It’s a good idea to remind yourself that you are slow traveling to experience the world with all your senses and not the World Wide Web from behind a screen…..when our mind is free from information overload, we tend to slow down. – Gretchen Rubin, The Happiness Project
Today is the last day of five days of January’s Open Write at http://www.ethicalela.com. Each month, this writing group gathers to write and give positive feedback to at least three other writers. Please join us and write with us!
I’ll share my Open Write writing from today in tomorrow’s post. Today, I give thanks for my daughter, Mallory, who celebrates her 36th trip around the sun. Happy birthday, Mal!
MALLORY MICHELLE MEYER
My daughter~
Adventurer
Les Miserables star!
Little Shop of Horrors fan
Outdoor-Lover
Rock Hounder
Youthful lover of life
Master Jeopardy Player
Indubitably a Prize Child
Child of God
Hiker of deserts and hills
Everyone's instant friend
Leader of the Safety Plans
Living healthy
Explorer of caves and trails
Miracle, she is!
Ever a champion!
Yearns to learn new things
Ever the creative spirit and
Reading Enthusiast
Daughter clicking her heels in the snows of Kentucky on Christmas Day
One of my creativity goals this year is taking more photographs. I’m not a talented artist who paints and draws, but I enjoy images and words. My daughters have always kept sketch pads and art projects going ~ they appreciate the spontaneity of lettering a Bible verse or sketching a face or landscape. I think “capturing the moment” is the artistic approach that appeals to me most. Life sometimes begs to be captured.
My daughters sometimes just doodle. They fill entire sketchbooks this way, savoring spontaneous bursts of creativity.
On a recent visit, my daughter asked me to share the photos we’d taken while we were out exploring in the snow. We’d worn our pajamas and snow shoes and had taken pictures of sunsets, snowdrifts, and squirrel statues. It’s the ultimate happiness for a mother, really, because pictures aren’t just pictures. They’re memories. That’s what she was really asking for ~ a jar of snow memory preserves. She wants to come back to our moments, just as I do. Score!
I’d given my daughter the camera and later looked back at all she had captured, like this birdhouse.
Something I hadn’t expected was the surprise of discovering photographs she had taken after I’d handed the camera over to her when I’d gone inside to thaw my toes. Scrolling back through these images, I found pictures I didn’t recognize. And then it hit me: these were images I was seeing through her eyes – the gift of glimpses that weren’t mine in the moment, but shared even now.
A favorite photo taken that day – sunset over the snow, and I think we photographed it at least three dozen times as it tucked itself into bed in the rolling hills.
And so I logged in to my photo processing account and ordered some snapshots on real photo paper. Over the next week, I plan to send her three or four each day to bring smiles and memories. She’ll make a photo collage that will keep this day, these special shared moments, forever etched in her heart.
I will, too.
Sunset over Burdoc Farms in Crofton, KY – White Christmas EveningAssortment of photographs I’ll send this week – making my creativity goals happen through smiles!
The start of a snowball fight……..I passed the camera off to Briar and launched an invitation to fun….
Common Threads 