Invitation To Fly

The only thing more precious than time, is the ones we choose to spend it with.


Original digital surreal art: “Crashing Time”
by: rob kistner © 8/22/23
 

Tonight
with careful hands
we will peel back
cracked and yellowed glassine
from faded aging pages

pages too often ignored
— our photo album
the chronicle of our love

tonight
my wife
you and I
are smashing the clock

we’re opening time’s window

liberating sweet memory
of our shared history
revisiting the magic
and the mystery

the captivating life moments
fondly remembered places
endearing loved ones
the true treasures
that the heart embraces

tangibly immortalized

let it be a symbol
of our enduring strength

of our courage
fully realized

we’ll squelch our fears
with quiet conversation
soft smiles
and gentle tears

some of joy
some bittersweet
some also sad

embracing it all
the good fortune
the wonderful times we had

faces and places
from another time
will reach out
touch our hearts

yes — life’s had its bumps
but also its beauty

it’s triumphs
and too — its tragedy

thirty six years
of us and ours

precious

unforgettable

captured
on these pages
in these folds of time
our time

also captured
though unseen

our deeply held hopes
for the future
our dreams

but tonight
my lover
we shatter
our temporal bounds
our physical limitations

let us soar
on wings of love

let our memories
be our invitations
to rise above
the weight of worry
make this moment — timeless
let us not hurry

through time and space
we will wind
traversing corridors
of heart and mind

alone
here
together

you and I

through time’s open window
this night
we fly


Original digital surreal art: “Through Time’s Window”
by: rob kistner © 8/22/23

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rob kistner © 8/23/23
Poetry at: dVerse

 

https://youtu.be/9rMdEDZULbc?si=x1c4CK87r4_CF5LF

32 thoughts on “Invitation To Fly”

    1. Thank you Kim. 🙂 It happened over the weekend past. Kathy actually happened to find our old photo album under the bed. It had not been opened for a long time. So we opened it and just began reliving so many memories. It was wonderful and something we both definitely needed, with all the things going on right now in our life that are making it a bit chaotic, and sad, along the way. It was of great help. Anyway, I felt motivated to write a poem and create a couple pieces of digital surreal art that I thought went well with it. This was a post in which I deeply invested my heart and my love. Glad you enjoyed it.

      Reply

    1. I agree James. Though nice to have, there is a sort of empty, non-tangible, hollowness to pics on an iPhone. Our photo album is a tribute to our love, and a beautiful treasure to touch and hold. I feel the same way about the record album covers of the 60’s snd 70’s. They are in and of themselves pieces of tangible art.

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  7. Oh Rob….knowing that you and Kathy are facing difficult times right now….how wonderful to “refind” this album so you could simply sit and go through it together. Rediscovering, so to speak, the grounding of your love….what you’ve shared over so many years. I would imagine there were some smiles and some tears as you turned the pages. I’m so glad you came to OLN LIVE today…it was good to see you, my friend. Know that so many of us care….
    And I must add, the artwork is phenomenal. You are a man of many talents.

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    1. Thank you so much Lil. My love and I are definitely feeling the stress, so this was an marvelous and magical oasis for the heart and mind. It had been there, hiding deep under the bed. We had forgotten about in the stress and chaos of this year. Many smiles, many tears. Aldo, thank you for complimenting my new art endeavor. Since the arthritis in my hands, has robbed me of my ability yo create my Serenity Totems, I havd been hungry for a new way to express my visual creativity. I am absolutely loving the digital rendering tool David Holz created last year. It is allowing me to take my digital art of the past twenty years, and now extrapolate it beyond anything I thought possible. It is like a camera that photographs my imagination, because written verbal description (poetry if you will) is the catalyst for generating the final steps of refinement to the images. And like a fine art photographer, you have to “learn” how, through practice and refining your personal vision, to do it well — to have the image ultimately become what you imagined. But it is fun, fascinating, and very fulfilling — so the learning is a joy. It is a wonderful, snd timely distraction, for which I am exceedingly grateful.

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  8. Such a great poem of love, to be able to go back in time through those photos must be a perfect way to spend the evening.

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  9. Barbara and I were just saying the other day that we should look back on photos and do some time travelling and this lovely poem is just the prompt we need. Talking of prompts, Midjourney is great but it does take some wrangling to get what you want from it…
    Great music selection too Rob only Time in a Bottle perhaps missing…

    Reply

    1. I am pleased this resonated for you Andrew. 🙂 I learned to push David Holz bots, from the start, in the direction I am envisioning, by beginning with a digital art piece I create, because it strongly informs the direction of the extrapolation. That sends the piece I am creating, more effectively in the direction I seek. It was a matter of learning how the MJ versions and combinations of codes, moves the image along. The final key is to creat a chain of verbal prompts that the bot will utilize. Finally I start feeding in the poetic prompts, to which it responds very favorably. I learned to nudge and direct the bot in a manner very much like a fine film photographer had learned composition, and how to light the subject, in balance with lens characteristics, and the final touch of mastering the darkroom — time and emulsions. But the most important element I discovered is the original digital core you create and feed it. Otherwise you will get pretty pictures, but it becomes almost totaly random. That is not what I seek. A bit of randomness is fine, I don’t mind letting the bot be part of the conversation — but I decide the topic with the initial core digital art piece I feed in. I also decide when the discussion is over, and we have created the art piece that satisfies my initial vision. It is a helluva lot of calculation and application work, and a willingness to doggedly and smartly pursue the vision that you seek in the finished art piece. Also, a willingness to be a little flexible is important. Creating with the bot is great! It’s like 21st century photography of my imagination

      N.B. If you are willing to spend the time in preparation, and can muster the patience and tenacity to continue to refine the iterations in a focused and purposeful way – you can achieve beautiful digital art, like this one I created immediately below for my “Wind On The Water” poem (which reflected quite accurately my initial vision). I also went on to create two wonderful additional pieces, which I included with that post.

      If you don’t start by creating a functional initial digital core as a guide for the bot, and don’t apply the planning, patience, and tenacity — you end up NOT with your initial vision fulfilled, but with an unacceptable final result that not even in Photoshop can mold into your vision… like you see below here. A lax approach and follow through will produce a lot of duds like this one below. Interesting image, but not at all what I had envisioned. In the same as a photographer, who does not understand composition, or master his lighting, or learn his lens choices, or the nature of film in emulsions, or the art of the darkroom, will never get a breathtaking final photograph — faltering in one of the steps with the bot will not get you the beautiful digital art piece you desire. I used to get a lot of misses, sometimes extreme misses, when I first began learning the technicals, and how to refine the final extrapolated image with impactful verbal manipulation (and a few tricks of the process which you must pursue the knowledge of the experienced users to learn). Now I have dramatically fewer misses. My advice, never “settle”. If you stay on task diligently, and stay true and in line with the process, you will get what you want.

      Reply

  12. Very moving, and the art compliments it so very well.
    “through time and space
    we will wind
    traversing corridors
    of heart and mind”

    Wow!

    Reply

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