Beaver Farm in Motion

SUNSHINE
is this week's prompt over at Photo Friday and I thought I'd post this shot I took yesterday while visiting Camphill Special School. A few years ago the school bought nearby Beaver Farm to enlarge their transition program for 18-21 year olds with special needs. There is a desperate need for programs for this age group, and Camphill is hoping to provide many more young people with a wonderful place to learn skills and self-reliance in a healthy, wholesome farm atmosphere. They recently started construction on several buildings which will eventually provide housing and classroom space for many more young people than they currently can serve. This is a wonderful thing...and very unlike the usual heart-rending scenario of bull-dozer + old farm = suburban sprawl. This is all about creation, not destruction!

Even Floss the farm dog can feel the good energy, obviously!

What lies behind us and what lies ahead of us are tiny matters compared to what lives within us.
~Henry David Thoreau

Overhead

A busy summer beach, and nobody seems to notice the approaching helicopter except two boys...

Pet
is the theme over at Photo Friday today. This is a recent shot that I thought would fit the bill:
Woman with Chihuahua

Deceptively Fragile

a breath destroys me-
but my seeds will travel far,
my roots dig down deep

The Good Life
Enough food, and someone to share it with. M. France said it best:

Hunger and Love are the pivots on which the world turns. Mankind is entirely determined by love and hunger.
-Anatole France
(letter to George Sand)

MISTY MOUNTAIN
You'd never know, but this is The Beehive, at Acadia State Park in Maine. For Photo Friday's challenge: mist. I used the Accented Edges filter in PhotoShop to add a little drama.

The fog comes
on little cat feet.
It sits looking
over harbor and city
on silent haunches
and then moves on.
-Carl Sandburg

CITY RIVER
You'd never know you were in the heart of my adopted city, Philadelphia, standing by the Schuylkill River enjoying the feel of the autumn sunshine and the plashy sound of oars as scullers row by. At moments like this I feel immensely grateful that I ended up in this beautiful place. At other times (fighting our suburb's notoriously adversarial school board for services for my special needs child) I feel less happy. However, a bike ride by the river has an amazingly soothing and refreshing effect on one's tired spirits.

COMFORT
is today's theme at Photo Friday. Maybe you'd be surprised to learn that the little boy in this photo has autism. In fact, my own autistic son, Henry, is so affectionate that this delayed his diagnosis...learned doctors would frown, puzzled, and say "Well, he has many of the symptoms of autism, but he's just too affectionate!" Hmm. Here is my friend Katie getting a reassuring hug from her sweet son J during some fleeting moment of anxiety. So much for the myth of refrigerator mothers and their unemotional autistic children.

IT WAS JUST A HUG

out of nowhere
from my three-year-old.
In the softness
of his encircling arms,
and velvet cheek
pressed to my side,
I thought, please,
in times ahead
of anger, pain,
and disappointment,
when fate crushes,
love wounds,
and friends betray,
let me recall
this moment as
a blanket around my heart.

~Ann Reisfeld Boutte

PURPLE
is the theme of PhotoFriday today. I was momentarily stumped...it's not a color I have a lot of in my life. Then I remembered meeting the wonderful Beth Krush at a brunch last month, and that she was wearing a gorgeous purple sweater. You probably know Beth, even if you think you don't. She and her husband Joe are well-known illustrators, and their many projects include The Borrowers, that redoubtable children's classic. The books are very well written of course, but I've always thought that the fantastic illustrations really make the books come alive, amplify and enlarge the text to such a degree, that I can't imagine the books with any other illustrations but those by the Krushes.

So how absolutely appropriate it is that Beth is wearing purple, the color of royalty. In my mind she is a queen amongst illustrators.