What if Love Went Viral?
Who knew Love in a fMRI machine could be so inspiring?
Truly, this might be one of the best videos I have seen lately. Take a look. Watch watch happens as these people, each of whom spend 5 minutes focusing on love, come out of the fMRI machine. Look at their faces, listen to their voices, feel the happiness. Amazing.
What if …
we each spent 5 minutes every morning focused on Love?
and that focus inspired others around us to do the same?
and the energy of Love went viral?
Imagine.
Let’s try it. Are you in? Five minutes of your day – you can do that. Anybody can do that.
Five minutes focused on Love.
Wow.
Watch the video below, or go to the link here: The Love Competition
Love.
A Valentine Haiku
tiny leaves emerge
from bare winter branches ~
this is love
The day after Valentine’s Day ~ still celebrating love.
A photo out of context: Broken
Ack! Two posts in one day! Apologies for the onslaught – I just need a place to post this photo. The Dark Globe is holding a February photo shoot-off (got photos? check it out!), and the way to submit is to share a link. So… two posts in one day. I promise that won’t happen too often.
This is from our recent storm here ~ the road right by our house. The poem with it is one of my daily stones written while we were without power.
a gray dawn
reveals a quiet world
without traffic or
the hum of power lines ~
the world as it was before.
Hopeful Haiku
the sun rises
over the Baltic Sea
hope remembered
I took this on the Baltic Sea near Humlebaek, Denmark. I just needed a place to post it so that I can share the link. The Dark Globe is holding a February photo shoot-off, and I thought it might be fun to enter a couple of photos. If you are a photographer (amateur or otherwise!) go check out the contest and enter your own photos. The categories are hope, broken, and people at work. This photo is my entry for Hope.
Weekly Photo Challenge(s): Random and Alone
There is no official photo challenge topic from wordpress this week, so I am following the lead of a couple of my fellow bloggers: Maggie at Living Life in Glorious Color chose Random as a topic, and Margie at Latebloomerbuds posted using the topic Alone. Kudos for blazing the trail on your own, ladies!
A bit of random news: a friend of mine just bought a new camera, so guess who bought his hand-me-down. Woohoo! I love good deals like that. 
This camera is an upgrade for me ~ from my little canon powershot (which I have absolutely loved ) to the Panasonic Lumix DMC-G2 – so I now have interchangeable lenses. I am thrilled! These photos are the first from the new camera, and are mostly just experimental shots as I figure out all the settings. So much to learn!
Meanwhile ~ my experimental photos seem perfect for this week’s non-officially-themed challenge. Enjoy.
Playing with focus – branches against the sky
Deuce soaking up the sun ~ taken with the telephoto lens
Sunlight on a holly leaf, frozen dew drops, early morning
Fern fronds in and out of focus
Kona-the-dawg
Sunrise in the forest
Haiku at Dawn
a thin line of orange
draws day away from night ~
blaze of birdsong
~~
Ground Hog Haiku
morning sun
startles the ground hog ~
still winter
In celebration of National Haiku Month (the shortest month for the shortest poem!) my daily poems will be in the form of Haiku. A haiku a day – want to play?
Here’s a fun fact for the day: apparently Ground Hog’s Day began with Candlemas ~
I don’t know the author of this rhyme, but it fits with the day:
If Candlemas Day be fair and bright,
winter will have another flight;
but if it be dark with clouds and rain,
winter is gone, and will not come again.
Well, looks like more winter here ~ wherever you are, I wish you spring-like vibes, regardless of what the ground hog says!
Stones and Meditations
Laughter
after a dark night of rain
the mist rises,
clouds float apart and
sun rays spill through the trees.
small drops of water become
natural crystals
spreading rainbows and
the forest simply
sparkles
~~~
Somewhere around the first of January, the folks at Writing Your Way Home suggested writing daily “stones” which they defined as “…a very short piece of writing that precisely captures a fully engaged moment.”
I have written my “stones” daily since then – you can find them on my Daily Poems page. Technically, the challenge was for January only, however I find that I so enjoy these small meditations that I plan to keep up the practice through the year. Mostly, I will post them on my daily poems page ~ but occasionally, if I have a photo that I want to share with the poem, I will post it here on my blog page.
Like this one from a magical morning. I took this photo at dawn today.
As I write, the cloud cover is back, and the day is already that typical northwest gray, but I witnessed that moment of pure brilliance, and even though it was brief, I still feel the joy. I hope you can get a small sense of the magnificence I saw out there this morning – it is so hard to capture in words and pictures. Perhaps beauty is within the soul of the beholder more than the eye… if we can just learn to see with our souls…
