Orange Unfurling

I love this blossom! Just took this photo a little while ago in my neighbor's vegetable garden, on a stop on my walk. I went back uphill to get my camera to capture its intricate unfurling. It makes me want to draw.

From Walt Whitman's "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry":

The glories strung like beads on my smallest
sights and hearings, on the walk in the street
and the passage over the river.

-- Walt Whitman (1819 - 1892)

And a perfect thought -- why not? -- from Whitman's "Song of the Open Road":

Henceforth I ask not good-fortune, I myself am
good fortune.

-- Walt Whitman

Click on photo to enlarge image.

The Staircase in Her Eye

While doing sit-ups the other day, I looked up to see this riveting reflection. My line of vision and the angle of light combined to create this collage of my younger and older daughters' self-portraits from high school. I love the way my older daughter's face looks down the stairs from the landing into the eye of my younger daughter and the way my younger daughter's eye contains the staircase leading to my older daughter. The way my eye holds them both.

Here are some related words from John Steinbeck:

Man, unlike any other thing organic or inorganic in the universe, grows beyond his work, walks up the stairs of his concepts, emerges ahead of his accomplishments.

-- John Ernst Steinbeck, from The Grapes of Wrath (1939)

The picture was taken 7/25/10. Click on photo to enlarge image.