Photo 101: Solitude
Category: NC Triangle
Photo 101: Water
Photo 101: Home
When I first moved to North Carolina, I didn’t have a place to live lined up. I figured I’d camp out at a park for a few days until I found one. Lucky for me, NC has approximately a bazillion state parks, and I found one nearby with a campground.
A few days turned into two weeks, during which it rained the ENTIRE TIME and I got more and more frustrated as various possibilities fell through. At one point, I posted this extremely green photo on Instagram and Facebook:
My concerned friends back in Florida replied that they hoped this was just a temporary situation. It did turn out to be temporary, and a friend who lived in the area called some of her friends, and they offered me a place to stay for a couple of days. Then I finally managed to find someone with a room to rent who didn’t sound creepy and didn’t think I sounded creepy. And after a year of that, I moved into a little house all by myself, and I still live there.
So, this photo? This is not home. This is just the spot where I was camping this weekend. For fun. And it didn’t even rain!
A common enemy…
Not a nature photo. This is a response to the Daily Post’s photo challenge theme: Gathering.
This is a photo from the Moral Monday protests in Raleigh, NC last year. This protest was polite, organized, and huge. There were groups there supporting civil rights, labor unions, public education at all levels, immigration, environment, healthcare… you name the cause, the state government had damaged it.
There were poor elderly people from the middle of nowhere talking to young grad students. There were Christian, Jewish, Muslim, and Unitarian Universalist leaders on stage. There were people who normally wouldn’t necessarily dislike each other, but who would just never see one another in their everyday lives, holding hands and holding signs and cheering for each other’s causes. There were signs in English, Spanish, and Arabic. There may have been other languages.
You want to get a bunch of disparate people all working together? Give them a really awful governor.
Welcome to the Hobbit House
In response to The Daily Post’s weekly photo challenge: “Happy Place.”
The North Carolina Museum of Art is one of the places that, when I first moved to the Triangle, convinced me that I’d made a good decision. It’s a museum, obviously, with a large collection of art from an amazing range of time and space. As you would expect.
But there’s also an amphitheater where they hold their summer concert series. Their concerts are popular events: the bleachers fill up fast, but then people bring chairs and blankets and sit on the lawn. I usually sit on the retaining wall in the back. I don’t get a good view of the band there, but I can hear just fine and also watch the people mill around and the fireflies come out, and not get stepped on or bumped into. I’ve seen the Lost Bayou Ramblers, the Indigo Girls, and Iron & Wine there, as well as an impressive show by Paperhand Puppet Intervention.
And it has a lovely park outside, with miles of walking and bicycle trails where sculptures loom up along the way. Like these. They have real names (mouse over to see them) but I am not very sophisticated about art, so I think of them as the Corn Cob, the Stargates, and the Dragon Ribs.
The Corn Cob
The Stargates
The Dragon Ribs
And if you go on a cold, sunny afternoon when you have nothing pressing to do, you’ll follow a side trail until you’re away from the main part of the park and down the hill, so that even the giant Stargates are mostly out of sight. And then you’ll take a few more side trails off that, and you’ll come to this tiny dome-shaped building. It’s just out there in the woods. No big, obvious signs pointing to it. The trail is small and easily missed. The builder can’t have expected many people to see it, but there it is. Just for you, the aimlessly wandering person who happened across it.
Overlooked Nature 