to love someone who really sees you and loves all those bits and bytes even the crazy ones.
its always been easy for me to write my pain or write out the angst and confusion but am learning that it is just as important to write out the happy, to document the beauty in my life. on saturday, we spent the morning working together shooting a beautiful loving couple and it was such bliss to do what i love with the man that i love with people who are in love. i will share some of the photos later tonight. afterwards, we heading to the farmer’s market for some lunch and laughter and organic hand-crafted wanders, our cameras still in hand. life is good. i am a lucky girl.
and because every post needs a little madonna … don’t ya think?
i think that i often come across on this blog as far too serious. i’m not really and if you knew me in real life, you might even think that i had a sense of humour, a bit twisted most days and some days even on the dark side. i wonder sometimes if i really am how i write here in this place. i don’t know and that bothers me a little. oh sure, i sometimes have deep thoughts and i can be a bit of a pollyanna for sure but i can also be catty and witty and snarky and sarcastic and goofy and nonsensical. typically, i have a way of making those around me burst into laughter. i laugh a lot and so do those around me because i think laughter is the stuff. i am situationally funny though, not funny in the i can tell a joke that will knock your socks off kind of way, ’cause i can’t tell a joke to save my life. i can be a bit overly dramatic and on days like today, i find myself at work in bright colours that clash horribly and realize that once again, i have completely missed out on making a good fashion statement. um an orange red tanktop thingy with a pink grape jacket, um … so doesn’t work under the flourescent hued light. eek.
i wonder if my writing misrepresents me somehow. i don’t know. i could be wrong. i have met a few people who i previously only knew in this weird internet place and they all seemed to think that i was the same as i come across in my blog. i just wanted to be sure. you know. because its somehow important for me to be me and not just a part of me that is easy to write.
so anyway, i’ve been working on a website and its no where close to being completed but its a start. would love any feedback you have … you can check it out at www.dpartistry.com.
its a work in progress, kind of like me.
i ended up going with a very cool little company called portfoliositez and am glad i did. from the time i purchased the template, they had me up and running within a couple of hours and that my friends is some good service. the template has been very easy to work with and fairly flexible with what i need it for right now.
otherwise, i have an engagement session to shoot on saturday that i am really looking forward to and some steps to stain green. and that be my weekend. hope everyone has a lovely weekend filled with laughter and goofy expressions.
“Beauty is a form of genius - is higher, indeed, than genius, as it needs no explanation. It is of the great facts in the world like sunlight, or springtime, or the reflection in dark water of that silver shell we call the moon.” (oscar wilde)
this morning as i walked from my house to the bus stop, i smelled the damp earth, the verdant green, the lush state of a world awakened and tears sprung to my eyes as my senses took it all in. today there is a mist of rain turning the pavement the same colour as the river as green engulfes the splattering of houses hidden in the dance of new life.
there is so much i have wanted to share and yet i have been finding it somehow easier to pick up the phone and talk to a friend, to giggle at smiles within touching distance.
“i had one of those moments on saturday as i was shooting a wedding, one of those moments where in the midst of incredible busy with cameras and lens hanging off me as i crouched and moved and captured moments of beauty, one of those moments of pure utter bliss. it is so amazing to be doing something that makes you so happy, that gives you insight into the world around you and the world inside of you. it is good to know with absolute certainty that life can feel so amazingly right.”
“we worked hard on the weekend, digging and cleaning and my garden is filled with tomatoes, spinich, lettuce, leeks and onions, squash and zuchinni, pickling cucumbers and brocolli and brussel sprouts, bits of coloured flowers and sprouts of perennials planted last year. i have pots filled with bright colour scattered around my yard and a lawn that has been thatched and seeded and green scent beauty of growth surrounds me. My body is tired and my legs ache but joy fills my heart.”
“the double blossoming plum tree (our forever babies tree) has tiny little blossoms covering her branches and i see henry and eliot smiling down on me. sometimes tears still spring to my eyes seemingly for no reason but not because i have lost so much but rather because i was given so much. i feel blessed that those two little soul babies came into my life and touched my heart and bled the grief and pain from me as they died in my arms. they have given me more of myself than i could have possibly hoped for in this lifetime. they have helped me to discover how to be happy. there is an irony there that i don’t know that i can explain, perhaps that is a post all in its own someday, perhaps not.”
“the moon hangs in the sky, patched with darkness, filling our planet with light and i stand barefoot in the dew wet grass and stare at the sky and feel the earth move through me. so much pain and suffering, anger and desparation, loss and bitterness washed in the blood of someone else’s pain. and yet, so much beauty and love, hope and care, a bursting of emotion washed in the cool breeze of belief. i see the darkness and choose the light. i see the ugly and choose the beauty. i see the anger and choose the pain. i see me and choose hope and love; happiness and joy.”
“Fear is a slinking cat I find beneath the lilacs of my mind.” (sophie tunnell)
i have been fairly quiet here these days, waiting for the lilacs to bloom outside my window, the scent to dance through the sunlit corners of my house. i have been fairly quiet in the presence of my mind, slowed down and yet somehow managing to do more work than i thought possible in a short period of time. i have been reading blogs in my feed reader and enjoying your words and feeling as though it is okay for me not to comment on each and every one as i declutter the minutes of my day. i have been quietly and slowly building our business over the past six months since i decided that it was time my husband and i took the plunge and it has been amazing.
one day about six months ago, i decided definitively that i was tired of the slinking fear that lived inside my mind and the very next day it all started falling into place and opportunities have been knocking ever since. i have the start of a solid business plan, i have drafted contracts and had them reviewed and finalized them and um even had some signed by clients. i have put together information sheets and we are figuring out taxes and have applied for a business license and even purchased beautiful lovely, i have fallen in love with equipment. i am designing cards and advertising and our flash site is almost finished and most importantly, we have bookings all through the spring and summer months, real live bookings and i am so excited and thrilled and well mostly excited that the fear seems almost not even there. i keep waiting for fear to rear its ugly head but so far it is only a tickle in my belly that feels more like excitement.
this has all happened with very little fanfare over here, mostly a lot of hard work but as the sunlight dances and the heat scorches us this weekend, i find myself smiling a lot and dancing about with happy. i am working two jobs and will continue to do so for a long time to come but i am also taking chances again and following my bliss and that makes the world smell a whole lot sweeter.
i am happy. not the kind of dance in your underwear happy but more of a quiet, content happy. the kind of happy that sticks around and settles into your bones, the kind of happy that i used to scoff at when i was young, the kind of happy that really could be called content. sure there are things that i want to change about my life including losing some weight and continuing to renovate our little house and perhaps some day exiting stage left from cubey land but these things don’t keep me awake at night. i can honestly say that i love my life right here, right now and i can’t wait to see what happens next.
this weekend will find me shooting, gardening and enjoying the bright new green of spring, the buds of colour and the dirt underneath my fingernails. here in canada it is a long weekend ~ monday, may 24 is a holiday, victoria day, the day we canadians honor queen victoria’s birthday as well as the current, queen elizabeth. we can be all british like that.
have a wonderful weekend everyone and a happy long weekend to my fellow canadian friends.
sunlight and dirt
mothers and sons
flowers and smiles
bright red berries
family and friends
an evening cocktail
a greenhouse infusion
chocolate and hoops
its been a busy weekend, full of laughter and connection. i have a new front porch and stairs and it is beautiful, the smell of new wood, the hard work of love. i have dirt beneath my fingernails and a tiredness in my muscles. i have a smile on my face, a lightness in my heart and an energy that i have missed for years. i am already loving the face of may.
“Who will tell whether one happy moment of love or the joy of breathing or walking on a bright morning and smelling the fresh air, is not worth all the suffering and effort which life implies.” (erich fromm)
the first time i went to the mountains during the month of may was over 10 years ago. i had went with friends to attend an elac (english language arts council) conference. it was loads of fun and i discovered the charm of jasper national park during the off season. ironically when i was there this year, the elac conference was going on and i felt a longing to go back to the world of teaching.
three years ago in may, duke and i rented a cabin just outside of the town of jasper and tried to find some peace after our worlds had been shattered. it was the perfect place to go and we found it incredibly healing to be surrounded by all that beauty and power.
last year, duke had a gig so we got to revisit that beauty shortly after grieving through april and the anniversary of our loss. last weekend we packed up the drums and headed off to the mountains again to play the same gig a year later. it was a super relaxing trip and we spent some good time sitting around and talking and catching up with some people that i hadn’t seen since last year. we also made sure and to leave ourselves plenty of time to hike around with our cameras and new lens gear. it was a workout because the new lenses are not lightweight but oh so much fun.
i took a ton of photos over the weekend and though i managed to dump them onto my laptop when i got home last night that is pretty much as far as i got before my droopy eyes found me hitting my lovely bed. we stayed at a beautiful hotel lodge paid for by the company who hired the band and were treated to lovely meals, however, i somehow never manage to sleep all that well unless i am in my own bed and i suppose staying up until the wee hours of morning didn’t help the matter, heh heh. last night i slept for a good nine hours and i almost feel like myself again which is good because may is a busy busy month and i need to be rested to get through it.
whenever i go to the mountains, i feel myself growing inside, there is a power in the rock that feeds my soul and an expression in the sound of the wind, the crisp of the air, the way the sky dips down and the waters icy drops refresh and in the spring, there is magic. the snow receeds, tiny bits of colour subtle against the landscape begin to cling to the green. water begins to rush and bubble down across pebbles and boulders and filling bowls of sand. there is an expectant energy that breathes our bodies and our minds.
“Anyone who says sunshine brings happiness has never danced in the rain”
May entered with raindrops and storm clouds hung low dripping life down on this little space of the earth. The air smells fresh and light and fertile and full of life. If April signifies death for me, May signifies life.
Yesterday, I said good-bye to April and enjoyed such an incredibly beautiful day filled with fantastic surprises (I am so thrilled and excited); a work day that danced smoothly and beautifully and an evening spent playing with mynewfabulouslenses and talking on the phone to my beautiful friend.
As April turned to May, I snuggled into my husband, my love, my best friend and we talked about how incredibly happy we were; how much has happened in the past five years and how incredibly lucky we are, so very lucky. It may sound strange that we would feel so lucky as we lay in our bedroom, the ashes of our twin boys to the side but as hard as it can be some days to think about, I feel as though their large souls live in our hearts and the joy that we feel for our lives is shared and rejoiced by our family both living and dead. We are lucky to be living this life, to be free to make choices in how we live and to choose to find beauty and joy in a life that is not always giving and caring.
We have made some significant choices lately in how we will move forward in our lives, choices that will affect our future in a big way. We have decided that we are not going to try to have another baby, it is not our path. We have my son who is about to turn fourteen and we have the memory and love of our two little babies who were not meant for this earth and somehow that is enough. We have each other and that is enough. We are putting our energies into other dreams, dreams that include capturing light and beauty; making the music of the earth and stringing words into ideals.
I am happy even when I am sad and that is a beautiful sigh.
