Invitation to Love
Invitation To Love
As the late Joanna Macy reminds us, “It takes courage to love the things of this world and to believe that praising them is our noblest calling.” Continuing a Kinship tradition that began with the start of our collective, we invited the community to share photographic love letters and participate in a rich conversation about love and photography. We touched on the infinite varieties of love, from love of place, to the emotional feeling of love, to romantic love, as well as the love that grounds us within conflict and purpose. These are the love letters generously shared by the community.
I want to eat the seasonal fruit. The strawberries you buy at the roadside stand on the way to the beach house. The fruit that sweetens our bellies before walking down to the ocean. I want to eat the seasonal fruit and watch Feaster and Lucy build a sand castle and hold Emily’s hand in the sunshine and watch Kaiti run maniacally into the waves.
I want to eat the seasonal fruit. The apple on a stick that the lady with a cart dips in hot caramel–difficult to eat, messy, delicious. I want to eat the seasonal fruit and then take the long way home through state game lands with trees adorned in gold.
Our curiosity
writes our love on the land
every time we are outside
my children and I
we create a new one
never to be read by another
just for the land.
Look at this and this and look at this
we say with not just our words but our hands.
With our attention our eyes look closely,
with our touch we embrace gently,
with our nose we inhale slowly,
with our ears we listen intently,
and if we are lucky,
with our mouth we taste the gifts offered up by the land.
Only recently have I realized
that when we look at the land
the land looks back,
when we attend to the land
the land attends back.
But it takes some learning and unlearning
to listen for the love letters
from the land.
a silken curl; a furl beneath the sheen;
a heady, heavy incense; a satin glow:
all linger in the dying of day.
receive then, the invitation to trace these
soft shadowed shapes; to enter a
bugle, with rejoicing; to part the veil,
and discover yourself plunged
in purity; to come to rest from flow
within an arc of plump, cushioned white.
Japan has a healthy appreciation for winter blooms. Camellia trees, plum blossoms, and narcissus flowers can be found in many parks and gardens across the country. But winter tulips, or “ice tulips”, as they’re referred to in Japanese, require tender human cultivation to thrive during the depths of the cold season. Their bulbs are refrigerated, then planted in the slightly warmer ground outdoors, where they blossom, bringing us an early taste of spring. They are annuals, and must be replanted each year. Wherever ice tulips bloom, it is thanks the love and care of dedicated gardeners, inviting us to put on our coats and come out of winter hibernation to rejoice in their bright, romantic colors.
I have been creating and collaborating on a piece of land with a small number of women who are tending to, cultivating and healing this land. It was a hot summer day and they were working to prune, thin the plants in the fruit tree guilds. I was composing the image to emphasize her strength and posture.
