Zoo Me

Today I went for a really long walk with one of my favorite people. We walked up the road from my house, thinking we were going one place, only to pass an unfamiliar trail. Deciding to be major explorers, we took the unknown route instead. The mystery trail brought us close to the zoo, and so we decided to go see the Rainforests of Africa, the Pacific Shores, and the Cascade Crest. Here's a moment from the African Rainforest.

When we got to the zoo, we only had an hour and fifteen minutes to explore; I thought that would be plenty of time, but I was very wrong!

We saw fish with big, gooey eyes,

sea anemone that we couldn't touch (sadly--I like how they pinch your fingers),

reptiles with sticky feet,

flamingos (which are super cool because they are PINK, which is obviously one of my FAVORITE COLORS. My other favorite color is green, in case you were wondering.),

and giraffes (which happened to be my nickname when I was little. I was tall, so I got called "giraffe," and a lot of people asked me if I was on the basketball team, which I obviously wasn't).

On a side note, I like tall girls who wear heels. I like tall girls who wear heels because, like a stranger once said to me, "tall girls in flats are just...tall girls in flats." 

A giraffe in heels would be quite a sight, too. ;)

We were also flashed by a monkey (because monkeys don't wear undies), but I don't have a photo of that one!

Seeing Double

There is a fine line between double exposures that are interesting and double exposures that are cheesy. I made some today that I thought were interesting, and I hope you think so, too:

Vertebrae:

Nature's Kiss:

Barking Man:

Spitting Flowers:

Laying in the Grass:

I love pairing images of naked skin with images of plants because they are similar in many ways. Naked skin is the only clothing we are born with, while the plants that surround us in nature are what our world was born with--no infrastructure, just the Earth, the soil, the plants. This might sound hippy-dippy, but I think there is such an extraordinary beauty in exploring the shapes and forms of what we were naturally given. These double exposure photographs allow human skin and living Earth to be synonymous; for a moment, they can take you away from today's distracting world.

Vortex

There was once a girl who ran away from her home on the hill

she ran and ran until she was deep in the forest

once she was there, things started to change
her legs moved strange
and they took her to stranger places

when she came to the end of the trail, she found a great big room

and each wall had a mirror,

that grew more and more distorted

her vision of herself changing, changed

she got up close to a mirror and tugged on the edge

behind the glass, a window

she couldn't quite see through it

she only felt dizzy

and fell right on through

she fell into a vortex 

and the world tumbled over and over

it spun

and she could walk on the sky,

the bushes,

the houses

suddenly

she began to fall again

she fell onto her feet

back in the forest

she was in the middle of nowhere nothing

she did not know what had happened to her

not of running away

not of the walks through the forest

not of the mirrors

not of the vortex

not of walking on the sky, the bushes, the houses

she only had one memory

of her old home

and the old floral dress she used to wear around the house

she'd close her eyes and forget the world.