And heaven and nature screams

 Der Schrei der Natur...Edvard Munch nailed the collective human angst in a single frame and so did John Clare Stokes...art is nature and nature is art and we are all feeling a little angst-ish these days. You totally cracked Skip and me up this morning, John. Happy Monday to all.  Everyone relax and have a good week.

Sweet buy and buy

To show for the money I got with trading in all my old gear, I bought a new 10-20 lens. So far I like it. Duh!

Chesterson

 One of the deepest and strangest of all human moods is the mood which will suddenly strike us perhaps in a garden at night, or deep in sloping meadows, the feeling that every flower and leaf has just uttered something stupendously direct and important, and that we have by a prodigy of imbecility not heard or understood it. There is a certain poetic value, and that a genuine one, in this sense of having missed the full meaning of things. There is beauty, not only in wisdom, but in this dazed and dramatic ignorance.

~ G. K. Chesterton 

I

The iron did swim

 And the iron did swim. 2Kings6:6

Sopchoppy River Community Swimming hole

Near the time of first walking, I was already crawling in the dark shallow. There came the eventful day, the long swim to the far dock. The other shore where the black bear and panther roamed. Where the teens dared you come. Sitting upon the dock for the first time, there seemed nothing this little Yellow Jacket couldn't accomplish.

Johnclarestokes

Inventory

Now that the camera and lenses are sold to b&h, what remains? Digital, D7500, D7000, D3500 and D40. Film the F3, the FM2, Pentax MX and Olympus OM-1. Two Yashica Mat-124, a Rolleiflex. 

Lens, 70-300, 18-300, 35 1.8 digital

35, 55, 105. 70-150, 180, 80-200 film

Still quite a lot. 

Round Top

 The benediction of the goats

Little Round Top school 

Rose Creek Presbyterian 

One of the oldest structures in Columbia County, for years the octagonal structure( no corner for the devil to hide)has served as a feed storage, goat residence. I have long said it should be relocated  to Alligator Park and restored.

Morning glory

Morning Story

john clare

not even the first morning glory

of the season opening beside

the Sopchoppy steeple could

appease me...no

this cometh not out but by

mowing and Vivaldi 

thinking of the sixty 

degree Alaskan scenery

a brother chose to go without

even asking me...no

so in the ninety degree 

pushing to Vivaldi 

I hit a post in anger

and wasps arose madly

about the time a yellow

sulphur was passing 

stinging him instead of me

perhaps sacrificing himself

knowing for him his

Vivaldi season had come

to an end

never seeing that Alaskan

scenery....no

and it grieved me

to be mowing so selfishly

thinking only of my misery

so i came inside

poured a glass of tea

and determined as the worm

ate the gourd in the sun

that today....today

i would take mamma

and go hear her boyfriend...Larry 

lecture on Ecclesiastes

that way mamma and me

would have company in the misery

far, far from the

Alaskan scenery.

Beyond the pail

 Beyond the pail 

All about the past permeates 

every pail, plant and pot

holding something at one time

a tale, a moment, not forgot

Cemetery like yet alive

Resurrection like

Awaiting consummation 

in hope another after we are gone

will see in the pail, the plant, the pot

Things this one

Never forgot.

When flood was staged

 Due to flooding of the Suwannee...The Nephila Clavipes Patrol have volunteered....To keep all fools from the swollen banks...To keep them from wading into currents swift....Where...if they do not obey...will be swept under...to be spit ashore below White Springs....where Johnny Bull will retrieve thee....burying thee at Prospect Primitive....your marker shall read....One Swift Suwannee took him ...One Giant Spider warned him.

Paddle quietly

 Yes...perhaps I shall paddle with you...but first....promise me....not to speak of eschatology( pridefully), philosophy( unintelligibly),democracy( ignorantly) or ecology(religiously)....but silently....breath in poetry....exhale knowingly....and possibly... take fewer strokes....as you paddle SLOWLY along with a mute john stokes.

Spires

 The Morning Glory and the gourds grow beside one of the old spires from the steeple that once was on the Sopchoppy Methodist Church. When the old Methodist Church was torn down around 1960, my father, who was pastoring the church at the time, saved them.

Do this…

 In Remembrance 

In fifty-six our father

Placed my sister and I

upon 

The altar

At Easter

In the old Sopchoppy

Methodist church

Now placing one

Upon an altar

Does not mean

Much to many

But to those called

It means more

Than memory 

Ever recalls