Tag / nature

by Paul Ottaviano

Soft Focus on Shallow Depth

rhododendron blooms
Rhododendron blooms. Darkroom print. Silberra 25 film.

Sometimes it feels as if I have a fighting spirit, with no justified cause. What justified cause there may be now, involves staying home. And gardening. Wasting less. Producing, consuming, and investing with conscience. Nurturing.

Problem being that I was not raised to nurture. Schooling and competitive culture both channeled into a loop of run, hunt, and exploit.

Nurturing seems right, especially now, but feels unsettling. How do I fight by doing less or nothing, and if active, no harm? On a superficial plane, I get it. But I don’t know how to be this way.

This is why I take one day each week, as a Secular Sabbath Day. I read theology, philosophy, sacred texts. Myths, and natural origins. I’m trying to learn how to be nurturing and adaptive.

Rationalism doesn’t quite fit. This could be ineffable. So, faith? I don’t know. My ignorance is a ghost, that I had better learn to accept and be friendly with.

by Paul Ottaviano

About to Bloom

wild flower photograph

“She thought of the view from her window at night, those nights when she cried bitterly without knowing why, the dome of the administration building like a white peak and the restless waves of moonlit branches and the stillness and the singing voices, mournfully remote, blocks away, coming closer, the tender, foolish ballads, and the smell of the white spirea at night, and the stars clear as lamps in the cloud-fretted sky, and she remembered the choking emotion that she didn’t understand and the dread of all this coming to its sudden, final conclusion in a few months or weeks more. And she tightened her arms around the boy’s shoulders. He was almost a stranger. She knew that she had not even caught a first glimpse of him until this night, and yet he was inexpressibly close to her now, closer than she had ever felt any person before.”

– The Field of Blue Children, Tennessee Williams