Trees
Monday, July 15th, 2013
In this gorgeous weather today I had the opportunity to walk along the residential streets parallel to my local High Street.
It was great for the senses to take in all the different sounds, smells and colours. I enjoyed sauntering along.
I snapped this photo of a tray on the wall of someone home. They had placed small bunches of delicate flowers in a jar and asked for £1.00
donation for each bunch. There was a sign advising you to drop the pound coin into the jar.
How lovely was that?
- What acts of kindness have you seen people in your neighbourhood do?
- What acts of kindness have you given to others in your local area?
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Saturday, July 13th, 2013
By now you know how much I love trees. Today whilst driving in my car in traffic with the roof down I stopped under the sprawling branches of a shimmering Oak tree dancing in the light of the Sun’s rays.
That’s why I wanted to share this quote today sent to me by a former colleague Esther Waldron who posted the following excerpt from Thomas Merton, Seeds Of Contemplation on, The Soul Of The Rose website: http://estherwaldron.wordpress.com/2013/07/12/the-divinity-of-trees/
‘A tree gives glory to God by being a tree. For in being what God means it to be it is obeying Him. It “consents,” so to speak, to His creative love. It is expressing an idea which, is in God and which is not distinct from the essence of God, and therefore a tree imitates God by being a tree.
The more a tree is like itself, the more it is like Him. If it tried to be like something else, which it was never intended to be, it would be less like God and therefore it would give Him less glory.
…This particular tree will give glory to God by spreading out its roots in the earth and raising its branches into the air and the light in a way that no other tree before or after it ever did or will do.’
Religious or not the quote draws parallels with the tree being uniquely itself and reminds me of how we can also mirror this in our writing by writing from a voice that is our own and not trying to imitate the voices of others.
I find this comforting when at a time when the market place is crowded with thousands sharing their message. Having a voice, a voice that pitches from the authentic realms from within will enable your writing to stand out from the masses.
Our best writing comes from when we write from who we are not who we want to be or who we think we should be. Your writing voice is when you find that ping in what you want to write about and express it in a voice that is your truly and authentically your own.
I believe wholeheartedly that there is much for us to learn from trees. I will be drawing on their energies and how they can inspire us both on and off the page at my writing retreat next Thursday 19th July until lunchtime on Sunday 21st July 2013. There are still places left. Go here to book: http://www.alternatives.org.uk/site/EventDescription.aspx?EventID=111
Remember who you are is how you write. You’ll never see an Oak trying to be a Willow or a Rose masquerading as a Daffodil. It will be a weekend of recovering your true voice and discover how you bring new ideas and a new perspective to your work.
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Tuesday, May 28th, 2013
Copyright Sebastiao Salgado
Thanks to a recent newsletter by Mary Reynolds Thompson at Reclaiming The Wild Soul www.ReclaimingTheWildSoul.com I’m taking an Artist date at the end of this week and going to see a photography exhibition by photographer Sebastiao Salgado.
His images of the natural world are deeply haunting and moving encouraging us to reflect on our impact with the natural world and the impact we have on the world’s natural resources. This image of this lone tree was enough to convince me to make a promise to myself to commit to my Artist date and go see the exhibition.
The practice of Artist dates advocated by Julia Cameron are a great way to top up our creativity and get us inspired whether you’re a manager, leader, a member of a team. It really doesn’t matter what your role is but artist dates give our mind a vacation from the constant information and technological overload and provide other forms of sensory pleasures.
I was fascinated to read on the Natural History Museum website that his wife Leila bought him his first camera in 1970. I can only imagine that he himself must have gone on a series on Artist dates that eventually ignited his love and passion in photography
I find that my own creativity gets juiced up when I am exploring outside of my own profession and areas of work a bit like a cross- fertilization process. I find images in particular do a great deal to incite new ideas and perspectives.
Of course I had no idea why I was fully pulled towards this exhibition but in the process of researching more about Salgado I found out that he has recently planted nearly two million trees on a family farm in Brazil that had been overtaken by modernization of the land. This is a man after my own heart.
More on my Artist date to the Genesis exhibition in a future blog post.
http://www.nhm.ac.uk/visit-us/whats-on/temporary-exhibitions/salgado-genesis/
11 April-8 September
Waterhouse Gallery
Ticket prices £10 Adults £5 Children
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Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
I am loving feasting on the many Cherry Blossom trees that are around at this time of the year. My iphone camera is happy.
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Thursday, May 2nd, 2013
I’ve fallen in love again. It happens once a year normally between the months of mid March to mid April but the dates do move. This year I have been fortunate to witness the once a year weekly, sometimes stretching as far as two weeks bloom of the magnificent Cherry Blossom trees This year the bloom has fallen in my birthday month of May.
This year the bloom is late causing concern perhaps more for the environmentally conscious about the state of our weather. Yet at the same time giving our eyes a treat after the sluggish weather conditions of the last few months. In the ancient cultures of Japan the blossoming of the Cherry Blossoms were used to forecast how crops for the coming year would do. So make of that what you will. I wonder how this later bloom will impact on the state of the crops and harvest for this year?
I woke up this morning determined to capture some shots of the Cherry Blossoms before their delightful blooms disappear from our landscape over the next few days for another year. So I set myself a creative expedition of going on a short savour safari. The idea of a savour safari is to really drink in your chosen object through as many of the senses as possible. Savouring is different to a glance. A glance bounces on and off in a jiffy. It’s a slowing down in the absence of rushing. It’s about taking time to be with the moment, your object, food or a person rather than rushing your way past or through. I believe that savour is a word we need to reclaim in our busy, hectic lives. We do not savour enough in our modern world and I am determined to readdress this balance, starting with myself.
The word savour comes from the old French word savour and from the Latin word sapor. It means, “The quality in a substance that is perceived by the sense of taste and smell.”
So what I did this morning before I started out on the emails was to hop into my car and take a short tour of my local area snapping images of as many Cherry Blossom trees that have birthed their clusters of pink fuchsia, white almond and rust oranges clusters of flower petals in my local neighbourhood.
My morning trip was a delight. Cherry Blossoms were bursting out everywhere. There was no holding back from these trees, which for the other eleven months of the year could be so easily looked over. I found them on street corners, bursting out from behind fences in back and front gardens, on roundabouts and pedestrian crossings.
Of course I cannot taste the Cherry Blossoms trees around me and the smell of the Cherry Blossom’s fragrance seems to have been dispersed in our toxic air. So today my savouring is fuelled by sight and the feelings, sensations and memories that are evoked when I am around these trees. After my photo expedition I made time to journal and I’m surprised by what surfaces on the page, memories and desires of being married in an orchard of Cherry blossom trees. An Internet search shortly afterwards reveals that the most globally requested destination to be married is under a Cherry Blossom tree.
Enjoy my personal gallery of the Cherry Blossoms captured on my iphone this morning and one of a Cherry Blossom I snapped on a trip to Colchester this week for work. These images will keep me going for another year until the Bloom of the Cherry Blossom returns next spring.
I’d love to see some of your images of the Cherry Blossom tree in your areas or from your travels. Just email copies to: jackeeholder@aol.com and I will post your images on the blog. Let us know the site of your Cherry Blossom and date of your Blossom Patrol.
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Friday, April 26th, 2013
The tree I mention at 40 Josephine Avenue, SW2 (I know – Is that really a face peering back at us?)
The Perfect London Weekend: Radio Interview with Robert Elms.
Click here to Listen JackeeHolder_Interview
There’s nothing like a good old down to earth conversation. I was lucky to have one of those a few Saturdays ago when I was a radio guest on Robert Elm’s Lovely London Weekender Show on BBC Radio London. Click the link above to listen. It’s really fun.
Part of our conversation included sharing what I would do on a pleasure filled London weekend. I talked about all the different meals I would have (food is very important to me), the walks I love to take in nature (I love nature and London’s great parks) and my adventure on a three-seated motorbike visiting the sites and homes of many of London’s greatest trees with one of my favourite tree photographers and writer Thomas Pakenham. This really chuckled Elms.
During our conversation Robert shared a story with me that reminded me of how our stories are so interconnected. I talked about an idea I had for a television programme where you would research all the people who were still alive who over the years lived in the same house obviously at different times and bring them together for a big reunion and history of what it was like to live in the house. This was after finding out that I wasn’t actually born in a hospital as my lovely Mum had informed me but at no 39 Jeffrey’s rd in Clapham, London.
This prompted Robert to share a similar kind of story. It was a year after his Mum had passed away and he found himself in a part of London, Pimlico he wasn’t familiar with. But on seeing the name of the street he was standing on realized because he had been dealing with his mum’s affairs for the last year that he was actually standing on the very street she was born in. To top that he was in front of the house where she was born. Next thing the door opens and the present occupier comes out and in a few minutes Robert is invited inside to take a look. There are just some stories we can’t make up and I believe these stories are mirrored all over the world.
I went on to share with Robert how I’d come across a similar story in Real Simple magazine several years ago that I’d kept. It was written by A. Nanette Ansay and was a personal essay entitled, One Hundred Acres. Her grandmother had died in 1998 and her farm was sold to pay expensive medical expenses. The new owner remodeled the house but had made it clear that any of the author’s relatives – more than 200 people were free to wander around the orchard and the woods. But none of the relatives had taken up the offer.
“ In our minds, the house is exactly as it was. The barn smells of hay. The out buildings are intact. The flower beds are bursting with colour.”
“ Last spring my Uncle Artie, plowing in a nearby field decided he’d run up to my grandmother’s farm to get some water. To his surprise the door was locked. But he went around to the back where my grandmother always kept a spare key, removed it from the beneath the stone, filing a glass of water and let himself into the house.
He was standing at the sink, filing a glass of water, when it dawned on him that the plates in the sink were nothing like my grandmother’s. the entire sink, in fact, was different. So were the curtains. The furniture. Even the floor.
That’s when he heard a man’s voice say. “Uh, excuse me?”
Uncle Artie turned, and the present snapped back into place. My grandmother was gone, and he was in a stranger’s house.
Around the same time I’d discovered a similar story by Paul Auster which I know I have stashed somewhere in one of my files. I don’t think synchronicity strikes once but several times over. Seems like our stories are intricately connected and intertwined.
Do you know of a similar story or stories?
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Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013
Here’s a writing prompt for today inspired by these beautiful flowers I captured on my iphone on my morning walk.
- Write about a memory of flowers or Fucshia Pink.
- Write about something that is still in bud form in your life
- Write about who you imagine lives behind the iron fence?
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Tuesday, April 23rd, 2013
I couldn’t help but delight during one of my early morning walks at the Cherry Blossom trees that are blooming eventually all over South London. A real reminder that spring is finally here. And isn’t it great to finally have some sunshine and clear blue skies.
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Monday, April 1st, 2013
I’ve returned to walking in the early mornings giving me space to breathe again. There is nothing better for me than an early morning walk with my iphone. It’s a real adventure never knowing what will capture your eye, what tree you will really notice and what ideas will emerge as you walk and think.
Recent research has proven that the brain changes when we walk amongst nature than when we walk in walk in urban settings. I am delighted to be walking again and wanted to share these images I captured last week as a reminder that spring is finally on our doorsteps.
What do you see in this second image?
Isn’t nature fascinating at what she creates?
I see a group of people in a group hug.
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Wednesday, March 13th, 2013
Sitting amongst a pile of work this afternoon (that I was avoiding) I was inspired by this photo of the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda (yes I was surfing the internet instead of working).
- What were his thoughts in that moment I wondered?
- Where was he?
- Who was the photographer?
In my distracted state I came across many of his poems and wanted to share this with you on the tree blog. Enjoy.
Ode To the Smell of Wood
by Pablo Neruda translated by Jody Bateman
Late, with the stars
open in the cold
I open the door.
The sea
galloped
in the night.
Like a hand
from the dark house
came the intense
aroma
of firewood in the pile.
The aroma was visible
as
if the tree
were alive.
As if it still breathed.
Visible
like a garment.
Visible
like a broken branch.
I walked
into
the house
surrounded
by that balsam-flavored
darkenss.
Outside
the points
in the sky sparkled
like magnetic stones
and the smell of the wood
touched
my heart
like some fingers,
like jasmine,
like certain memories.
It wasn’t the sharp smell
of the pines,
no,
it wasn’t
the break in the skin
of the eucalyptus,
neither was it
the green perfumes
of the grapevine stalk,
but
something more secret,
because that fragrance
only one
only one
time existed,
and there, of all I have seen in the world
in my own house at night, next to the winter sea,
was waiting for me
the smell
of the deepest rose,
the heart cut from the earth,
something that invaded me like a wave
breaking loose
from time
and it lost itself in me
when I opened the door
of the night.
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