Gratitude : : Week One...

So I have a lot of proverbial balls in the "gratitude" court this month and I've come up with a way to make all of it jive...I think. My posts here this month, as I've said, will carry the theme of "gratitude" but I'm also doing a photographic series this month over at Flickr about "gratitude. It didn't really start out as such but I found myself beginning it without thought or purposeful action. And then it was there as if I made so much sense that I didn't even take the normal thought processes to stew it over. I really just began to post these black and white photos depicting real concepts of gratitude in my life.

The black & white thing also wasn't really something I feel like I deliberately chose. I feel like it chose me. I had felt, in a way, that I was hiding behind beautiful colors in my photographs. I kind-of thought that I should start attempting more black & whites and then I just started doing it in this really relevant way. Because these concepts of gratitude that I'm depicting are about the real deal: the real slices of life stuff that really matter in life. They are about the moments and the people and what's really going on. I like to photograph pretty flowers but, let's face it, life is not all pretty flowers and perfectly composed still lifes. I'm currently not very good at black & whites but hopefully I will improve as the month progresses.

So this gratitude photographic series developed really organically and I feel like it ties in really well with the theme here and with the overall theme of the month of November. Anyway, life is like that sometimes {awesome like that sometimes...}! Then I found this Flickr group called 30 Days/Gratitude '09 and instantly my "thing" became a real thing and...Ta-Da!...month long series. So, on addition to regular posting, I'm going to try to post my week's gratitude photos here every Friday. But I've also created a special set just for this series on my Flickr site. And you should check out the 30 Days/Gratitude Group Pool as well for some truly moving photos and sentiments.

We are off today, over the river and through the woods, for a little visit with my grandmother. I'm looking forward to being "un-plugged" all weekend!

I wish you all a lovely weekend!