{"id":2339,"date":"2011-10-02T19:49:41","date_gmt":"2011-10-03T00:49:41","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2339"},"modified":"2011-10-02T19:53:02","modified_gmt":"2011-10-03T00:53:02","slug":"rain-flower","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/?p=2339","title":{"rendered":"Rain Flower"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I had trouble getting to sleep the other night, so I spent a half hour or so perusing Fr. James “Jeff” Behrens’ monastery photo book Portraits of Grace<\/a>. Jeff’s photos and his gentle written reflections were a nice calming touch, just what I needed. It felt so good and comforting simply being under the covers, resting against propped pillows with the book in hand, that I probably stayed up a bit longer than I had to. It was one of those cozy moments of life that come along too infrequently. <\/p>\n

I guess that I’m still a bit of a ‘monastery romantic’, despite having been to real monasteries and talking to real monks (including Jeff). Their life is just as gritty as anyone else’s. But Jeff’s book helps to feed my illusion, nonetheless. He focuses in closely on quotidian stuff like tools and windows and leaves and dishes and shovels, with just the right sunlight and shadow to make it all seem beatific. Yea, I know it’s not real life, but sometimes real-life is not what one needs.<\/p>\n

On page 85, Jeff has a shot of a praying mantis standing on a wet morning glory flower. Quite interesting. The next day, I went out back by my car, where my own morning glory vines are still in bloom, and I noticed that they were still wet from an earlier rain shower (not surprising given how wet the past few months have been around here). So I went inside and grabbed my camera, and here’s what I got. No bug, but still not a bad shot, IMHO. Thanks, Jeff, for the idea.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I had trouble getting to sleep the other night, so I spent a half hour or so perusing Fr. James “Jeff” Behrens’ monastery photo book Portraits of Grace. Jeff’s photos and his gentle written reflections were a nice calming touch, just what I needed. It felt so good and comforting simply being under the covers, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2339"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2341,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2339\/revisions\/2341"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2339"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2339"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2339"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}