[so every day i was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you. — mary oliver]
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 Five pretty ones on this beautiful, quiet Tuesday.
Be well, kind souls.
September 25, 2012 by
The Life and Times of the Plume
I Love Your Soul
[so every day i was surrounded by the beautiful crying forth of the ideas of God, one of which was you. — mary oliver]
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 Five pretty ones on this beautiful, quiet Tuesday.
Be well, kind souls.
such strength….you may just take flight!
“live to the point of tears.” -camus
you’re definitely doing so.
much love.
beautiful fullness
thank you
ps I love your soul : )
love and light
damn girl. beautiful. 🙂
Tiny (inviting) trailer in a huge forest. Tiny (pretty) nature girl in a huge pasture. These photos are super serene.
Postcards!!! Especially that first one! Just beautiful, Jillian! I’m bookmarking this one to bolster me up when I get a little nervous about moving away from our families. Seeing these photos reminds me why we need to. The city is sucking our souls dry.
Lovely week to you…
Jillian,
Your blog is my escape into the dreamlife of
existence. I look forward to each new post
to carry me away to the pure beauty in life.
thank you, thank you, thank you – you beautiful
soul! One day soon i will own one of your exquisite
treasures!
<3 Lyn
I sat amidst still-unpacked, month-old moving boxes on my dining room floor this morning reading Mary Oliver because my 4 year old pulled “House of Light” off the bookshelf last night and left it there on the floor. The words calmed my restless soul and your images complete the work. Just lovely.
[This is the earnest work. Each of us is given only so many mornings to do it–
To look around and love
the oily fur of our lives, the hoof and the grass-stained muzzle.– Mary Oliver]
oh yikes, i love this quote! my moving boxes containing mary oliver remain unpacked and now i yearn for them…
I think we both meant that our boxes remain *packed*! Oops! 🙂
Eeep, I love your view of the world!!! AMAZING!!!
Joy!
so much soft and mesmerizing beauty…
tonight, inspired by this post, i took my first break since moving and sat on the deck with a copy of *taproot* and a glass of wine and let the dachshund curl up next to me while fall leaves trickled down and the sun made its descent over the rockies.
it was glorious.
bellissima! yes, postcards of the first one!
You and your photos take my breath away! XX
Oh, Jillian, I meant to ask … have you thought about putting together an e-course on self portrait photography? Yours are so incredibly inspiring and beautiful that I’m sure your course would fill in a flash! XXO
Wowza.. did you notice many smoke-jumpers landing around you… since that dress is all ablaze you wild beauty! I do believe a trail of singed grasses must have followed in your shadow that day. xx
mel ;o)
needle and nest design
…and to you!
the changing seasonlight is so perfectly captured.
do you feel it?
do you feel the changes all around you??
Thank you all for these beautiful, kind comments!!! xx
The hunting post made me sad. My dad was a hunter. We grew up on elk, pheasant, quail, and duck. He was not wasteful – he only killed what we could eat and we wore elk hide slippers. He taught me to shoot. I became a vegetarian as soon as my parents would allow. Later in life, dad traded in his guns for a camera. Nature was simply too close, too much a part of us to point at with a rifle.
I am glad you are able to be a vegetarian.
I am not.
I wish you still had the comments up for the hunting post, but I understand that you felt defensive. I hope I can just make a comment that doesn’t incite anything? You have such a beautiful way with words and conveying your emotions, which is probably why I had such an emotional response to it. I think it’s admirable that you hunt for your food, and I’m a meat eater as well. I purchase only organic, humanely raised meat for us. I do not begrudge you meat or the right to hunt.
I think my reaction was because of the descriptive and haunting way you describe your experience hunting a wild and beautiful animal. A she-wolf? My husband spent his childhood on a farm hunting and killing and he described the overwhelming sadness he felt watching these animals die at his hands, when they had no chance bc of his guns. Eventually, he refused to kill anymore. So, I was actually a little taken aback by your prose, which went against my “ideal” of you. You represent an ideal to me, the part of me that is wild too. And it was unsettling a bit to see this “idea” with thoughts and words that were not akin to my own.
I guess I always visualized that if I hunted I would feel like my husband felt, sad that I had to kill and not charged with adrenaline. But..who knows? I’m the hypocrite that wants her meat to not look like an animal. With love, -Laura
Hey Laura!
Thanks for taking a moment to write.
I wish I still had the comments up on the hunting post as well but I had a feeling it was going to turn into a mud slinging festival and I just didn’t want that kind of energy in this space. The only way I could think to keep everyone calm and respectful (including myself) was to invite email dialogue. I don’t want to censor anyone, but this is a controversial topic for some and things can get heated and ugly. My reasons for hunting are intelligent, logical, spiritual, and personal. I don’t want to use those reasons as weapons against a readership I cherish.
I do want to clarify something, I don’t think I actually had any sort of adrenaline rush when I was hunting. I felt very methodical and calm the entire time I was stalking my antelope, I felt calm on all three of the hour long stalks I did. I compared myself to a she-wolf as a way to illustrate my actual physical movement across the sage flats of Wyoming. I wasn’t in a amber eyed, frothing at the mouth, adrenaline fueled rush of any kind. When I was out of breath and my pulse was ringing in my ears, it’s because I was up at 7000ft and crawling or running in a crouch was physically strenuous and made me out of breath.
I didn’t take any pleasure in killing my antelope. I worked really hard when I was hunting, I was under some physical strain, and to be honest, it exercised a portion of my mind that I have never really used before. Sneaking up on a wild animal, undetected, is a thrilling thing! Haven’t you ever been in the woods, and felt energized and excited by realizing you are very near to a wild animal? It’s exciting! I sneak up on wild things all the time, to get a better look at them, to be nearer to them, and the experience of being sneaky always elevates my pulse. I think it’s hardwired into me, that thrill of being near to wild things and undetected. So, while hunting, I did feel excited to be undetected and relatively near to wild animals, but I didn’t feel out of control or totally haywire with adrenaline. Does that make sense?
I also want to clarify that I’m not proud of what I did. I feel it’s an honor to be able to hunt. It’s an honor to know your food. It’s an honor to press your hands against an animal and feel the last exhalation as its physical body separates from its spirit. I felt this happen when our dog Plumbelina died in my arms. I felt it with my antelope. It is an honor to hold something as its spirit moves on. I have really mixed feelings about what I did, pride is not one of them. That said, I do feel I accomplished something that not many people do these days — I tied myself DIRECTLY to my energy source, became responsible for it, in the last few moments of its life, and when I eat it, I will feel so thankful to KNOW just what exactly I am putting in my body.
I was telling Robert yesterday that I’ve never felt like I’ve loved the natural world more than I do now. I’ve never understood it better — the arcing transfers of energy and life between sky, earth, animal and man. It’s so beautiful to comprehend fully and that full comprehension didn’t come to me until we were quartering my antelope in the field, to be frank. I have killed birds, shot them over my hunting dogs, I’ve been part of energy cycles before but something was different about my antelope. Perhaps it was different because I was totally responsible for it. No one helped me. The pointers didn’t help me find it in a field of tall grass like they do upland game. I did it alone. I feel like I used to be a spectator of nature — an audience, so to speak. Now, I feel truly a part of it. Not because I killed something, but because I am directly part of those energy shifts between sun, wind, dirt, plant and animal. I’m not trying to turn hunting into a sort of religion, but there is something very holy about it to me and if that was lost in what I wrote about the experience, then I should try to write about it again so that folks don’t misunderstand me.
If you hunted for your own meat, I am certain that you would feel all that I felt. And one of those emotions WOULD be sadness. This I promise you.
Thanks again, for taking a moment to write!
Thank you. I feel like I understand a little bit better. 🙂 I absolutely believe in being connected to your food source, and your prose..well, it almost makes me want to grab a gun and hunt. LOL. And let me tell ya…I’m not “that” girl.