Monthly Archives: January 2016

01/17/16

On a Walk with Anna Maria

Cortona Center of Photography Italy Tuscany Photo Workshop, Cortona Friends

 

My mind has returned again and again to this particular day… and this is what keeps nagging at my brain. For the entire time on our walk, we were surrounded by beautiful roiling rain clouds in every shade of grey, with dark and purplish bottoms, heavy laden and pouring across the Tuscan countryside. We could see them encircled all around us. Yet on the walk, we did not get more than an occasional light feeling of mist. I kept waiting for us to get hit with the downpours we were seeing from our ever rising and expanding vantage point as we got higher and higher up the mountain road, and farther away from the shelter of the church below where we had parked.

 

Cortona Center of Photography Italy Tuscany photo workshop, a walk to the top mysterious view of church santuary.

 

At the top, I kept suggesting that we wait and try to find some cover before we headed down into it, but the air felt electric and we kept on. Above is a view up to the Sanctuary at the top – with a purplish sky vibrating against the shadowed mossy greens and grey serene stone that has an otherworldish effect.

 

Cortona Center of Photography Italy Tuscany Photo Workshop, walk in the countryside, two white horses in a field

 

We continued to find some more photographs on the way back down as well and it was not until we approached the car that the raindrops started to fall. As we quickly hopped in the bottom fell out. We were all laughing hysterically as the water hit the windshield with a force like a fireman’s hose and it was then that I realized we had been in some type of protective bubble the entire way!

 

photograph

Maybe it was our collective happy energy, but I suspect that it was one of these three that held the power… Who do you vote for??!

 

 

 

All of the images in this post were taken on our walk.

For more Italy Photography Workshop info go to www.cortonacenter.com

 

All of the text and images © 2015 Robin Davis, all rights reserved.

 

01/6/16

The Ghost of Christmas Past

On the last of the 12 days of Christmas, it is fitting that we are visited by The Ghost of Christmas Past. This enchanting spirit is the first of three Ghostly visitors that appear to Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ story, A Christmas Carol.

The Ghost of Christmas Past personifies our tonality of memory, and the power nostalgia holds over us, to glamorize with a softly dim glow, our fond rememberings of distant days gone by, what is lost to us and longed for… an era that will never be again. This past holds the key to what we seek in the future.

The Ghost of Christmas Past; Crysta Luke; © Robin Davis

As our past becomes the present, it sets the way for the future. Here she is the link between the old year and the new. She looks back to honor the memory of the old year gone, and our lessons learned, but she also holds forward the keys to the opening of the new year. A happy synchronicity of being comes when we value the nature of time, and respect each moment as it passes, a trick that allows us to keep on center as we glide into our future being.

This Ghost also stands in warning!  She is telling us to appreciate what we have in the moment, not to let our time lapse unseen or be taken for granted. Once we grasp this awareness she then has the power to grant us a continually blooming present day Nostalgia, that resonates onward through each reoccurring instant, a constant current into the next and the next, always so soon to come. We step with her into the flow and take the choice to be happy in the here and now, as each strand unfolds, moment by moment.

The Ghost of Christmas Past; ©Robin Davis Photography

 

 

For my in-camera illustration of this character I chose Crysta Luke to play the part.

 

 

All Text and Images ©2015 Robin Davis