photography – Elizabeth Oakley Weaver

Priorities

How can taking a knee engender more anger than taking a life?

Originality

…originality, in art as in science, consists in a shift of attention to aspects of reality previously ignored, discovering hidden connections, seeing familiar objects or events in a new light.

Arthur Koestler

(Made by Elizabeth with the wrap from a bag of lemons and a medical lab’s purple and red tape, which is topped with a wine bottle’s metal cork protector.)

There will never be

only love

only peace

but there can be

more love than

before we got here

and more peace

because

we stayed here.

David Richo, Everyday Commitments

(Elizabeth creates 3-D art and photographs with eggshells because their fragility and strength parallel the human condition.)

Longing to Belong

girl with eyes too large and

milky teeth fairies must wait

years for in country that…(more)

Thank you to Writers Resist for first publishing “Longing to Belong.”

Heaven

IMG_3210-2

You think dogs will not be in heaven? I tell you, they will be there long before any of us.

Robert Louis Stevenson

Poodle Sprites

Spring appears in waves as

sea of curls return to play –

gold growls sail through blue.

wpc

I’ve been saying Fuck fear! to everyone today, especially myself. The surrealistic results of last night’s election were shocking and fostered images of increased violence, economic disparity, disenfranchisement, senseless cruelty and suffering in our country and beyond our imaginary borders…yet while out with our dog, I marveled at the stars sparkling as they have and will for eons.

So many compassionate people with social and historical understanding are scared, yet fear is how slave owners and terrorists, bullies and rapists, gangs and militias have gained and maintained entirely too much privilege for too long. Fear paralyzes. Fear wraps us in numbing behavior, PTSD and isolation. I’ve spent too much of my life focused on moving out of fear to embrace it now because our young nation is struggling with issues of entitlement and humanism; the ideals of capitalism and democracy; the definitions of freedom and propaganda. Fear locks the brain in a simplified fight or flight state rather than perceiving others through the complex lens of empathy and layered perspectives.

Fear, like anxiety, is a mighty imaginative force. If I let it root I’ll be paralyzed in ways I’ll be too blinded to even see, so fuck fear. We rise above bad circumstances and heal through love and connection so let’s make our way to 2020 as intact as we can as a nation, as connected as we can with our entire world and with as much deep listening, caring and intelligence as we can offer one another.

May all be happy, safe, healthy and at peace.

wpc