OUR picture choice this week takes us “across the pond” to New Hampshire and a world of photographs and micro poems celebrating the natural world.
This is the work of Catherine Arcolio, a 62-year-old whose Leaf and Twig blog began more than a decade ago as a practical way of helping her to recover from depression and addiction.
As she revealed in a frank features interview this week, the pairing of poetry and photography began after she moved from the city to a tiny rural community and became an important daily ritual that provided a foundation for her recovery.
In around a dozen words, her poems celebrate both the natural world and the human condition, while the images focus on the landscapes, wildlife, flowers and insects around her home, close to the state border with Vermont.
Her blog subscribers celebrate her ability to “take the ordinary things of this world…and in one image and a few perfect words reveal them as magical”, with many posts receiving dozens of likes.
“Your photos and prose are like little delicious sweets for the soul,” writers one reader. “Your poems always take me to a quiet, peaceful place of bliss,” says another.
Remarkably, there’s been a post very day since July 2011, and Catherine’s archive provides a searchable database of those entries, all 4,000-plus of them.
She confesses: “This daily art-making saves me. I’ve been training my eye to always be on the lookout for beauty as I listen deeply for all the languages of nature so I can translate them into poetry and share them.”
And she goes on to explain to her subscribers: “I’ve constructed a kind of life raft that keeps me from being pulled under by the ugliness, grief and disappointment that is inevitable in life. There is room on that raft for everyone. Especially you.”
