[-crackles!-]

Today is the second full moon of June if you live in the Eastern Hemisphere. For those of us in the Western Hemisphere, it was May 31, 2007. Since I seem to have missed it last month, I’m celebrating it with those of you in the other half of the world. Either way, we both get a full moon [just barely] in June [except Aukland and thereabouts!].

The second full moon in a month is called a Blue Moon.

Blue Moons come around every 2.7 years or 41 times a century.

Even rarer is a year with a double Blue Moon. Those only occur 4.5 times a century or every 19 years or so.

The last Blue Moon was in July 2004.

The next Blue Moon will be December 2009.

Blue Moons have nothing to do with the look of the moon, though on a gorgeous summer night in June we might be excused if we imagined a special hue. Moons do spur people to be creative:

Movies:

Moonstruck
Joe Versus the Volcano
Paper Moon
Apollo 13
Man on the Moon
Walk on the Moon

Songs:

Blue Moon
Moon Over Miami
Moon River
Moondance
Moonlight in Vermont
Dancing in the Moonlight
Moonshadow
By the Light of the Silvery Moon
Moonage Daydream
There’s a Moon in the Sky
Dark Side of the Moon
Bad Side of the Moon
It’s Only a Paper Moon
Harvest Moon
Song about the Moon
Ticket to the Moon
Heading to the Moon

Open your curtains as you sleep tonight and let the light shine down upon you. Maybe you’ll feel more creative because of it!

My Blue Moon photosandwich above was made with the help of hypergenesb who allows his photos to be used under a creative commons license. Thank you! I had a fun time playing with your beautiful photo. On his flickr page, hypergenesb has fully annotated his moon. Click the image to see it and his other photos!

[-photography, process-]

red carnation

Originally uploaded by nuanc.

This photo is one I took over two years ago. It came up this morning while I was playing the game Free Association! on flickr. The game involves posting an image in response to the last one posted by someone else. I did a flickr search through my photos for “window” and “silhouette” and this popped up. I hadn’t seen it in a long time and I found that I enjoyed it—really for the first time.

It has unexpected qualities. The distorted shape of the window. The gradation of blue from the top of the window to the whiter light at the bottom. The reflection of green on the window sill and the way the light between the tree branches seems to slide inside into to the corner of the window. The pop of red! And there’s something going on between outside and inside. That’s open to interpretation, of course, but either the flower faces the window as if yearning to be outside or perhaps the bare birch tree is admiring/envious of that splash of living colour. I’m not sure, but there’s certainly a hint of communication between the two.

All of this, of course, was unintended.

I took the photograph with my LOMO LC-A. It’s a refurbished version of a cheap camera made in Russia decades ago and it gives erratic and often impressionistic results—which is why LOMO’s have become popular and lucrative long after the cameras stopped being manufactured.

This photo was of a truly unremarkable scene. My step-son had been visiting and left an empty can of 7-UP on his window sill. Also in his room (this was after he’d gone home) I found a red carnation that he’d picked up in some restaurant we’d been to. Rather than toss both of them immediately into the waste basket, I put the carnation in the 7-UP can and took some LOMO’s.

This morning when I really saw it for the first time, it made me think about the act of creating as one of constantly expecting the unexpected. This image isn’t just about the unpredictability of the LOMO, though that’s a big part of it. It is also about taking the time to photograph an unremarkable scene and to chance shooting a dull, unsuccessful photograph in order to come up with something that has something different to offer. It took combining the colours of what was there: the metallic green 7-UP can and the red carnation against the white and blue background and taking it from a low angle in order to catch the super blue of the highest sky. It took depending on the unpredictability of the little Russian camera.

Each act of creation is an act of faith. We don’t know if it’s going to work out or not. That’s never the point. Doing it is the point. Doing it with an open heart and sense of expectancy that will allow us to recognize—once it’s done—when we have indeed caught the unexpected.

[-photography, poetry-]

by Nancy S.M. Waldman

it is, afterall, all about the sky

Originally uploaded by nuanc.

I took this photo last Sunday as I was pelting through New Brunswick trying to get home as fast as possible. Since I was driving and it was raining, I didn’t take time to compose the shot or focus it or choose it with care. The taking of it was as much about entertaining myself during a long drive alone as it was about trying to capture something of the amazing sky and the New Brunswick landscape.

When I uploaded this, I was immediately struck by two things. The proportion of sky to land and the tiny angled snippet of road in the lower right corner, with the even tinier cars and their miniscule headlights - all lost in the vastness of that sky.

It’s inspired this haiku:

I travel again this weekend.

take care, all

Originally published June 2006 in the Practically Creative blog

[-photography, digital images, photo essay-]

words and images by Maureen Shaughnessy

“cloud ice earth dancers”

Life is filled with mundane happenings and objects we take for granted.

Read the rest of this entry »

[-travel photography-]

by Tara Eden Read the rest of this entry »

[-essay, inspiration-]

by Nancy S.M. Waldman

My favorite part of being inspired isn’t the sudden flush of excitement about a new project, a distinctly different direction, or a fresh idea. What I love most comes along after that initial inspiration. It’s later, when all the pieces begin to fall into place and fit together in a new way. Often this feels like a moment of magical coincidence. Thinking about inspiration for the first issue of The PCQ made me want to analyze how and why it happens and whether it is possible to make it happen more often.

We’ve all experienced it. We are working on an intransigent problem – it could be anything: how to move the plot along in our novel, how to arrange our life so that we have time to do what we want, how to get our child to do what we feel is best – and then, when we have been wrestling with it, giving it our full attention for some time, we suddenly overhear a random conversation or read a magazine article in the dentist’s office or see something on the internet and we find that specific piece of information – the one we could have so easily missed! – is exactly the tidbit we need. Suddenly the issues of this problem become clarified and aligned in a new and significant way. That realignment allows us a fresh perspective and ultimately a solution for an old issue or problem.

Alignment makes me think of the planets. Unfortunately, I usually pay very little attention to the stars in the heavens. When the planets “do” something unusual enough to make the evening news, only then do I, like thousands of others, turn off the lights, step outside at night and look up. This happened with Venus, Jupiter and Saturn in 2004. There they were, bright and obvious, a line of planets dotted in the heavens.

This view inspires because we know how far away the planets are, not only from each other but also from us. In the same way, that seemingly random piece of information that aligns with the solar system of our problem and generates a solution, feels as unlikely and just as awesome.

But instead of thinking of our serendipitous inspiration as “coincidence,” it’s more helpful to use the word “conjunction.” Conjunction is another astronomical term referring to celestial bodies that are close together or on the same celestial latitude. Planetary conjunction is a natural occurrence noted and notable because someone’s paying attention. Astronomers intently watch the heavens and therefore know when the planets are aligned or conjoined in unusual ways.

This is what has happened to us when we become conjoined with that new piece of information that helps us solve our problem. Like a planet in the solar system, the information is there all the time. But because we’ve given over our full attention to the dilemma, our heightened receptivity becomes the telescope for that “coincidental” alignment of information. We get a new view and can see it all more clearly.

It’s important for us to know that this process isn’t magical but is instead a natural occurrence along an orbit of our own making, one of heightened awareness, attention and intention. We can bring about these inspired moments of clarity in our lives. We just have to remember to turn out the lights, step outside our normal routine and … look up.

© 2005 - 2007 Nancy S.M. Waldman all rights reserved
~ written in conjunction with Barry N. Waldman ~

Originally published in the (first) Practically Creative blog, Monday, April 4, 2005