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Splash Page Photo of the character, Prince Lexington Jelani from my Sanquinolency series.
Taken at Victorian London - Time Portal
I'd also like to thank Jo Yardley for the gift of this wonderful sim. If you haven't visited all the awesome places at the Time Portal you should take a look. They'll take you back in time.
While comuning with the beings, Kalani and the Halkan find that this unknown race have watched the Halkan planet for centuries from afar as their numbers dwindled and they faded into the cosmic sea. These three were the last. Seeking out and finding the source meant that the Halkans showed hope and promise for a better way, finally reaching a level of development in which these custodians could help.
It is their last act to send Kalani back through the temporal displacement barrier to her time. The Halkan returns to his war torn world with the wisdom to inspire and usher in a lasting era of peace and non-violent neutrality that Halka II is known for in Kalani's time.
The sword is taken back to Halka II where it is melted down as a symbolic act of dissolving conflict, and reconstructed into items held by members of the newly created Halkan council.
Walking along life's path.
Finding new places seeing
into the world.
Looking into the forest as
if it were conquerable.
Walking along life's path.
Seeing truth and life in this world.
Nature itself being unconquerable.
Walking along life's path.
Seeking to see the true design in our world.
Knowing only life is conquerable.
Walking along life's path.
The WalkinMan's Tree by Sheree Zielke
Yesterday, TheWalkinMan and I started something new. A collaborative photo and story concept.
If you read yesterday's Part ONE, then please visit TheWalkinMan's site to read Part TWO.
www.flickr.com/photos/sanfilipo/3595117664/
Here is yesterday's Part ONE, for those of you who may have missed the beginning of this collaborative effort.
www.flickr.com/photos/97705796@N00/3592106434/
Blessings,
Sheree
I read a little less this year than usual. I found when my dad passed this summer, I became quickly wrapped up in the funeral and all of the things you have to take care of and then it took awhile to build up my concentration again. I only read 140 books this year, which is far lower than my usual amount of over 200. One year, I read 365 books! So, I slacked off this year. I found myself lingering along different pages and chapters more so than ever. Here are some of my favorite books that I read. They didn’t all come out this year but time is an illusion anyway.
I'd love to hear about all of your favorite reads from this year or other years!
Photo above is a multiple exposure from Iceland..a reading/study room with a landscape photo in honor of my favorite read of the year.
1. Rooms for Vanishing by Stuart Nadler
A real wonder of a book about different possibilities, split timelines, divergent futures confronting the personal horrors of WWII in one of the most creative and thought provoking ways I’ve ever seen. I read several chapters again and again and felt like this was one of the most philosophical and creative books Ive ever read!
2. The Membranes by Chi Ta-wei
Extremely ahead of its time and published originally 30 years ago and translated into English fairly recently. This is a glimpse of a future world which many facets have proved to be fairly accurate predictions but it is also about queer identity and is written sort of like a gay Taiwanese young William Gibson might write it. Wholly original!
3. Is a River Alive? by Robert McFarlane
Yes, a river is very much alive! This is a wondrous work of nonfiction that really explores some diverse and hard to reach areas of nature and its effect on both the nearby inhabitants and the visitors like this author. I loved its sense of environmental advocacy and questioning why we would allot personhood to corporations but not bodies of water, for instance. You really feel like you go on a psychological journey with the author and learn so much between the rivers he explores and the people he meets.
Thanks to my friend Bob for this recommendation!
4. Future Home of the Living God by Louise Erdrich
There was a period of my life where I just didn’t quite get Erdrich for some reason…it just didn’t click…but now, I am reading at least a couple of books a year by her. This is really a striking book about desperate women who have lost all body autonomy. Her books are always well written and engaging but this one felt more fast paced and thrilling than the others in style and topic.
5. House of Day, House of Night: by Olga Tokarczuk
I really love how Tokarczuk writes about dreams and mushrooms in this one especially. There is quite a bit about religion as well as physical gender identity within that religious space and a really interesting sense of the people who live in Poland in a border town with Germany and remnants of WWII even. She just has a really poetic way of writing.
6. The Measure by Nikki Erlick
I read this on recommendation from my sister in law in one sitting on the plane to Los Angeles. It is one of the most engaging book I have ever read and a speculative fiction masterpiece exploring the psychology behind lifespan and how society might change if everyone over 21 was sent a single string of a certain length that told them how much longer they would live….but not how they would die. Fascinating storyline and very well executed…I kept wondering how I would handle this situation myself. Another book that made me cry this year…I guess I am a bit of a mess! Apparently, this was an “instant” NYT Bestseller back in 2022 but I hadn’t heard of it until my sister in law mentioned it…I guess I just don’t pay attention to popular culture.
7. Archipelago of the Sun by Yoko Tawada
This is the third book of the trilogy of friends where Tawada explores language and identity within the context of our current world and its insistence on borders and a national identity that not all have and definitely not all share the same level of privilege. These friends are so diverse and interesting and also one of the characters and their transitioning identity is also explored so it is rather complex but also very thought provoking and meditative the way she writes…you just want to linger on certain sentences again and again.
8. Tell Me Everything by Erika Krouse
I read three books by Erika Krouse and loved all three-this one is nonfiction and is about all of the horrific ways a football team takes advantage of, persecutes, and threatens women and how deep the cover up goes. Krouse is helping the investigator while also going through the horrors of her past and personal identity. I was honestly not expecting to find this book as engaging as I did but Krouse is an exceptional author whose short stories Save Me, Stranger have stuck with me for many months and who also writes vivid characters in fiction books (see Contenders). Highly recommended!!
9. The True True Story of Raja the Gullible (and his Mother) by Rabih Alameddine
If you ever have the chance to see Rabih Alameddine speak, DO IT! I saw him a few years back after Trump was office the first time around and he spoke about how art including writing is in and of itself an act of resistance. This book is both tragic and funny. There’s an image of our protagonist hero escaping a bunker during a civil war in Lebanon that actually had me laughing so hard I’m surprised I could stop. But, this is also a portrait study of a city and how it changed when the fighting began and equally an exploration of a mother and her gay son as they navigate through their relationship across decades. This is technically fiction but reads at times like an autobiography and, after all, it is a true true story.
10. The Dream Hotel by Laila Lalami
This book scared the crap out of me and if it had been published when she first had started working on it, it would have been even more terrifying. The premise reads like a Black Mirror story where there are corporations who own and monitor your dreams and might even insert products into them. You can also be suspect based on your dreams but people give up their dreams in desperate situations just to fall asleep….very riveting and terrifying!
11. Poets Square Cats by Courtney Gustafson
I’ve been following this author’s cat rescue in Tucson, Arizona for a few years now but only had part of the story before I read this book. This is the autobiographical back story of the author and cat rescuer herself and the ways in which becoming a full time cat rescuer changed her and perhaps made her more human or at least helped her focus her values and what being alive truly means to her. She is doing very good work and it is important to support this work. This book also gives the back story behind so many important characters, many of whom don’t seem quite so feral when you see their true feline selves in her way. A book to be treasured!
12. Sunbirth by An Yu
I loved her speculative novel Ghost Music and this new one is even more bizarre and has an apocalyptic angle about the sun slowly disappearing and people in this town being enveloped by and exploding with light. None of the characters know what it is like in other cities and towns and some try to escape but, after all, the sun is something we all share so you wonder how it could be different when it is the same major problem occurring. I loved these astounding characters and the sense of imagination here.
13. ACLU The Fight of the Century: Edited by Michael Chabon and Ayelet Waldman
Never has there been a more important time to stand up for human rights and also understand the history of human rights. I loved some of the authors responding to historical cases that are organized chronologically. Yea Gyasi Viet Thanh Nguyen, Elizabeth Strout, Salman Rushdie, Aleksander Hemon, Brit Bennett, Li Yiyun, Rabih Alameddine, Louise Erdrich, and Anthony Doerr amongst main more give us glimpses into their own personal history and how these cases may have impacted them. Some of these chapters are also critical of the ACLU’s stance too in some aspects in a healthy way as in the case of campaign funding, for example. Regardless, it’s an organization under great threat in America whose continued existence is vital.
14. Bad Bad Girl by Gish Jen
This is partly a memoir of the author but also an exploration of her mother’s past and her ancestry from back in Shanghai. It explores the horrors of the history they lived through while her mother escaped to America but it’s also an engaging imaginary conversation Gish Jen has with her mother who suffered sexism in her own life and treats her daughter as if she should also be quiet and easy and not have so many opinions. But Gish Jen is a phenomenal author of so many great fictional stories exploring culture and identity and she will always be a Good Bad Girl that we should be grateful for. Thank goodness for the women who don’t succumb to societal and family pressures put on us.
15. My Beloved Monster: Masha, the Half-Wild Rescue Cat Who Rescued Me by Caleb Carr
An extraordinary nonfiction work that really had me on the edge of my seat several times and crying at others. This is a story of a human who Is battling a personal history with physical abuse and has gone through several surgeries that have been only minimally successful. He is an acclaimed author (I haven’t read any of his other books) and lives alone when he decides to adopt a cat later on in life. I just love how he explores his relationship with his cat and the cat’s personality and sense of adventure. This is actually a story about two wandering souls who find each other and meet in the middle and I do believe that they have found each other again in the ether of the afterlife.
16. Generosity by Richard Powers
I read four different books by Powers this year. If you haven’t read his work, it’s quite masterful! He is one of those authors that has great ideas and can truly craft a complex storyline and bring it all back home in an impressive way. This one is interesting because it focuses on an immigrant who by all accounts should be miserable…she has very little and her parents have been murdered and her brother imprisoned. At one point, she is even sexually molested. Still, throughout all of this, our protagonist, Thassadit Amzwar. remains happy and joyful in a way that others just can’t quite seem to manage or understand. As one might imagine, people try to diagnose her as if something is wrong with her and study her DNA…things go so haywire because other humans literally just can’t imagine how this human could be this happy when the rest of us are so depressed.
17. Bewilderment by Richard Powers
This book really got to me in so many ways…it’s so much about the relationship between a father and a son who is neurodivergent and tests him in so many ways but it is also about biofeedback, flexible thinking, and consciousness after death. It is filled with wonder and sorrow both and really explores the complexity of human consciousness.
18. Beyond Anxiety by Martha Beck
I read quite a few nonfiction books this year related to flexible thinkers, nature, human consciousness existing after death, and octopuses but this one really resonated with me in the sense that it helped me immediately to manage my anxiety and is highly recommended to any artists. There are people in this world who consume art and those who create art and those who do both. I am probably in the latter category because I create art but also really love being part of an international community like Flickr and don’t really enjoy participating in other social media type of sites that seem to focus more on making oneself look cool or rich or just a made up version of a human.
This nonfiction is about how creativity can cancel out the heightened anxiety that threatens to overwhelm us every day. If you start to feel the heightened sensation taking over like you can’t even breathe except to scream, maybe this book is for you. Also, just sitting down and doing art for hours is indeed a luxury and makes it hard to go back to the “real world” of capitalism, etc. but sometimes this is exactly what self care is needed
19. A Love Story From the End of the World by Juhea Kim
I loved the wild weirdness and environmental focus of these short stories set all across the world in this time of climate chaos and political upheaval. Kim is an author and activist with a truly creative spirit!
20. After by Bruce Greyson M.D.
After what happened this summer with my dad passing, I read a ton of nonfiction regarding human consciousness continuing and this one really goes through quite a variety of Near Death Experiences and how it also ends up changing people. It’s a really fascinating look into human consciousness and how it continues from a medical expert. I am fascinated by these human stories and really enjoy the perspective of someone from a background in Science. I do believe that, when the body dies, the consciousness and soul of the spirit does continue and that most of us have already lived multiple lives at this point.
Honorable Mentions:
The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong
Annihilation by Michel Houellebecq
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Mailman: My Wild Ride Delivering the Mail in Appalachia and Finally Finding Home by Stephen Starring Grant
**All photos are copyrighted**
innen spielten sie Wagners Siegfried, außen tobten Odins Raben
Yesterday - they played Wagner's Siegfried inside, outside Odin's Raven raging
I'm revisiting images of the many faces of Keefer Lake, my home. This is a 'redo' of a photo taken in April, 2009. The thickest and strangest fog/mist formed over the ice on the lake in a pastel 'winter blue' I had not seen before. It was like being inside a Salvador Dali painting! Although we often have ice fog we have not had anything quite like this one ever since.
********************************************
What follows is a (very) short story of mine written in the same year the photo was made ... the story and the photo seemed related somehow - at least to me?
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'Finding it, solving it, living it.'
Cool blue seemed to describe what he was seeing. It was soon dark and with it he feared he would be left to himself and he knew from experience that was not safe. How to feel it seemed always to be the fundamental problem but there were countless other difficulties that he constantly confronted and tonight seemed no different. Why is it that the ordinary takes priority over the real issue? Laziness, he supposes … do what is in front of you and brighter in your eyes rather than deal with the shadows in your mind, the things that are off to the side.
With the passing of those thoughts the blue was already gone and only patches of grey lined the horizon and shaped the trees and lake in front of him. Black and white would be easier he mused, grey was the problem of course. Joseph had always known that the lake would be the place where he found it and solved it. However, there was little warmth yet and more to be done. It wasn’t a case of deciding where to start because he knew already there was no beginning. He wasn’t even sure if there would be an ending? What to do at any given time about it he had concluded is about energy and attitude and distractions. The right proportions are essential and even distraction is needed in a measured and timely way. He had not seen in any sustained way that magical place … only glimpsing it from time-to-time although that was enough and it kept him coming back. Joseph often claimed that his only enduring trait was curiosity although he was credited by others as having more. He didn’t seem to care or need their praise and usually shrunk from it when it was offered … shyness perhaps, perhaps not? He reasoned that it wasn’t relevant anyway and wouldn’t help with finding it.
Idleness is, a friend of, maybe a prerequisite to the pursuit of it and Joseph had time on his hands now. You had to be sure though that the distractions of idleness didn’t overwhelm the quest. It was too easy to see them as reprieves when really they were quest busters. Peace of mind was not the same as the lack of stress that sometimes accompanies idleness and Joseph believed it was all about finding peace of mind. The glimpses of it had shown him that idleness only provided a useful means for having time to chase after the peace. “Maybe it wasn’t so much as chase, as follow” Joseph concluded. Curious people are often alone with their thoughts and comfortable in them. Thinking is not being idle although it might appear to be that to those observing.
MJH (2009)
"They will be home soon," she whispers, "I know it."
Meanwhile the porch light offers herself as a welcoming beacon, as a seed sewn to the little, wooden shingled house.
"It has been two seasons since we heard their voices and footsteps fill the rooms," he says with a pensive relay.
"I know just what to do. We will send Mr. Messenger BeeAe Bird and his flock for them," she exclaims!
______________________________
for my love of photography and writing.
I hope you join me, xo.
facebook: www.facebook.com/angielambertphotographyandillustration/?...
webpage: www.angielambertphotography.com
In the darkness the cats look around for the slightest little sound.
The sister cats await the discovery of their prey, hovering in the dark.
Glowing eyes seek out and find, the little mouse scurrying across the ground.
Sister cats in the creepy dark night, stalk the tiny mark
When the lights come on the sister cats have disappeared and the mouse is no where to be found...
...................................................................................
Photograph of my two sister cats with no flash at night. Vignette, Drama and saturation filters applied.
The Queen Bee is in the garden with me.
Flitting in the air for her subjects to see.
She watches over them as they move about her palace in the tree.
She moves about the garden with me.
Sharing stories of her hive with glee.
Every bee,
in her tree,
is happy as can be!
Working and playing in harmony!
.........................
If while wandering in the woods,
you came across the portal.
Would you get close?,
would you dare?,
to look into it with
a long deep stare.
This one lives forever,
so it seems and even darkness
is swallowed by the empty soul
of this wooded immortal.
Shot at the opening of “Africa”, Milena Carbone's new exhibition at Ntitroglobus Roof Gallery.
« AFRICA MATRICIDE
Africa takes a look at the African continent, both amazed and crude. Amazed, because Africa is a fertile paradise of biodiversity and beauty and the cradle of humanity, born in the rift, the vagina of the earth. Crude, because Africa is a continent raped, slaughtered, poisoned, looted with impunity by empires, in cynical disdain of its inhabitants. Africa is what started it all by the grace of evolution, and will end by the rapacity of man. » Milena Carbone
More to (must) read on The Carbone Studio www site (including the whole stories).
inara Pey's Blog article about this exhibition : modemworld.me/2022/10/31/milena-carbones-africa-at-nitroglobus
Particles by Venus Adored.
Visit this location at Nitroglobus Roof Gallery in Second Life
Little spirits,
falling from the tree's.
Singing and laughing
in the breeze.
Little spirits,
smile and tease,
come play with us,
please.
Little spirits,
dancing with the bee's.
Floating in the
soft warm breeze.
Little spirits,
growing into tree's.
as Great spirit,over see's
............................................
Photograph of the helicopter type seedlings from the Maple trees, mirrored and saturated.
Hide and seek in the leaves
playing, laughing,
wont you, please?
Outside the world is
drifting away
but friends stay.
Finding a soul
to spend time around,
is always easy when
we look at the ground.
Nature provides,
in every way,
so, join in and play.
Dream, create, play!
.................
Photograph of the leaves, mirrored, saturated and a fish eye filter used.
The woman stood in the middle of the eerie field, stalks of a corn towering above her. She had come for a glamorous photoshoot, but now she was surrounded by shadows, the setting sun casting long, ominous lines. The scarecrow loomed in the distance, watching silently. Her heart raced. She checked the address again - this couldn't be right. A chill ran down her spine as she wondered...How did I end up here? Something felt terribly off....
When our time is done
and comes the setting of the sun.
We remember the life we
lived with someone.
Living our life in the sun.
Fear not the judgement of one.
For all see peace when the day is done.
As we live a life in the sun.
While on vacation in Primiero last summer I could see the effects of 2 phenomena which hit the forests of the Central-Eastern Italy. Apparently independent, in fact they’re sadly connected by the changing climatic conditions.
One is the devastation brought by an unprecedented storm, later named Vaia, in 2018 - on a very wide region, several thousands of trees have been eradicated and whole forests destroyed.
The other is the incisive action of the spruce bark beetle – a bug that, favored by the last couple of hot and dry years, is attacking many of the weakened trees that survived the Vaia storm, drying them up and thus worsening the already critical status of our forests.
This latter hit hard on the local communities, who were starting remediation programs after Vaia. It’ll take further efforts to find sustainable solutions, since many aspects in their daily life are influenced by the state of health of their forests.
Purple Lion,
laying around in the shade.
Purple Lion,
that my dreams made.
Purple Lion,
in the leaves we played.
Purple Lion,
of you I am not afraid.
Purple Lion,
in my memory you fade.
Purple Lion,
Through my dreams you wade.
Purple Lion,
I will find you again in the glade,
as for now,
Goodnight,
I bade.
.............................................
Photograph of the bushes in my yard, inverted and mirrored, a fish eye filter applied and some saturation.
Secret places,
I like to find.
The ones hidden
between your
world and mine.
Magical in every way.
Places where
fairies would
dance and play.
Beautiful doorways
such as this.
If I walked across
would it open to
my bliss.
Is the troll hiding underneath,
or the Dragon flying above
with large sharp teeth.
Why, when we grow up?,
do we stop seeing.
Is magic only for children
who's daydreams
are fleeting?