Unexpected Flashbacks

Yesterday, I had a surprise, since suddenly on my Blogger reading list, a very familiar-looking photo appeared. But I had not posted it! Not recently, anyway… However, I knew that I had posted another photo of the same building only the day before. For a second or two, I was very bewildered indeed!

Then my brain started working again. I realized what blog the picture was on: Write With Pictures. A blog to which I have given permission to use my pictures. I also realized that in my recent Picture Book post (Museum Church), I had linked back to an older post (17th century church) where this photo was included. So the whole thing was not at all as strange as it first seemed!

The Write With Pictures ‘Monday Meme’ means sharing “what memories that come to mind” when looking at the picture. Hm! Since it was my own photo, and I had revisited the place only two days ago, of course it brought back memories!

So I wrote down what went through my head. And after having done that, I decided to go back here and repeat some of it, and add a couple of more photos. And words.

♥-♥-♥

I think it was two years ago one year ago that I last went inside, one day when the door was open. Coming in from the bright light outside, it was so dark in there that I had very little idea what I was taking photos of. But I did take some flash photos. Not until I was back home, getting the photos up on the computer screen, could I see the details.

Now this reminds me of two things:

1. Some doors are not always open.
We have to find them at the right moment.

 
When I was there last, the door was closed.

  
When I took this picture, the door was open.

2. Sometimes we do not really see things clearly until in retrospect.

 
Collection of old keys inside the porch; and a box, in which visitors can leave a contribution to the maintenance of the church. I think it is probably supposed to be St Peter on the pillar. Or maybe that’s just how my mind wanders because of the keys in the background. It was to Peter that Jesus said: “on this rock I will build my church” and “I will give you the keys to the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 16:18-19)

“In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God.” John 1:1

“The true light that gives light to every man was coming into the world. He was in the world, and though the world was made through him, the world would not recognize him.” (John 1:9-10)

Uno’s Animals: Birds

Uno was 53 years old when he started making wooden sculptures. Altogether he made about 250 of them, big and small. He never sold any of his them. He gave some away, but most of them he kept in a private museum in a barn on his farm. As rumour or his work spread, he got more and more visitors. A few years after he died, the family offered the local folklore society to take over the collection, and a new museum was built next to the village hall. Some of the sculptures have also been exhibited in Stockholm and other cities in Sweden, and even overseas in Mexico, the United States and Canada.

Labyrinth of Life

In my Picture Book blog today I posted some pictures from yesterday’s Midsummer celebrations in our museum park. It was very crowded there yesterday, so not a good opportunity to get photos of details. I mentioned however that the stony ground in one of those pictures was a stone labyrinth. In a comment I was asked “What did they do with it?”

I went back to my photos from a less crowed visit to the same park last summer, and managed to “track down” (ha) the pictures above, where you can see it a little better. It’s still hard to make out the pattern (you’d need to take the picture from above I think) but it is of the single-path spiral kind, which means you are inevitably led into the middle and then back out again.

Classical Labyrinth picture from Wikipedia

As the very interesting Wikipedia article on Labyrinths points out, there is a difference between a labyrinth and a maze. A maze is a complex construction in which you have to guess your way among a lot of choices. In a single-path labyrinth you just follow the path laid out for you (and contemplate the mysteries of it).

In Swedish we use the name labyrint for both kinds. But there is also an old name “trojaborg”. This name refers back to the city of Troy from Greek legends. The walls of Troy were said to be constructed in such a confusing and complex way that any enemy who entered them would be unable to find his way out. In Britain too, there are some turf mazes which include Troy in their name.

Most likely they were used for ritual purposes. Quoting the paragraph on Cultural Meanings in the Wikipedia article:

Prehistoric labyrinths are believed to have served as traps for malevolent spirits or as defined paths for ritual dances. In medieval times, the labyrinth symbolized a hard path to God with a clearly defined center (God) and one entrance (birth).

Labyrinths can be thought of as symbolic forms of pilgrimage; people can walk the path, ascending toward salvation or enlightenment. Many people could not afford to travel to holy sites and lands, so labyrinths and prayer substituted for such travel. Later, the religious significance of labyrinths faded, and they served primarily for entertainment, though recently their spiritual aspect has seen a resurgence.

Many newly made labyrinths exist today, in churches and parks. Labyrinths are used by modern mystics to help achieve a contemplative state. Walking among the turnings, one loses track of direction and of the outside world, and thus quiets the mind.

 
(original source of picture unknown)

And Plato in his Socratic dialogues describes the labyrinthine line of a logical argument in these words (again quoting Wikipedia):

"Then it seemed like falling into a labyrinth: we thought we were at the finish, but our way bent round and we found ourselves as it were back at the beginning, and just as far from that which we were seeking at first." ... Thus the present-day notion of a labyrinth as a place where one can lose [his] way must be set aside. It is a confusing path, hard to follow without a thread, but, provided [the traverser] is not devoured at the midpoint, it leads surely, despite twists and turns, back to the beginning.

For me, putting together this post, my thoughts are led back to some words repeated with slight variation throughout the Book of Revelation:

I am the Alpha and the Omega,
the First and the Last,
the Beginning and the End.
(Rev. 22:13)

Mixed Up

 

This week I’ve spent some time trying to come up with better ways of (re-)organizing my photos on the computer.

Right now I’m at a stage in the process where I seem to be in danger of just making more of a mess of things than I started out with.

I switched to digital photography in 2006; but for the first three years, I still only took about 3-400 pictures a year. I filed them per month, and it was not a problem. I also had prints made of the best ones and continued to paste those into proper photo albums.

Last year in July, all of a sudden I went photo-crazy. I had been keeping this blog for six months. In July on top of that I joined the shared photo blog Soaring Through The World. From then on, I started taking my camera with me where ever I went. And made use of it… It’s been fun, and I’ve learned a lot . BUT. Since 1 July 2009 until now I have taken over 5300 photos. (My camera is keeping count.) I.e. more photos per month than I used to take per year. (It should also be noted that I have not even been further than ~20 km away from my home during this time…)

The 5300 are only “straight from the camera” shots and do not include edited copies, or collages, or scanned pictures. Those come into “problem” categories of their own.

I’m sure that in this digital age of ours, I’m not the only one with photo-organizing problems. What I’d be curious to know is:

How do you do it? How do you file and store your digital photos in a clever way that makes it easy (?) to find your way back to the pictures that you no longer remember exactly when you took?

I started out with a filing system which came with my camera. But that got messed up when I started moving pictures around, making changes in my original folder system. Then I started over. Then my (old) computer crashed. I had the originals saved, but not my edits. I started over again, on my (old) laptop. And then a few months later started over again on my new laptop; now tagging all new photos in Photoshop Elements. After a few months I find this too is growing into a complex science in itself, with Categories and Sub-Categories and Keyword tags… which, it seems, do not get automatically transferred to copies I make using other software (like Picasa).

Picasa on the other hand goes kind of crazy when I start making extra copies of folders, like I’m doing now (so as to be sure I don’t lose anything while messing around).

What I was hoping to accomplish was really to simplify things, by abandoning a system with too many sub-folders (which were not a big problem with Picasa, but causing me a lot of tiresome clicking and searching with Windows Live Writer).

If anyone has some words of wisdom and experience to share, please do so before I get even worse entangled…!

By now you’re probably wondering about the photos in this post. The common thread between text and pictures is supposed to be expressed in the title - “mixed up”…

Yesterday I went to have a look at a temporary fashion outlet in an exhibition hall (originally an engine shed). The new clothes for sale turned out to be all mixed up with old machinery and stuff borrowed from the Textile Industry Museum.

I did not find anything I wanted to buy (typical teenage fashion) but it was an interesting place to take photos!

Oh, and you should imagine disco music in the background, too (rather loud).

Mixed Up: Mixed together in an uncertain manner; confused, muddled or bewildered.

Sunny Sunday

Red currants

We have a word in Swedish, an adjective - lagom - for which there is no exact equivalent in English. Depending on context, it might be translated as "neither too much, nor too little", "just about right", "perfect", "sufficient", "enough", "in moderation"... It has often been said (by ourselves as well as by others) that this word sums up our national identity. In general, we don't much like the extremes; we prefer to be cautious and safe. Of course this is not true about every individual, but I think there's probably something in it, or we wouldn't have needed the word, or used it so frequently.

Anyway, lagom also applies to how we usually wish the weather to be, even though it rarely is. When it's not, we love to complain about it, even though (or perhaps because) the weather is one thing that no one can really do anything about. One period earlier in the summer it was much too hot, at least for my liking. Most of July on the other hand was very rainy. This weekend however, it has been just lagom... Sunny and warm, but not blazingly hot.

Yesterday afternoon, I was actually able to sit on my own balcony and relax and read for a while, without getting either too hot, or too cold, or wet.

And today I had a very nice stroll with my camera in a folk museum park, taking lots of new pictures of the old buildings there both from the outside and from the inside. They are still in the camera - about 140 of them! - but I hope to be sharing some of them both here and on the photo blog in (rainy) days to come. It's the same park from which I shared two or three pictures already on the photo blog (last week on the theme Before/After Editing).

The cottages are not always open, but they were today. Taking pictures inside was especially exciting, because it's so dark in there that you can't really see a thing. Especially not coming in from the bright sunlight outside. I took lots of flash photos with very little idea of what it was I was taking pictures of. It will be very interesting to see them enlarged on the computer screen!

Today's picture of red currants was taken yesterday in another park. No editing.