COME SO ALIVE

Finding breath and beauty amidst the storm

Tag: photography

Beauty in the not-normal

By

On 09/22/2023

In Gratitude

In search of a photo of the stunning fog rising off the small lake I had just driven past, I walked down this path.

The path led to the lake but once there I realized that the rising sun was now behind me – I stood on the opposite side of the lake I had driven past and could no longer see the beautiful mist backlit by sunrise.

The path didn’t lead to the view I had hoped for but a different beauty greeted me.

When we are open to beauty, it is more likely to appear to us. When we share that gift by pointing it out to others, we find we have even more of it to celebrate.

Trebbe Johnson

Last week someone told me my life wasn’t normal. Which, while validating to hear, is not what I want to spend my brief days focused on. Hence stopping for fog, something most people on that road probably didn’t even notice.

Looking for beauty in the not-normal doesn’t negate the pain. Our hardships hurt and do damage. At the same time, pain doesn’t mean beauty no longer exists.

Looking for beauty in the not-normal changes my focus from being only on the pain to also being on gratitude. And gratitude reaches out and keeps my head above the waves.

My husband likes the term “spiritual jiu jitsu” to describe times when I figuratively end up on my back on the mat after encountering a major insight from God. For me, gratitude is like that. It provides a way for me to perform a throw down on the pain trying to beat me.

Well, maybe more like “Karate Kid” and “wax on, wax off.”

Focusing on gratitude, I find a way to deflect even more damage that the pain from my not-normal wants to deliver. Pain wants me on my back and down for the count.

Gratitude deflects and even heals the wounds that pain inflicts.

Perhaps the more pain I experience, the more crucial it is that I look for beauty.

Gratitude as a discipline involves a conscious choice. I can choose to be grateful even when my emotions and feelings are still steeped in hurt and resentment.

Henri Nouwen

A Superior rest

By

On 03/17/2023

In Lifelines

We had an amazing, restful vacation last week for the first time in four years. Four years where we’ve amassed two open-heart surgeries, a job loss, a stroke, shoulder surgery…oh yes, and a pandemic. We needed to rest.

Interestingly, I didn’t sleep well on vacation (shoulder pain post-op still and pain medication-induced vertigo waking me up).

But I actually felt rested.

That’s because sleep and rest are not the same thing. Sleep meets a physical need, a life or death requirement of the brain and body. You can’t live without sleep. I would have liked more sleep but I’ll live.

Rest, on the other hand, refreshes our souls, something deep inside yet not physically inside. You can be alive without rest but you’ll be dead to really living. To seeing and receiving soul-restoring peace.

Rest is being awake at 6 a.m. (not my normal), seeing a clear sky, and deciding to go take sunrise photos. In 23-degree F temperatures. (Really not my normal!)

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Sunset

By

On 12/30/2022

In Beauty in the Storm (epilepsy), His Vast Strength (stroke)

The last five years have taught me to be mentally prepared for bad things to happen.

Oops, sorry, we misread Cody’s MRIs for the last three years. He has a different kind of epilepsy, one which not only will he not outgrow it but he will need brain surgery for it.

Oops, I was wrong four years ago when I first met with you, Chuck. You do actually have a genetic issue and it’s likely what’s killing your family members. You need to have it monitored and will need open-heart surgery at some point.

And yes, those are mostly direct quotes – no candy coating going on with either doctor.

We heard both of those about two months apart. One year later we heard it was time to start brain surgery assessments and then time to have open-heart surgery.

A few months later, we had a flooded and destroyed formerly fully-finished basement. Then a job loss a week before open-heart surgery.

Another open-heart surgery less than three years later. A stroke.

So when something went wrong last week with the website I have spent over two years creating…well, of course it did.

Except I’ve taken it relatively calmly, after the initial panic.

I mean if someone hacked and destroyed my site, they are way more technically savvy than I am and there’s really not much I can do about it.

I still haven’t figured it out. So, Come So Alive might look a little different this year. Or maybe not.

I guess we won’t know until we get there.

Which is how life is anyway so perhaps that’s fitting. Maybe even that’s the lesson God wants me to learn this new year.

You’d think I’d have learned that lesson after the year of stroke we’ve had, but, no, I went to bed last night wondering about the future…

“You won’t know till you get there, Carrie, so stop trying to figure it out. To guess. To prepare. You can’t prepare. No matter how much you go over projections and possibilities in your head, you’ll never be fully prepared for all life brings.

“But you can let Me walk next to you, you can slow down and walk next to Me, so that when you get there, you get there with Me. And I AM all the preparation you’ll need.”

So instead of thinking ahead, I decided to look back. I scrolled through my photos on my phone from the last year and rediscovered these beautiful sunsets.

Do you know that Jewish days begin at sunset?

“While a day in the secular calendar begins and ends at midnight, a Jewish day goes from nightfall to nightfall.”*

As I post this, the sun is setting. Another new day is starting. And I can try to prepare for the bad I’ve come to anticipate.

Or I can simply enjoy the sunset closing out today, knowing no dark night lasts forever. Tonight’s sunset will usher in a new morning – and He will be there.

He already is.

I will walk among you and be your God…

Leviticus 26:12


*https://www.chabad.org/library/article_cdo/aid/526873/jewish/The-Jewish-Day.htm

O Come, O Come, Emmanuel

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On 12/02/2022

In Pay Attention

Welcome to the season of Advent, which means “coming” in Latin.  The Christian church designates the four Sundays before Christmas as Advent, a time of waiting for the coming of Emmanuel, another name for Jesus, a name that means “God with us.” 

I received several notices of special Advent devotionals on waiting this year.  Yet, I realized, this Advent for me is less about waiting for what is to come and more about recovering from what already came this year. 

One year ago, we were waiting on doctors and diagnoses for Chuck.  And I have already been feeling the PTSD of that waiting and what it led to – hearing “You need another open-heart surgery,” waiting to get it scheduled, waiting for the surgery date to arrive.  Waiting during his surgery. 

Waiting following a massive stroke right after surgery.

No, I’m not waiting for something this year.  I’m needing to heal from all the waiting this year.

Then God gave me an unconventional Advent devotional.  I purchased a book called God Is at Eye Level two Decembers ago, and on my shelf it has sat, largely unread.  Until it called to me last week, and I reread the subtitle: Photography as a Healing Art.

Yes, that’s the Advent devotional I need this year. 

I wasn’t sure how I would use it, but, as I paged through the book, certain phrases jumped out at me.  The first being the very first thing written on the Introduction page, a quote:

“There are two ways of spreading light: to be the candle or the mirror that reflects it.”

Edith Wharton

Suddenly, I knew that was what I needed to photograph – and I already had the image in my house.  For Christmas I set four pillar candles (don’t worry, they’re battery-operated) on an antique organ which has decorative beveled edge mirrors on the upper shelf.  I tried framing the photo several ways and finally found the one that was the image representation of those words. 

And now I knew how this book on photography was going to be my Advent devotional.  And how it would heal me.

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Anticipation, Part 1

By

On 10/21/2022

In "Come So Alive" Origins, Beauty in the Storm (epilepsy)

I anticipate with excitement a certain day of the year, every year.  I can’t tell you what day it is, though, because I don’t actually know.  To be more specific, I don’t ever know the exact date until the day it happens but the event that I anticipate, that I can tell you,  I love the day my peony opens!  Or peony, depending on how you pronounce it.

That day also happens to be a day I dread, because it rains that day and beats down my beautiful peony blooms, light pink, double blooms as big as my hand on tiny little stalks.  It rains that day. Every. Year.

This year the gloriously painful day was June 15th.  I know the exact date because I took pictures of the bloom.  It was sunny in the morning when I awoke to several massive blooms that had popped open overnight – but by 11:30 a.m. the sky had turned cloudy.  I decided to take a picture so I could enjoy their beauty longer, knowing they would only survive a day or so. 

As I squatted in the dirt so my camera was even with a bloom, thunder clapped somewhere in the distance. 

Seriously, I’m not making that up.

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Smiling for the camera

By

On 10/07/2022

In Finding Breath, Peace

I went on vacation this week. Well, a staycation. Ok, I spent a few hours relaxing on my deck. But I nursed three mugs of tea and just sat. It was amazing!

…

I have tried for ten minutes to figure out what to write. I type, then I delete. Because, I finally realized, that morning was so relaxing that I just really can’t write about it. Writing about it feels like it makes it work and that morning was not about work at all.

So, I’m going to share a few of the pictures that I took over the course of 2 1/2 hours of sitting on my deck – a very quiet, still time that calmed my body and started to restore my soul.

I enjoyed just being present to what came into my backyard. To the little gifts God sent my way that morning. I hope you find a few moments of peace as well. And maybe a chuckle about the squirrel that Cody thinks was smiling for the camera.

The secret of the healing power of beauty is learning to receive it as a gift.

John Eldredge, “Get Your Life Back“
“Look! He’s smiling!” said Cody when I showed it to him.
I finally captured an upside down nuthatch!
My staycation selfie
My amazing accommodations

For this week’s post, a plog

By

On 06/10/2022

In His Vast Strength (stroke)

“What are those things that Chewbacca ate called again?” Cody looked at me slightly disgusted. “Porgs. And don’t remind me. That’s just so sad.”

Cody is a sensitive child. I think every day that I picked him up from preschool he had a dandelion, a twig, or a pine cone as a gift for me (I actually still have the pine cone collection in my car by the gearshift).

Chuck and I often hear him talking to bugs, “Hello. Who are you?” I heard that this morning actually. We had some weird bug in the house that I had unsuccessfully tried to swat last night. Cody found it this morning, used the fly swatter to scoop it up, and then opened the patio door and gently let it out.

Calling them his outdoor pets, he loves the birds in the backyard too. He was quite concerned about who was going to keep our bird feeder filled while we were at the hospital for his daddy’s surgery. Thankfully we have some very good friends!

Cody is so sensitive that he had a seizure three years ago the day of Chuck’s first surgery. Needless to say, we were quite worried about him surrounding this surgery too. That may have been the biggest stressor for us quite frankly. When friends asked leading up to the surgery how they could pray for us, we’d ask them to pray for peace for Cody during the surgery and good sleep at night at the hotel. He also sleeps very poorly any place other than his bed and consequently regularly has seizures when we travel – which we have pretty much stopped doing.

So, facing a 7- to 10-day stay was anxiety-producing to say the least.

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The things I would have missed

By

On 11/21/2021

In Beauty in the Storm (epilepsy), Gratitude, Pay Attention

What did you think your life would be like as an adult when you were in high school?  Did you have specific plans?  Is your life filled with things you never could have predicted?

I remember an exercise in high school that instructed us to write out a timeline of goals for our lives, how we saw them unfolding.  Schooling, marriage, kids.  All the things we think will play out in our lives.  I can’t say I followed that timeline of expectations very well, both by choice and by circumstance.  All the best planning could not have predicted where I have ended up. Do you know the feeling?

I’ve been trying to learn to let go of planning and to just receive instead.  (Yes, I know some of you are laughing – I’ll wait until you’re done).

One great way to do that has been learning about contemplative photography, whose principle is to not “take” shots, but rather to receive an image.  Three times recently I have received an image but only in looking at the photo did I really see the whole picture.

I decided to avoid the highway and take the back roads to run errands one day. The greens and blues and peace of the little lake (which I’ve driven past for 20 years) made me stop and back up so I could photograph it. I posted it to Facebook with the caption, “I took the road less traveled.”

Somehow, I missed the fact that I included the side mirror in the image. I was kind of bummed about that because I really only wanted to see the lake. Then a neighbor commented, “I can see your past” and I really looked at the image captured in the mirror. That image was, in fact, my past – the road I had just taken, a road very much “less traveled.” A past that lead me to the beauty I was currently enjoying. That reflection in the mirror actually became my favorite part of the picture.

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Blowing me kisses

By

On 10/24/2021

In Beauty in the Storm (epilepsy), Pay Attention

One of my pastors created a Facebook page called Contemplative Photography, a place for its page members to post their own photos.  I learned about it almost a year ago and immediately joined the group.  I am not a professional photographer nor is that a requirement for the group.  The point of the group is to “receive” photos, a visual way to pay attention to God in your daily life and share it with others.

Last week at breakfast, Cody said, “Oh, look!  Half the sky is gray and half is sunny.”  If you had drawn a line down the middle of the window, one half would have been completely overcast with dark gray, misty cloud cover and the other half shining with bright blue sky and a few wispy white clouds.  I quickly grabbed my phone and went on the deck to photograph it.  I posted it to the Contemplative Photography page with this thought:

“Like life, some days we get sunny, blue skies; some days we get dark gray, cloudy skies. And some days we get a combination of the two. Maybe most days it’s a combination of the two.“

And I have thought about that combination – of blue skies and gray clouds – several times since then.  I contemplated how glorious those brilliant blue, cloudless-sky days are.  We had one just the other day, with almost unbelievable deep blues.

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LIFELINE FRIDAY – Friends

By

On 08/20/2021

In Lifelines, Pay Attention, Peace

I love photography and I love sunsets. This spring I got the great idea to combine the two and document the sunsets from the same spot on the first days of spring, summer, fall, and winter to see how the sun moves throughout the year. You may be wondering “Why?,” but it sounded cool to me.

We live half a mile from a public beach on the east side of a large lake – a perfect place to set up a tripod and take a sunset picture from the exact same spot for all four seasons. It’s also a great spot to just sit and visit with friends.

Two of my friends decided to join me, not so much because what I was doing excited them but just because they are my friends. Sitting on the beach watching the first summer sunset and chatting with each other while I basically ignored them (sorry, ladies!) sounded good to them.

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