japanese garden

Visiting Portland’s Japanese Garden with Bo & Amber and Chris.

(For our earlier visits to the Japanese Garden, see this post and this one too.)

extreme closeup!

Spring has fully sprung here in Portland. with our dogwood and cherry trees in bloom. On a neighborhood walk with the pups I noticed the tiny little daisies scattered through the lawns, so I took out the camera and turned on the “macro” setting for an extreme closeup.

Those little daisies inspired me to look for more tiny things during the rest of that walk.

Here’s an experiment in 3D: cross your eyes until the two pictures merge.

It’s amazing what you can miss if you don’t take the time to look up close.

Returning home, I finished up with a pair of final extreme closeups — the dogwood and cherry blossoms right outside my own front door.

poem: unlike things

simile: a figure of speech comparing two unlike things, often introduced by like or as.
metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.
– Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary

life is like a simile
i compare yours to mine
pretending they should be the same
why aren’t you more like me?

life is a metaphor
if i see the world through your eyes
if i walk a mile in your shoes
who will meet me when i arrive?

life is a deep snow-covered hillside pasture
at twilight as the first stars appear,
where dozens of laughing dogs leap and run in circles
with sparklers

April is National Poetry Month, and on the ReadWritePoem blog  a bunch of poets more dedicated than me :-) have taken on the challenge of writing a poem-a-day for the whole month — check it out!

the opposite

Most people, I think, are familiar with the saying “the opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference”. But I learned today from Garrison Keillor’s The Writer’s Almanac that the full quote is

The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference. The opposite of art is not ugliness, it’s indifference. The opposite of faith is not heresy, it’s indifference. And the opposite of life is not death, it’s indifference.

said by Elie Wiesel, who survived the Buchenwald concentration camp as a teenager in World War II. American troops entered the camp on April 11, 1945.