Keeping it real

Zen Puddle - chosen for the 2012 publication
Open to Interpretation: Water's Edge

I don't know about you, but this year has gone by WAY too fast.  Yesterday I had to stop and think if my show at Mysteria gallery was THIS year or last year?  It was this year...but it seems so far away now.  I learned a lot from doing a solo show and had some hard bumps and some big highs.

There are moments of doubt along the way, everyone has them, but we don't talk about them much on Facebook and Twitter. This year has been a year of reflecting and questioning why I do this, who I am doing it for, and could I live without doing this...?  It's the end of the year, a time to do the books,  and I decided to make my last blog post about keeping it real.  
So this is me doing that.  

Thank you 

thank you 

thank you

to everyone who supports me in the possibility

to everyone who helps me in the realizing

to everyone who shows up (physically and virtually)
                             to celebrate successes
                             and to get me through the failures

to you brilliant collectors - thank you for allowing me to continue

AND

thank you to the  

commenters

clickers

likers 

and

sharers!

There are moments of big doubt, moments when I wonder if I have the courage and the energy to continue never knowing where it is all going and absolutely knowing the places that it isn't going. But then there are the other moments when you get a phone call out of nowhere from a collector who can't forget your work and it has spoke to them and stayed with them and the "unknowing" takes me to a place of real humility and gratitude.  

It is easy to forget why I started.  It certainly wasn't for fame, fortune or Facebook fans!   It was because I couldn't imagine NOT making images.  The fact that some of you out there like them, choose to live with them, and connect with them is just my very good fortune.  So thank you.

OH! and thank you to the 10 people who read this blog! ; )
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Breathe

Cape Enrage, New Brunswick

“All my life one of my greatest desires has been to travel-to see and touch unknown countries, to swim in unknown seas, to circle the globe, observing new lands, seas, people, and ideas with insatiable appetite, to see everything for the first time and for the last time, casting a slow, prolonged glance, then to close my eyes and feel the riches deposit themselves inside me calmly or stormily according to their pleasure, until time passes them at last through its fine sieve, straining the quintessence out of all the joys and sorrows.”

Nikos Kazantzakis
passed on from
Crashingly Beautiful

© Colleen Leonard 2011


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Rapture

Oka © colleenleonard 2011

Rapture
1. The state of being transported by a lofty emotion; ecstasy.
2. An expression of ecstatic feeling. Often used in the plural.
3. The transporting of a person from one place to another, especially to heaven.

The end didn't come, but we thought about it. Since I'm far from my family the only other place I wanted to be was in the forest. There is one part of Oka National Park that reminds me of the end of the world; ghosts of trees in a barren wasteland. This is the one place I photograph the most there, and this Holga panorama is from an April trip when the ground was halfway between ice and mud.

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A One Way Street

As the NDP rides a wave of popularity in Quebec and the Bloc rallies their sovereigntist troops I found this sign politically poignant (translation below).  What do you think Madame Paillé?

English translation: One way eastbound from May 14 2011

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The Road Not Taken

by Robert Frost

Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;

Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,

And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.

I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less travelled by,
And that has made all the difference.

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