“Yes,” said Queen Lucy, “in our world, too, a Stable once had something inside it that was bigger than our whole world.”
Month: December 2014
Back to the mountains
Here comes the sun
The Son is coming!
The power of music
Who is perfect?
Description of this film:
Disabled mannequins will be eliciting astonished looks from passers-by on Zurich’s Bahnhofstrasse today. Between the perfect mannequins, there will be figures with scoliosis or brittle bone disease modelling the latest fashions. One will have shortened limbs; the other a malformed spine. The campaign has been devised for the International Day of Persons with Disabilities by Pro Infirmis, an organisation for the disabled. Entitled “Because who is perfect? Get closer.”, it is designed to provoke reflection on the acceptance of people with disabilities. Director Alain Gsponer has captured the campaign as a short film.
The figures are life-sized, three-dimensional representations of Miss Handicap 2010, Jasmin Rechsteiner, radio presenter and film critic Alex Oberholzer, track and field athlete Urs Kolly, blogger Nadja Schmid and actor Erwin Aljukic.
“We often go chasing after ideals instead of accepting life in all its diversity. Pro Infirmis strives especially for the acceptance of disability and the inclusion of people with disabilities,” says Mark Zumbühl, a member of the Pro Infirmis Executive Board, in describing the campaign.
Make it snow. Make it snow. Make it snow.
“Notice when life is passing you by and fight to stay present.”
This is an amazing woman. I wish she lived next door to me.
harvesting hope: a life worth remembering.
When we moved into our new house last year, I pondered what to hang on the walls. Our old photo canvases and prints were still in storage. I thought back on all of our professional family photos and realized that I had also avoided hanging those at our old house; they sat for years in a pile on our bedroom floor. When I looked at those pictures, I always remembered how I’d felt during the shoot, and it felt heavy. I remembered how much Gracie hated the scratchy dress I told her she had to wear, how Donny and I argued on the way there. I saw the antique props that I purchased the day before to look like they had character and stories. But the stories were not ours.
And, over the years as a photographer, with each client session that I photographed, I began to cringe whenever the parents quietly begged their children to behave, and bribes were on hand to help hide away the tears. When the sun finally set, and I said “finished,” it was common that the parents would allow their shoulders to finally relax; the children would kick off their shoes; and that’s when the authentic beauty would shine the brightest. But by then the daylight had already faded, and my camera was put away.
As an artist, it tortured me.
This past year, Donny and I worked through a lot of heavy stuff. In the years leading up to our move, we were going in fast motion, and we didn’t take the time we needed to nurture our marriage. After years of continually feeling exhausted and unfulfilled, we got fed up, sold our home and all of our belongings, traveled the country looking for a place that felt like home, then put down roots on a farm in Washington state. Once we settled into a simpler lifestyle, we found the time we needed to work through our pain. We faced hard truths. We let go of years of bitterness. We learned how to anchor our respect for one another. And we found a wellspring of hope in the midst of our healing.
This growth in my personal life stirred up something in me as an artist.
Please read the rest here.
Now let’s go to Slovakia
Incredible.
To the Alps
I just felt like a trip to the Alps today . . .
Incredibly beautiful ice and snow
Go here to see amazingly beautiful snow and ice formations: God’s artistry! Here’s one example:
Wonder and Beauty 