“A thousand moments lost because you took them for granted, just because you expected a thousand more.”
― Saleem Sharma –

We get an ‘extra’ day today on this 29th of February, 2016. A leap year. Another way that man is always trying to balance out this arbitrary counting of time. Our calendar just won’t walk hand in hand with the solar system so we add on seconds until they add up to a day which we tack on to our calendar every four years.

That’s ridiculous!

You can’t just add time onto time. We get what we get. This isn’t an extra day, this isn’t another 24 hours added on to your life time. This isn’t another chance to take a stab at something because you were give some extra hours. EVERY SINGLE breath that you take is how you should measure your life. Sometimes those breaths come slowly, softly, and peacefully. And sometimes they come fast, and harsh, and uneven. There isn’t a rhythm to their beat, there isn’t a means of continually counting them, their weight and depth can’t be charted on a calendar or in a lab somewhere. There is just more substance to our existence then the marking off of days in some random attempt to make sense of our place in the universe.

Breathe in your life, breathe out your life, breathe in your moments, breathe out your moments. Don’t take for granted that you’ll get another breath. But if you still feel like you are getting an extra day because your calendar says so, then definitely don’t waste it. Hold it like a warm sun in your hands, breathe in its heat, feel the flush as it moves through every cell of your body and coats your soul with life.

Or go drink a beer . . . that works too.

I love my dining room in the morning. The light comes softly through the windows, it flows into every corner and crevice and invites me in with a warm greeting to the day. It makes my brain happy. It actually makes my brain fire off a bunch of chemicals and electrical sparks that make my whole body feel good. And it makes my soul feel good too.

I am sharing links to two other articles today that talk about our brain and how it can get wired because of fear and trauma and how it can get re-wired by love and acceptance. This is a huge topic for me because of how my brain was wired as a child. I didn’t know that it was being mapped by the trauma of abandonment of a mother, abuse from stepmothers, and the overwhelming anger of a father on alcohol. You can’t know as a child that when you are under attack it is forming you – you tend to just duck and cover after awhile. You do know that things happening in your world don’t make you feel good. You also learn that if you stay small and quiet they might not notice you and you won’t be collateral damage in the daily wars of the adults around you. Of course that didn’t work well for me. I had a very hard time staying small and quiet. I still have that issue. But I remember my brother Tim doing just that. I remember, even as a little girl, watching something being extinguished in him when he was being hit and kicked by the adults that were supposed to be loving and kind. It broke him, shaped him, mapped his brain to only expect fear and trauma. I also remember wishing it was me that they would hit and often I would take the blame for his wrong doings to spare him being hurt any more. It was that obvious, even to the little girl I was , that this was killing him inside.

Childhood trauma is one of the leading causes of addictive behavior. Children from homes where abuse and neglect, high stress, abandonment, and anger are a part of their daily lives are more likely to exhibit addictive behaviors including alcoholism, drug abuse, smoking, eating disorders, and obesity. Their brains get mapped. And here is how:

• The amygdala (your brain’s threat detection center) can become overactive, engaging in a constant program of looking for, seeing and assessing threat. This will cause you to feel intensely anxious, vulnerable and fearful.
• The hippocampus (your brain’s center for processing memories) can become underactive. Rather than consolidating and then placing memories in the outer layer of the brain for long-term storage, memories get hung up in a present-day loop. The result: You will experience and re-experience intrusive, disturbing and uncomfortable recollections.
• The cortex (your brain’s center for executive control) becomes interrupted by survival-oriented instincts from deep inside your inner brain. These instincts overrule logical thinking, diminish cognitive processing and decrease your ability to inhibit behavior. Even when you try to refrain from addictive behavior you will experience an unstoppable urge to engage in it.(Rosenthal, Michelle. “Trauma and Addiction: 7 Reasons Your Habit Makes Perfect Sense.” Recovery.org. Recovery.org, 30 Mar. 2015. Web. 25 Feb. 2016. )

  So – there you have it. Broken brain=broken life.

  BUT – what if we don’t have to just accept that? Because that seems to be what we have done. We have basically said, yes, this person experienced trauma and yes, they need help or they need to get over it or they need to make better choices. And everyone of those responses is actually correct. But it isn’t as simple as just telling someone to get over it or that they need to make better choices. We need to be showing people HOW to make better choices by teaching them to re-wire or re-map their brain. In my last blog post I talked about how art helped me to move into a much healthier place in my life. I believe that the repeated processes of creativity, the repeated starting and completion of paintings, photographs, writings, and other art mediums helped my brain recover from childhood trauma and from adult trauma brought on by bad choices which again are connected to childhood trauma. Being creative created new pathways, new, happy, positive, feel-good pathways that helped to heal my traumatized brain. I know it happened as surely as I am sitting here right now typing this sentence. Art healed me. But it doesn’t have to be art that is the key for everyone. It might be talk therapy, it might be brain games, or it might be medication, or it might be spiritual exploration or alternative therapies that helps a broken brain to heal. It might take many things, it might take time, it WILL take time. My brain did not heal over night.

  Here is a link to a quick read about how childhood trauma leads to a negatively mapped brain:

  Childhood Trauma Leads to Brains Wired for Fear

  The author of the above article also believes that there is indeed the ability to help reshape, re-wire, and re-map the brains of those who experienced childhood trauma.

  “One thing we can do – which is not all that well explored because there hasn’t been that much funding for it – is neurofeedback, where you can actually help people to rewire the wiring of their brain structures.” (Bessel van der Kolk)
  
  In the following link, the article, ‘The Science of Happiness: Why complaining is literally killing you.’ explains how changes in WHAT we think and HOW we think actually have a physical impact on the way the brain fires.

  The Science of Happiness

  We CAN teach our brains to be healthy brains, to build healthy pathways, to experience and create health in our thinking and in our living. We are just getting started on this type of brain building and re-building. But I think it is HUGE in terms of what it offers for the addict, the abused, the broken. There wasn’t any way I could save my brother Tim. I kept telling him that he carried all the wrong things in his heart but the problem came from all the wrong things he carried in his brain. We have always equated love, pain, loss, etc. to our hearts. But it appears our heart might actually be in our brain. Love looks like a healthy brain.

  Love looks like something that isn’t bruised and painful. Love looks like hope. Love looks like the electrical sparks that fire off when I walk into my dining room in the morning and the sun and heat and possibilities of a new day greet me.  I am happy for all those possibilities to come. I am not afraid anymore.
  My brain looks very much like love.
  
   

I have had the joy of knowing love. It has been the perfect counterbalance to when love wasn’t known.

There are people from who love should flow. Mothers. Mothers are the most likely place from where love should flow. But what if it doesn’t? What if you don’t ever experience the love of a mother? Does that shape you forever? And can the love that you find or seek out though life make up for that loss? I know that I spent my youth seeking love like a drunk in search of bottle. I staggered my way through so many wrong choices and blindly continued to make the same wrong choices over and over. And when I drank  that poison I thought was ‘love’ I found I could never quite get the buzz I was seeking. But I drank it and drank it over and over again until I blacked out in my heart.

I was absent from my own life for so many years because I sought love in all the wrong places, in all the wrong people, at all the wrong times, and for all the wrong reasons. And I didn’t think for one minute to seek it in me. And I certainly didn’t know that I could actually find it there or that I had to find it there first before I could find it anywhere else.
Who teaches us that we have value? Who teaches us that we matter? Would a mother have taught me that? Perhaps a mother that believed those things about herself or knew love for herself , perhaps that mother could have taught me that. But my mother didn’t. She did not have that ability or inclination or maybe even the basic grasp of making her children feel like they were valuable and worthy. My mother taught me to be absent. She taught me that I couldn’t count on her or anyone else. She taught me that being empty was okay. But she couldn’t help it. She was seeking love herself without a clue where to find it.

Love can make us or break us. If we are waiting for love from someone else to make us then it is guaranteed that love will break us. I have watched it break my brothers, one by one, they have fallen like bricks from a wall, broken edges, missing pieces, and no mortar to hold them. They are leaving this life with no children, failed jobs, and failed relationships. When they are all dead it will be like they never existed except for  the memories that my sister and I carry. And when we are gone we will take those memories with us and what will be left of my brothers will just be smoke.  They waited for love to make them. They waited and waited and found disappointment over and over. And their seeking led them to drugs and alcohol and sickness and death. But not once did they look inside to find love. They didn’t know how. They hadn’t been shown that trail. And the brambles and thorns of self-loathing and shame slowly covered that trail until it could never be seen again.

My older sister found her salvation and recovery from drugs in her religion. Her belief taught her that she was lovable, loved, loving. What a parent could not give her she found in the words of a man long dead but still alive in so many ways. He became her guardian and showed her a way to find love inside her own soul, to see that she was worthy of the most important love there is, love of your own self. It sounds selfish to love your own self, but it’s not. There are so many times in life where having love for yourself is the only thing that will save you. In fact it might be the ONLY thing that can save you.

Art has helped me find my love of self. Creating things, painting, writing, photography, preparing beautiful food, and sharing it. Creating things has touched a quiet, hidden place inside me and nudged it awake. Creating things reminds me that I too am a creation. I might be a creation of an all loving Father that sits in Heaven or I might be the creation of a cosmic mad scientist that has poured out the stars and galaxies in a beautiful experiment. I might be a figment my own imagination or a figment of yours. No matter, I would still be a creation and a mighty interesting one at that. It’s a leap of faith no matter which way I jump. Art is the reminder that when I spend time creating something and feeling peaceful and inquisitive all at the same time, I am being true to myself and in being true to myself I find love waiting. And I find love all around me because I recognize it’s face.

What love looks like is me.

And now that I can see it in me, I see it everywhere.

This week was perfection. Leah and the 3 grandsons were here and we went exploring. One of our stops was here at Palouse Falls, an incredible geographic wonder.

Palouse Falls is located about 40 minutes from my town of Dayton, WA. It is one of the remnants of the Great Missoula Floods of prehistoric time. The Palouse River cascades off a 198 foot cliff into a catch basin below before continuing its journey to meet the Snake River. The water is muddy brown right now from recent heavy rain storms and it rumbles over the basalt cliffs in a continuous thundering boom. Mist rises from the pool below and when the sun peeks through the clouds a rainbow arches from one side of the pool to the other.

Basalt cliffs surround this water fall and scurrying among the rocks and crevices are families of groundhogs. They pop up and down the rock faces and have no fear of people. Most likely they are fed too often from picnic baskets and have become accustomed to hikers and sightseers. Their fur is ragged this time of year as the days are getting warmer and they shed their heavy coats for something more in the spring fashion line. They make a high pitched chirp and I wasn’t sure if it was a warning or a demand for food but I wasn’t scared of their rebel yells and I had no food to share. I was a huge disappointment I am sure.

After leaving Palouse Falls we headed to the Little Goose Dam on the Snake River. This is just up river from Lion’s Ferry and the insanely narrow bridge that crosses the river, but I am saving that for another day.  We arrived at the dam just in time to see one of the Tidewater Tugs pull into the locks that are located at Little Goose.

The locks carry boat traffic up and down the levels of the river where once mighty rapids roared through. It’s an incredible work of man, mind, and machines.

Back home at the Blue Cape Cod it’s all about what to eat and drink. This week we made pots of homemade vegetable soup and beans, opened old bottles of red wine, and enjoyed breakfasts of warm, toasty pop-overs and waffles. If you have never had a pop-over you really need to try one!! They are the ‘last meal’ I would request if I were on death row. And I would die happily licking the butter from my lips as they pulled the switch.
Jerry is the pop-over king and when we have visitors it is the one request that is always made by our guests and family members. You need a good cast iron muffin pan to create the crunchy brown edges and the pan has to be preheated so that the batter begins to cook the moment it is poured into each cup. I love them hot from the oven with butter and real Maple syrup but honey is good too or even just on their own they are an eggie, yummy delight. Of course waffles are pretty heavenly too . . . butter and syrup, how can that be bad??

The kids left this morning. I spent this day putting away toys and bedding and missing them like crazy. I love the peacefulness of my home but they can come shatter that peacefulness any time they want. They are part of the yummy things in this life. I can’t wait until they come back again.

I have been in a transitional period in my life this past year. We moved from our home in Seattle to our little town of Dayton, WA. We bought a new home. And those two were truly new found joys. I also left a long time volunteer position and took up a part time paid position at our little community library. I thought I might mourn after 8 years as a volunteer photographer with  Now I Lay Me Down To Sleep,  but I actually found that it set me free to explore my life here in Dayton, spend more time writing, and seeking light for the camera I carry and also the one in my head.

I am falling more and more in love with the Palouse country I live in. A drive through the area is like the pitch and roll of being on a ship as you dip and rise through petrified ocean waves, the residue of prehistoric floods. The sky is wide open, clouds cast shadows across newly green wheat fields and in every intake of air I know that spring is coming. And spring is always a new found joy, not just for me but for every slumbering flower and plant that is now pushing itself through the ground or straining to produce a new blossom at the tip of bare branches.

This week has been filled with the noise of boys. Daughter LolaLeah came with three of our grand-babies for a spring break visit. The age spread in these three makes for interesting sounds and conversations. One is 13 years old, Riley, and vacillates between the surly quietness of teendom and still happy conversations of his younger days. The 7 year old, Cole, wakes up completely and fully alive every day. He bounds out of bed as if it is his first day on earth and he knows he only has so many hours available to accomplish so many things. The 1 year old, Harvey, giggles and grunts and screams and jabbers and poops and eats and then starts over. These boys make for new found joys every single moment. Watching my daughter parent them is beautifully moving. She is the kind of mother I never was and definitely the kind of mother I never had. She is strong, funny, kind, stern, instructional, guiding, and so loving to her boys.

Here is Cole and Harvey sharing a bath in my 100 year old tub:

The New York Times just published a piece about Walla Walla, Waitsburg, and Dayton . . . the triad of wine towns where good food, wine, hand-crafted beer, and exploration are in abundance. It’s a good read and describes the personality of our area quite accurately. And it’s an invitation to come visit. My Blue Cape Cod is here with lots of room for friends, laughter, and new found joys.

Here is the link to the NY Times article:

Walla, Waitsburg, Dayton, WA

 

Yesterday was a big day in the science world as LIGO announced the discovery of gravitational waves in the universe. LIGO stands for, Laser Interferometer Gravitational-Wave Observatory, and they have been hoping to prove Einsteins theory of gravitational waves and the bending of space/time since Einstein first proposed the idea.
And with the announcement yesterday we can now explore space in a new way. Here is a cool video from World Science Festival:

LIGO – Space Waves

This wave was the result of two black holes colliding. That’s a pretty massive event. And throughout the universe there are many such events taking place or have taken place and we are just now feeling or recording their vibrations.

Everything, including us, creates a vibration. All energy, once it begins, continues on forever and forever. Energy never stops. Every note of music played is still slowly rolling through space and time. Each word uttered, each shout, every tear that rolled from an eye and struck the ground has created a vibration that continues on and on. Every birth and death still exists because energy never ceases moving. Just because the sound waves from the cry of a baby were stilled when that child was comforted doesn’t mean that they ended. The sound of the cry became mingled with the sounds of the mother’s gentle cooing and they carried out in a long slow journey into a space that appears endless.

Every move we make, every breath we take (thanks Sting), become vibrations with no end. And while it is probably not a proven scientific fact, I would like to think that the vibrations we make from a positive, loving place have a gentler impact on the universe then the ones made from a negative and hateful place. I would like to think that those vibrations look different, sound different, travel differently but the reality is that they are probably measured the same in terms of waves and sound. That would seem more scientifically sound.

But on earth in the here and now I know for a fact that the vibrations we create do carry a different impact. Maybe not in terms of how they will continue to roll out across the universe but in terms of how they roll across the place where each of us currently stands.
If we truly understood the influence we have in terms of our own cosmic waves we send out then maybe we would make better choices. If I am part of the waves in space/time then I need to understand just how valuable and important that makes me. And you. Each of us is so incredibly miraculous in our very existence. It took the collisions of black holes, the explosion of stars, the formation of gasses, and the beautiful dance of gravity to create a planet so unique in the known galaxies that life found a way to blossom. And if you don’t think you stand squarely on the shoulders of your ancestors just remember that all it would have taken was for ONE of them to fall into a raging river, or die of a raging plague and YOU would never have existed. Instead you are here, the winner of a cosmic lottery, the winner of DNA that fought its way though a billion trials to find itself right here, right now, in the distinct shape of you.

In many ways you have an obligation to the ones that came before you. You owe it to them to appreciate the miracles, the millions and millions of miracles that it took to get you here. You may not feel like you are much in the big expansive reaches of space. You might in fact feel quite small and insignificant when you look up at night and see not only the brightness of stars but the darkness that is between them. But you aren’t small. You are special. Special in ways that are hard to even fully describe. So special that in all of those stars you can see and in all the darkness between those stars, there is only ONE YOU.

Yesterday they announced the recording of the collision of two black holes, a collision that happened so long ago that none of us were even a twinkle in the eye of the universe. And yet those vibrations still carry on. I love this quote:

An old man once said:
In the end, when your name is spoken, the sentiment evoked by the vibration will show how well you have lived your life.(from The Book of Ceremonies, A Native Way of Honoring and Living the Sacred)

Go live your life well today, make some good vibrations, let the universe know you are here. Live like the miracle you are.

Here is a cosmic chirp from the gravitational waves made long ago:

THIS IS NOT A POST ABOUT THE ELECTION OR THE CANDIDATES!! Just sayin . . .

Election year . . . yikes. But really every year is some kind of election year. But when we roll into the Presidential election cycle things just get completely wonky. Politics are dirty and have always been dirty. It’s just that now we have social media and 24 hour news to spread the joy in a non-stop, non fact based, pay attention to ME, kind of way.

So what is the truth about all this?

We The People are the truth. We the people are the government. The government isn’t Senators and Congressmen or the President. The government is US. We fund it, we elect it, and then we have to deal with it. Whatever ‘it’ means. And maybe, just maybe we have been going about this all wrong.

My nephew Ian and his wife Meagan are part of this group called ‘One Tribe’. What One Tribe does is collect things throughout the week: clothes, food, personal care items, hygiene items, books, shoes, etc. And then they pile it all into a cars and a group of them head to downtown Seattle on Sundays to pass out all this wealth to the homeless, the runaways, the addicts, the people. And they give something even more valuable, they give their time. They don’t just dump stuff off and run, they hang around, they visit, they talk about how things are going, they ask questions, they share information and they care! They learn the names of the people they are helping, and they let them know they matter.
They even did this on Super Bowl Sunday. Yes, while you and me and a billion other people were in front of our TV’s shoving nachos into our faces, screaming at referees, and arguing about which 5 million dollar a minute commercial was the best, Ian and Meagan and One Tribe were out on the streets doing some ‘By The People’ stuff.  Because that is what real governing looks like: Of the People, For the People, By the People.

Here are some photos of them spending time with fellow people:

We keep sending folks and money to WA DC and we keep getting less and less back. But we have HUGE expectations that WA DC fix our problems. After all, that is what they get paid for, what they were elected for, what they take our taxes for, etc. But that doesn’t seem to be working too well. What does work well is when WE THE PEOPLE do stuff FOR THE PEOPLE. That’s us doing stuff for us. We have to quit waiting and bitching and complaining about our problems and we have to start working and giving and contributing to solve them.

So what pisses you off about the problems in your country the most? Is it the number of homeless people? Or is it the number of addicts? Is it the lack of decent education? Is it the lack of care for our elderly, our Veterans, our disabled? Is it the polluted waterways? Is it the lack of nutrition for kids and families? What is it? What is it that pisses you off so much that you feel the need to post on Facebook about how horrible that problem has become? And what exactly are YOU the people doing about it? Because YOU the individual ARE YOU THE PEOPLE.  Who should fix what pisses you off? Who are are waiting for?

Living back in a small town again is a great reminder that it is the people that take care of the people. Government assistance is lovely and often needed but it is not and never will be enough. Even when a person is given government money to help with housing, to help with food, etc, it will not be enough. And we cannot just walk by those who receive assistance and assume it is enough, that we have done enough because our taxes paid for that assistance. We can’t just write a check for our taxes or have the government write a check or want to create a government that gets to write bigger and more numerous checks and expect to feel good about ourselves. It’s passing the buck in every sense of the word.

Just imagine if more people joined One Tribe or started a One Tribe in their own city.  And why aren’t you?
Just imagine if more people committed 4 hours of their Facebook time to a Food Bank instead.
Just imagine if more people reached out to the YWCA (not the YMCA) and volunteered to help with housing women and children. What if more people used their mad resume skills or Microsoft Office skills to teach a class for them?
Just image if more people volunteered at the VA Hospital. What if more people drove a Veteran to an appointment or brought them something they needed like books or even better just gave them some one on one time?
Just imagine if more people joined a Stream Team to help clean up an inner-city waterway and make it habitable for little aquatic creatures.
Just imagine if more people joined a Hospice Care program and helped another human being make the biggest transition at the end of their life to the life beyond.

Just imagine if more people gave 4 hours a week volunteering in some way in their community.

There are about 319 MILLION people in this country and if only HALF of them volunteered that would be 159 million people giving time. And if that 159 million people gave 4 hours a week that would be 636 MILLION hours of giving PER WEEK!! That means over 33 BILLION HOURS  per year. Imagine what WE THE PEOPLE, OF THE PEOPLE, FOR THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE, could accomplish in those hours. 33 billion hours of giving, doing something positive, making a difference, changing things, making things better for someone and not waiting for someone else to do that. Someone like the government.

I don’t ever want to be anywhere outside of the FOR THE PEOPLE, BY THE PEOPLE place. It’s a lonely place full of unhappiness and it’s full of people waiting for someone else to make things better. It’s full of whiners and complainers. It’s full of people who say they don’t have the time to give.

I like the place where I look up and see my fellow PEOPLE looking out for each other, taking care of our own stuff and also helping those in true need. I love seeing the difference real governing can make. When we govern ourselves and then help in the governing of those that need help we are proving that government works like it is supposed to work. And real governing is done by the real governors: We The People.

 

 

I have a place for you to sleep, to rest your bones, to find a quietness in your heart. The walls are warm white, smooth and soft like melted ice cream. The light streams through the window, filtered by sheer curtains that diffuse the shape of the huge Sycamore in the front yard.

If you come in summer, we will eat roasted corn on the cob and drink icy margaritas from mason jars. Our bare feet will be dusty and our shoulders will be red from the sun. When you sleep, the windows will be open to the breeze that will move across your body, pulling away the heat of the day and your head will rest on a pillow that smells like lavender.

If you come in the fall, we will eat the last of the sweet tomatoes from the garden, so red that their ripeness splits their skin. We will drink apple pie moonshine and bake pumpkin pies. When you sleep, the windows will still be open just a bit to let in the waning warmth of summer days gone by and your head will rest on a pillow that smells like lavender.

If you come in the winter, we will eat a dark, rich soup and drink an even darker, rich wine. We will listen to the popping of pine wood on the fire and read books that can only be read when the snow falls. When you sleep, the windows will be closed against the icy winds and your body will be pressed under the weight of winter quilts and your head will rest on a pillow that smells like lavender.

If you come in the spring, we will eat crunchy green pea pods and drink whiskey sours. We will hike the trails along the river and watch for baby skunks marching in a row behind their mother. When you sleep, you will dream of the days ahead when once again the windows will open to summer’s breath and your head will, as always, rest on a pillow that smells like lavender.

Source: Photography

Black White Photographic Arts – that’s me. Or at least the name of my photography business. It doesn’t mean that I don’t take photos in color because I do. But I have a deep love of black and white photography and a respect for it as well. It’s more complicated then I imagined and requires me to be thinking in black and white rather than in color as I compose an image. It asks me to pay attention and not just pull the shutter. It asks me to keep learning.

Photographer Ted Grant once said, “When you photograph people in color, you photograph their clothes. But when you photograph people in Black and white, you photograph their souls!” But I think that applies to this fine, furry fellow named Beau. His soul is right there, drawing you in, and asking you to feel something more then just, ‘here is a photo of a dog’. Is he a black and white dog? Or a brown and white dog? Are his eyes blue or brown? Where does he live? What does he do? Is he a farm dog, a working dog, or someone’s house dog? What is his story? YOU get to decide. What ever is happening in this image is up to you.

There is something about black and white photography that asks the viewer to think and feel. Color is simple. You know the sky is blue, you know the grass is green, you know the sun is yellow, and in color photos you know everything about the person, the color of their eyes, their clothes, and the environment around them. In black and white it isn’t that simple. It’s like the difference between a book and movie about that book. You read the book and you imagine the characters, you imagine their environment, you give them form and shape and color and depth and emotion. And then along comes the movie and all that is done for you and many times it’s disappointing because it stripped you of your vision and emotion. It robbed you of something you created. That movie relies on the vision of someone else to tell you the story.

Black and white photography asks you, the viewer, to feel more, to find more, to participate more, and to discover more with your eyes, mind, and heart. It asks you to find the story, create the feeling, imagine the emotion, and make up your own mind.
And really, that is what art is all about.

“Color is everything, black and white is more.” – Dominic Rouse
“I want to be MORE” – Vicki Zoller