Friday Photos 10 – Perspective

The seasons change and summer turns to fall, threatening a cold winter yet yielding the odd warmer day — el niño? Trees shed their leaves and turn bare reminding us that even a large majestic tree will change form and beauty.

We pass one another, often wordlessly, like trains on parraelel tracks. We have our destinations and they do as well.

There are few promises that are everlasting and nearly no unshatterable guarantees. What is ours can be lost in the blink of an eye.

It behooves us to cherish what we have while we have it.

We never know when the tide may turn against us.

Thoughts Entering 5774

This has been a bit of a hectic couple of weeks for me, leading up to today and tonight, the beginning of the Jewish New Year. Consequently, you will not find me near a computer for the next three days (Jewish holidays begin at sundown and end at sundown as well — since Rosh Hashana runs right into the Sabbath, that means that I will be AFK effectively from tonight until Saturday night…) and so I wanted to first wish all readers who celebrate the Jewish New Year a happy and healthy one.

The year 5773 on the Jewish calendar was certainly an interesting one for me from a writing perspective, particularly the last few months. Specifically this is the case because three months ago I shifted my blog writing model from that of writing for someone else’s blog to writing for my own blog — giving me greater flexibility in my writing schedule and choice in topics. I must stress that I would not have gotten anywhere near where I have come in the last thirteen years without writing for another person’s blog — but the time had finally come for me to do this. There are a number of experiments I would not have felt comfortable doing which you will G-d willing see unfold over the next number of months.

The year also had a lot of development in terms of my son as he grew from a nearly two year old to a nearly three year old. Where before he was timid in speech, perhaps due to the nature of my wife and I speaking two different languages to him (Romanian and English) he now seems a lot more comfortable in both and knows which to speak to whom. I have tested this sometimes by asking him, in Romanian, to say something to his mother — he responds not by parroting the same thing but by saying the translation of what I have said. To me this means he genuinely understands the words I am speaking to him and is not just mimicking the sounds.

I have come quite far in terms of physical fitness, a subject I will explore further on this blog in upcoming weeks and months.

Look up! It’s a tree! Friday Photos 1

Every Friday I hope to share photographs with you, taken with my camera phone and other photo capturing devices. This is Friday Photos 1 — Look up! It’s a tree!

It was a lovely spring day — seemingly a rarity this year, for some reason — and I was walking home from the train station. I nearly bumped into a low hanging branch from a tree that drooped down well into the sidewalk space. I grumbled as I do not particularly care for tree so close to my face, and chastised myself for paying too much attention to my phone and not enough attention to the world around me that I had allowed such a thing to occur in the first place. As I stood there, attempting to shove the phone in my pocket and regain any semblance of dignity (it surely was a comical look, my nearly bumping into the tree) I suddenly wondered to myself what the branches of the tree looked like from below — and so I looked up.

I could have stood there for hours, but I had to go home — and yet every time I would pass a lovely tree with its freshly regrown leaves, I would purposefully stare up from my station down below and admire the branches and leaves above.

I started to notice the white space — the negative space as it were. The view of the space that was not occupied by leaves or branches — and how vastly it differed from tree to tree, due to the nature of trees themselves, and how there seems to be no way to predict from where a branch will sprout, or from where on a branch you will find larger or smaller clusters of leaves.

I thought about how the view must be standing under these trees at night, and how nice it would be to share it with you — but I have never been able to take good night pictures. Everything comes out pretty dark.

When was the last time you stopped under a tree, and thought to admire the branches and leaves above you?

Maybe the next time you are out for a walk and see a tree, the first thing you will think to do is to try just looking up — and see how much you have been missing.

Maybe it’s not just about trees, branches, and leaves. How many times do we pass the same sights every day and out of nowhere, suddenly notice something that has been there all along but we have just been oblivious to it? What are your new perspective moments?