Sunflowers and Death

Winding down a long weekend, a tough work week looming.

Sunday began with the bright promise of an early morning visit to McKee-Beshers Wildlife Refuge in Maryland to photograph in the fields of sunflowers. The weather was cool and clear, lovely for an almost August day. We got in early enough to enjoy long periods of silence with the flowers. We left as the crowds started to arrive with their loud voices and selfie sticks.

A rush home to attend the memorial viewing of a friend's wife. Death's timing is hardly ever good.

This day was bracketed by life and death, and now as it closes I'm lead to try and make sense of it, but I cannot. The bright morning with sunflowers stretching to the sun, and with the evening, time to mark the passing of a life. Light to dark, life to death.

This is a passage all living things must take - still, if I could have a wish it would be to return loved ones to those who miss them, to make broken hearts whole.

Photography & prose by Terry Rowe.

All work can be or is available for sale, visit www.terryrowe.photography. You can also leave me a comment if there is a particular piece of work you are interested in.

I am grateful for all of your comments and views.

Pre-Dawn Walking

Pre-dawn walking is required during a southern summer, it's likely to be the coolest part of the day and the risk of thunderstorms is less.

This morning the air was still and close, still the birds sang and the darkness was comfortable.

I take this walk every morning through my urban suburban neighborhood.

Each house is different, bungalows, farmhouses, colonials. Quirky, and since most are older each has evolved with it's own look and personality. Nothing like the new suburbs further out - so confusing with each house built the same with only slight differences in appearances.

The gardens around these houses too are vastly different

Some pristine and manicured, not a blade of grass higher than the other. Shrubbery controlled and pruned into exact shapes. Others overblown and lush, packed with blooming plants in numerous colors. A riot of color and smells. And here are the neglected yards, overgrown and weedy, a bit forlorn. A sad beauty in how the plants have take over. These lonely yards speak to me, feel familiar. I wonder if their keepers are just too busy to care for them, or don't care, or can't care. Maybe the neglect is a reflection of their spirits.

Each yard a refection of the spirit of the people who inhabit their space.

My house is a combination of flowering lushness and fortressed shrubbery - the front facade a solid face to the street that gives little away, shielded by dense green shrubs. The side yard, a lush full space of colors and blooming. The gate guards the hidden garden. Flowers, water, birds and animals. A quiet space that only a few are invited to enter.

Photography & prose by Terry Rowe. Your visit & comments are appreciated.

You can see my art work or photographs at www.terryrowe.photography.  Any photographs in my blog are also available for purchase. 

Winter's Landscape

There is beauty in every season.

Spring's beauty lies it shy emergence and delicate colors, a rising energy quickening the spirit.

Summer flaunts her lazy voluptuousness, bright colors, and hot languid days and nights.

Fall brings a different kind of quickening in the air, a feeling of brisk energy, bright colors exploding with one last passionate push.

Then there is winter...cold, silent, and seemingly dull. But winter. Winter speaks to my soul. She is truth laid bare, a promise of what might be, hope in the face of starkness. Winter touches my spirit with a frosty hand and reminds me that silence is a deepening treasure.





 

Photography & prose by Terry Rowe. 

Your visit & comments are appreciated. 

You can see my art work or photographs at www.terryrowe.photography.  Any photographs in my blog are also available for purchase.