Linda S. Viens

This picture was taken at Sakonett Point, RI, in the late afternoon on a cloudy July day. Most people had packed up and gone home, but I was loath to close my book and leave that sacred place, though the wind was blowing hard and the darkening clouds threatened rain. The ‘hipstomatic photo app’ on my iphone effortlessly amps up the emotional content in almost every photograph taken using it as the ‘lens’. The darkness of the tints in this image, deepest at the creases and edges, stir a kind of exaggerated melancholy in my heart. My ever-present sense of time passing is captured in the deep greens and blues and smoky blacks. I see organic life as it lives and recognize the fact that all organic life dies. Yet the ocean and the sky remind me of something energetically eternal. And the white dog running is my prayer for exuberance and a tendency to joy while living on this planet. That he is running towards his ‘human’ is the connection between all living things, and the love that springs inexorably over and over again in our wounded hearts for each other, for the children, for the plants and animals and the vast, mysterious landscapes; urging us to be grateful for the privilege of experiencing the magnificence of life on earth.