Photographing the way we live

New Year’s resolutions when followed out for a time have a wonderful way of reordering our personal experience.

Since agreeing with myself that I would “knit the sky” each evening, I have both spent more time looking up than looking down and been able to carve out just a few minutes each evening for my favorite pastime. This past Monday the sky was a beautiful shade of almost perfect blue. I kept being caught up in the vastness of the space above.

I had great spans of time in which to gaze out while driving to visit one of my oldest friends in Barry County. About halfway between Neosho and Cassville I realized that I was framing up visual “shot” as I drove. I was thinking out an old barn or a stand of evergreen trees would make a nice picture. Blame it on another New Year’s endeavor, this of my friend Chrissy Day. Since the first of the year she’s been capturing a photograph image a day and posting on her blog The Way We Really Live.

Chrissy has a great eye. She sees things that I miss – until I see her photograph. I’ve added to my very early morning routine a visit to her blog, just to have a little “inspiration” time before the day becomes too hectic.

I keep giving Chrissy grief about needing to enter her photographs in an exhibition. Not because that will somehow lend credibility, they’re already “worthy” but because they’re good enough to share with a wide audience. Hopefully next year she’ll enter an image or two for possible consideration in the annual PhotoSpiva exhibit.

The 36^th Annual PhotoSpiva opens this weekend, March 10, at 10 am. PhotoSpiva is Spiva Center for the Art’s national claim to fame.  This exhibit brings together art and photography,  surrounding viewers with outstanding images selected by a nationally known juror.

There was no theme or categories. No way to distinguish photographic processes or professional status. Spiva had 156 photographers submit 844 images for consideration by photographer Andrew L. Moore. Moore, who photographed Joplin for the New York Times, selected 88 images by 64 photographers, that he felt showcased excellence and visionary work. Included in the exhibit are photographs by both amateur and professional U.S. photographers.

PhotoSpiva 2012 runs through Sunday, May 6, which allows plenty of time to make a run to Joplin and view the exhibit.

Chrissy, on the other hand, will be not quite half finished with her year of photographs come the first of May. Fortunately there are plenty of beautiful days and bountiful shots just waiting..

Move over "bromance"...here comes "cangle"

There are many things I fear in life, most of which will never come true.

I’m pretty certain I’ll never be asked to perform a piano solo again. Not playing publically in almost 20 years has rendered my fingers, reach and memory woefully inadequate. Which is a good thing – very few situations leave me as entirely eaten up with fear as that experience.

Can’t remember the last time I stayed in a creepy hotel and I’m always certain to pull back the shower curtain, even in the nice ones,  looking for Norman Bates, so that’s eradicated as well.

It’s been years since I fell down a flight of stairs, but I have accomplished that feat more than once, which explain the tree-sloth slowness with which I now descend any staircase of more than three steps.

What I often dread, and actually did last Friday was lapse into “Lori-speak” at an inopportune time.  For those who don’t know, Lori-speak is the little known but curious language known only to myself and a few close friends and relatives.

I tend to make up words. Most likely it started with my incessant need to talk. I talk and walk in my sleep. I talk to myself. I talk to complete strangers. And it would make sense that for someone who talks all the time; inevitably you would run out of words.

So, last Friday in the middle of a staff meeting, surrounded by people I desperately want to impress and who I hope will eventually hold me in personal and professional high regard, I used the word “cangle.”

Cangle: a compound verb created when you combine carrot and dangle as in to “dangle a carrot” in front of someone or something to achieve a desired result.

I was recounting a conversation I had just finished with an information technology consultant who was wrapping a new web design project, when I stated something along the lines of “it was just the cangle I tried.”

All the heads around me cocked to one side, you know the way a dog does when you’ve been talking to it for too long, and I thought something was amiss, but couldn’t put my finger on it.

So I stopped and said to the woman across from me “What?” “What did I say?”

“Cangle?” was her response.

So I patiently explained the definition of a cangle.

About this time I heard a stifled giggled coming from the person in the chair to my left. Never mind that it was Marta Churchwell, former newspaper reporter. The same Marta Churchwell that I years ago placed upon a very tall pedestal where I hold her writing skills in the highest regard. Never mind that I had felt really confident about my communication skills that day.

I said cangle.

Oh well, I’ve decided to keep it. You may not be aware but, “bromance” and “walk-off” officially made it into the dictionary last year. I think there’s hope for cangle.

What a difference a year makes.

(The following is my Neosho Daily News column from two weeks ago - when we were still enjoying unseasonably warm temperatures.)

Just twelve months ago I was thrilled to be sleeping on the floor of my office eating whatever we had left in the vending machines. We were in the midst of a blizzard in southwest Missouri and I was one of only a handful of people working in the office. I was thrilled to be able to curl up on the floor to sleep because only hours earlier I had gotten lost in the storm driving from Neosho to Joplin.

The snow was so heavy and the wind so strong that the “green monster” van’s windshield wipers couldn’t keep up with the snow. I had no idea if I was heading up, down or sideways. When I finally gave up and called for help I was only twenty feet or so from the ramp to 32^nd Street but I might have well as been at 7^th. I was thoroughly and utterly confused and unable to find my way.

I got a text from a former co-worker that simply read “Remember where we were and what we were doing 12 months ago? What a difference a year makes!”

Last year we were praying for the temperature to get above 20 degrees and for the sun simply to tease us with its rays. This year we’re stomping around in balmy mid-sixty degree weather. Birds are singing and the breeze hints of spring. An even surer sign is the fact that my Okie toes have only been subjected to socks a half-dozen times. I even gave careful consideration to donning a favorite pair of sandals this past weekend.

I will never complain about warm temperatures or beautiful winter skies. Give me a calm Ozark’s winter any day. After the crazy rollercoaster ride of 2011 we’re due.