I like the sky. A sign of an optimist? Or a chicken who needs to close her mouth when it rains?

This is truly gorgeous. Your littler one looks like my wee sis with dark hair! SO cute!

Very evocative...

She's quite the little poser, the Younger. She was taking acting classes last summer. I went for it so she'd do better in oral presentations in school. She sure doesn't need it for the drama!

I'm a sky person too - big time. I call it the canvas of God.

A sign of optimism of course! all wonderful pics

Beautiful. I think a sky-in-the-pie is a good outlook.

as a huge fan of the sky myself, i say; beautiful!

Cloud man myself. Beautiful shots.

i'm back admiring these pics some more, and it got me thinking about the sky, which reminded me of an incident i'd forgotten almost. one time some friends and i drove out to tuttle creek reservoir near manhattan kansas. they wandered down by the lake shore while i walked up onto a grassy hillside and lay back, looking up into a perfect blue sky dotted with puffy white clouds. at some point while laying there i apparently stopped thinking; the sky somehow induced in me a meditational state like T.M. or something, because i went out of body, i was in the sky with the blue and the clouds. i WAS the blue and the clouds, there was no separation between the sky and myself, and it was one of the most beautiful things that ever happened to me. of course, as soon as i realized in a conscious way that i'd become the sky, i popped back into my body, was left sitting there with a huge sense of loss. the sky is where it's at is what i'm saying i guess.

Wow, what a wonderful out-of-body experience!

Of course, back in the day, I knew some guys that grew some powerful shit out there by Tuttle.

I'm just sayin'.

i. like. sky. too. no matter where you are it's always there.

looks like someone was holding the moon in their fingertips...
quite rated CMack! (and animus has been my favorite word of the week)

How perfectly lovely. This seems so like my own love of land yet up, up, up into all those majestic clouds.
Love this! And, you made me look up!

Love it, especially, Ocean Bound.

this is lovely. the girls are adorable and the younger one does look irrepressible. the photos are great. the sky is comforting and awesome at the same time. i miss san franciso. just took one palm tree glimpse to get me. now what is the green ball that someone is holding? did horton hear another who? love love love

I Love Sky as well. I ended up traveling through Durango 4 times last year. The sky was different and beautiful every time.

These are lovely. Like you, I like sky. Night sky, sky at dawn and sky at sunset---each makes me think there just might be a heaven.

I love your photos, especially since they have lots of sky.

Your little ones are adorable. That is a prize photo.

But what's the puffy yellow thing? It doesn't have wasps in it does it?

zuma, you're such a californian! the puffy yellow thing is a hedge apple, AKA osage orange. they grow on a thorny, gnarly tree native to the midwest that people use for hedgerows. the fruit, which you see being held up there, is about the size and weight of a softball, and if you smack somebody in the back of the head with one they drop like they've been pole-axed.

wow. these make me feel ... good ...

Nice post and beautiful pictures. And then of course, the cummings. One of my favorites. thank you.

I like it too, Connie. Do you ever watch the hawks just hanging there in the sky, cruising around on the thermals? Beautiful.

excuse me while i kiss the sky
(it's been awhile. thanks for reminder)

Yeah, each one of these places, I could have done a pictorial on, with commentary. I had to trim to get into one post.

Zuma - the hedge apples - they're prevalant where I'm from. We used to play baseball with them, and, like Naten says, they're great weapons. That road that the girls are on is a road to nowhere - it was basically put in so the people farming the bottom land beyond could get to their property. So there's no traffic - it's great to play on. We were racing hedgeapples down the decline, but the buggers kept rolling into the ditches.

Coyote - yes! Love the raptors. We have them aplenty here in NorCal, too. Back home, though, in northeast Kansas, there's nesting bald eagles who kind of run the show on the eastern shore of Lake Perry. Our farm family raptors are redtail hawks. Non-raptor favorites are scissor-tail flycatchers, meadowlarks and all (noisy) woodpeckers (I only hate them early in the morn).

gorgeous!!! love it!!!

wondeful wonderful wonderful!

LOVE this. Just love it! Rated.

I love clouds. White clouds, that is. But also blue sky. I guess I liek sky too.

Lovely girls and lovely pics, Connie! I was going to ask about the yellow ball too. lol

Connie,
Had a dad who would look at the sky with big brown german eyes in satifaction, awe, foreboding,etc. & received whatever messages it sent him; i introverted sttod at his side & glanced, but returned my gaze always to the ground, Mother earth.... Now the sky is finally becoming mine; wish i remembered all he tried to teach me: to read the signs. Or even discern direction! Beauty-full, beauty-full...
jim

I felt a longing so deep Connie.....beautiful, both images and words.
Thank you!

Connie, this is just gloriously beautiful (one that shows the beauty within as well--but I knew that already). I felt like I was with you on every image, and I think that's a wonderful thing.

Alright, pulled up a Camus quote to shoot back:

"Don't wait for the last judgment---it takes place every day". "The Fall".Damn right. Also see: that Travelling Willburys song, "end of the line".

Um, Camus, eh? Dipped into his "The Rebel". Liked it. Political, but didn't turn me off. Also:Sisyphusian absurdism is indded true---on a certain level, where i've been for oh, 25 yrs & am now well out of, thank...um...God i guess. I'm currently redefining God, so look for that soon.

Now, big problems with his philosophy, for our times. Innocence was his thing. How be innocent in an absurd world? Easy. Faith. In what? Yr next step, that's all. Miniscularize yr life, live it instantaneously, picturing the universe not as harboring benign indifference, as Camus declared, but: benign material. Or clay. Or...a movie , & yre the director. Point is: benign, but ready to be shaped, usually in ways you as a selfabsorbed bag of skin (Watts' term for the ego) will not see. In peak experience (Maslow), which i believe is a Moral Sphere above all, you will get glimpses of interconnectedness. Or just smoke a doobie, that'll get you there.

"the absurd springs from the confrontation between the human call and the unreasonable silence of the world" (Myth of Sis) ok oik...but we have crafted, made, a more responsive universe with our electromagnetic tinkering....who knew shaved monkeys were so damn clever!....so...a prime example is OS. This is not silence. The universe is beginning to Speak, and we are at a crux in the temporalspatial stream--the slipstream (van morrison)---to hear it. Another eg: we have all of poor Prince Albert's works at our fingertips...he did not live, as an individual , to see or appreciate it, but his call was heard nonetheless...

Best Always, James E....did i drop enough names....? ha...

K, we're traversing posts here, betwixt you and me, with Camus and Jim Morrison, so I'll doubly-post this response:

Camus: A fascinating creature. An avowed Non philosopher, he nonetheless led the way for many. He was a pacifist with a decidedly pugilistic cant. Dismissed institutions, including most particularly that of marriage and, and yet fathered a movement of peace + prosperity - foreseeing the European Union. (Just this morning, I heard Maureen Dowd on local KQED radio comparing the boulder in Raiders of the Lost Ark to GWBush, and I figured she'd compare Barack Obama to Harrison Ford's character... but no, then she turned the boulder into Sisyphus's rock.... She's gone round the bend, that one....) One can compare his work to Orwell's. fairly or not so much so, and glean some insight into what was happening in the world back then, and how it might relate to what's happening now. Both men wished to warn us. Would that we might listen.

um, i sometimes get a sense of deja vu eading yr comments...curious....now, as for camus...ach enough french propaganda. A german (my dad) would look at the "west" sky & say:

"pretty, lonely cloud, ja?....(silence...give the kraut a minute...stop bein so damn fassst...)

"ja, brings to mind how i felt today, a cloud free & clear of the others, no system to be involved in.."


he sits down & muses, a long damn time: like, 15 seconds, an eternity for a bipolar son...


"ja, good cloud. i'll remember it, ja"
"take a pictureitlastsllonger,dad"
"ah?"
" Take a picture willya?"
"oh ja"

etc...children of the soull, forest dwellers still i believe...

anyway enough Not-see or Knot-see stuff...see ja..JME

ja, yer dad, he was the philosopher.

I'm glad that you love the sky -- and you are an optimist and not an open-mouthed chicken! Thanks for this, CM! Bionic thumbs up!

I really enjoyed this.

Ever westward. Adventure. I wonder if the shapes I see in clouds ( I once saw John Lennon) are the same as the ones that other people see.

Ah. I've been away. Now I'm back. How lovely.

Oh wow! Another sky freak! I take sky photos thru the windshield of the car, too! And clouds and landscape and sometimes just plain blue sky. I saw a book in the library that someone had published and it was all cloud pictures and I was bummed because I thought, I could've done that, I could've been published, too! And when we used to go back to Ohio to visit my husband's family, MY girls used to say the same thing -- "We should move here!" Great shots of your girls and the skies and clouds and fields and river! I like that you "always end up looking up."