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29
Jul
2021
Thursday July 29, 2021
Long long ago, I had a Baby Brownie camera. It had no settings at all – just point and click. But it let me take grainy black and white pictures.
As time went on, I graduated to a 35mm camera that would do almost everything for me except choose my subject. It would set the aperture. Choose the shutter speed. Auto-focus on whatever I had on the screen.
Except that one of its dials sets “picture mode,” in which the camera automatically amends its settings to suit special circumstances -- portraits, landscapes, close-ups, etc.
Not long ago, I took a series of photos of our Rotary club picking up litter along a popular walking route. Somehow, I bumped that dial from “Auto” to “Art.”
I got grainy black and white photos that I might have taken with my old Baby Brownie.
Categories: Soft Edges
Tags: aging, letting go
22
Thursday July 22, 2021
Smoke cloaks the Okanagan Valley, as it does much of North America. With wildfires burning all over B.C. and through the western states., smoke can’t help drifting through this valley.
It hangs like frosted glass between me and the far shore of the lake.
To the north and south, water sky and hills merge into an opaque curtain.
There are no horizons.
Smoke is becoming a new normal. As extreme weather patterns come tumbling one after another, we can expect more heat domes. More droughts. More smoke.
Tags: sacrifice, Smoke, Solomon
20
Thursday July 15, 2021
Some sources will tell you that the “rule of threes” derives from trench warfare in World War I. Two soldiers could safely light their cigarettes off a single match. But if you kept the match alight long enough for a third soldier to light up, enemy snipers had time to aim. One dead soldier.
But the rule of threes surely goes back far before that.
Threes are endemic in Christianity. The Holy Trinity – Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. In baptisms, people are dipped or sprinkled three times. Everyone knows that there were three Wise Men – although the Bible itself never cites that number. Resurrection came on the morning of the third day. Peter denied Jesus three times; Jesus countered by asking Peter three time, “Do you love me?” Jesus rejected three temptations in the wilderness…
Tags: Threes
Earlier this spring, a friend and I were coming down a steep trail on a local mountain. As we came around a huge boulder, we suddenly realized there was a woman on the far side of it. Sitting with her back against the boulder. Sobbing.
To one side of her there was a small green tree. A pretty little tree, but not what I would consider a native pine, spruce, or aspen. It looked more like the decorative evergreens that florists use for contrast in a pot of blossoms.
A small white sash hung around the tree: “This tree planted for our son Walter.”
Tags: grief, tree, Walter, memorial
3
Thursday July 1, 2021
I took my dog Pippin to an off-leash dog park on the outskirts of Kelowna a week ago.
Pippin loves dog parks. She pranced off to meet with a group of other dogs, and their owners, gathered in the shade of some trees.
Suddenly a black and white and tan streak emerged out of the cluster, heading for the gates, as if it was trying to outrun a load of buckshot.
I expected the double gates at the park entry would stop her. They didn’t. She slid under the first one on her side. Then under the second. And out onto the highway. Running north, as if she were demented. Running, running, running.
I started running myself.
Tags: dogs