Meri's Musings

Sometimes I have a little trouble letting myself be silly. It's not that I don't want to, you understand, it's that I'm concerned about looking silly. Undignified. Ridiculous, even. Will I ever get over that? (Only in the right circumstances, with enough encouragement.) Do you have trouble being silly and cutting loose?

I haven't seen a self-portrait post on anyone's blog for a long time, but I always loved them. Most of us hate to be the subject of a photograph, captured for all time the way someone else sees us. Bloggers, especially, at least the ones I know, vastly prefer to be the one seeing through the lens. But I told Relyn of Come Sit by My Fire that I'd take up  the challenge to tell at least 7 things about myself that aren't widely known. So here goes, complete with a self-portrait from last August before those journeys of discovery that were supposed to transform me. 1. When I was a 20-something and a feminist activist, I won ribbons for my cooking at the State Fair of Texas. A third place ribbon for salad (potato) the first year. A third place ribbon for drop cookies, a second place ribbon for spectacular desserts (puff pastry), and a first place ribbon for salad, the second year. One of the salad judges came and told me that it was an outrag...

I thank Misty Mawn for prodding us all to capture self-portraits on a regular basis. It's a challenging assignment on so many levels - how to accomplish it technically, how to manage issues of body image and self-consciousness, not wanting to open yourself up too much to others, wanting to cast yourself in the best light. I've come to love the "reflected self" self-portraits because they offer a handy dandy way to deal with those issues. Besides, the reflected images have an enigmatic quality and my corporeal self has an air of lightness, at least that's what I think. The truth of it is, however, that every moment of our lives we're creating a self-portrait. how we use our time the choices we make when no option is ideal whether we celebrate or shun our gifts if we demonstrate kindness and compassion consistently whether we're open to new experience or sadly shut down the trail our words leave behind us the images we choose to capture and share in our blog...

I'm still more comfortable  with stealing other people's souls     (this is my long-time friend Judie who joined me to shoot spring color,   not knowing I'd steal her soul so shamelessly) than I am with letting the lens  capture a piece of mine. But since I am a soulful woman I guess I can't lose anything by sharing another self-portrait. Some of my blogger friends are so innovative, so sophisticated that they use tripods to take pictures of themselves that look like   glam our shots , like Beth. And then there are Daffodil Divas, like   Judy Wise who expose themselves to all kinds of allergens to snap pictures of themselves with camera at arms' length. I'm not that advanced. I'm taking baby steps toward self-portraits, trying to banish my self-consciousness. It's just me and my camera, in front of something that reflects the two of us. And I realize that banishing self-consciousness must be a process because what registers when I...