I created this Daisy Heart three summers ago, so I can claim it’s mine…made with my two hands, my heart and my imagination, captured on my camera. I made it on the grass which fringes a favorite coral beach of mine, in Plockton. This beautiful village in Rosshire, where my mother grew up, I have visited several times a year every year of my life. Often I we will be the only people on this beach, as its a little hidden and off the beaten track, and there’s a bit of a scramble over rocks to reach it.

If we have been sitting enjoying the views, and the sounds, and the peace and solitude, and then some one else arrives I do feel a little possesive….as though they have burst into my private space. However the quiet serenity of this beach soon sweeps that naughty feeling away.

If I take friends who are visiting for the first time to this beach it does feel like I’m letting them into a very private space…I suppose its because I’ve sat so often on my own here, reading, painting, drawing or meditating….enjoying the space as mine.

The other reason I chose this Daisy Heart is that I wanted an image which expressed this life of mine. It is after all the only thing I can truely own, and waking up to this is a wild and exciting adventure, but one filled with love and truth. Owning ones own life sounds as simple as breathing, but all sorts of things get in our way. Often I have caught myself trying to live someone elses life! To be authentic and to live each day full of the wonder of life and all it brings is my aim….some days I manage better than others.

This is my life so I may as well get on with living it, joyfully if possible, hopefully full of gratitude and wonder, and open my own reality. This life is mine, and I claim it!

The Summer Day

Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean-
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down-
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don’t know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn’t everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
With your one wild and precious life?

By Mary Oliver

Find some other great interpretations of the Photo Challenge : Mine here

And here are some others I liked

http://theblacktwig.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/weekly-photo-challenge-mine-of-books-and-moving/

http://windagainstcurrent.com/2012/10/01/weekly-photo-challenge-mine/

http://ldawkins.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/weekly-photo-challenge-mine/

http://margaretsmiscellany.com/2012/10/02/weekly-photo-challenge-mine/

http://theeternaltraveller.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/weekly-photo-challenge-mine/

http://renserberit.wordpress.com/2012/10/02/behind-the-trees/