Kat Eye Studio

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Photo-Heart Connection: November

Hope. Sadness.

PHC-November

Two sides of the same coin? Perhaps. I see mostly hope with some sadness on one side, sadness with bit of hope on the other. They touch in the center. They echo each other; reach one to the other.

Can you have one without the other? Is the experience of one healthy without the other? For sadness, alone, seems to me depression. And hope, without sadness to temper it, is delusion.

Perhaps the best is when they touch in the center, balancing each other out. Hope and sadness. Sadness and hope.

Well, my Photo-Heart Connection this month is filled with melancholy, isn’t it? I couldn’t decide between the two images this month. They seemed to go together, and reflect one another. When I listened to the words they whispered, it was the mirroring emotions of sadness and hope. I don’t quite understand why I needed this message today, but I’m not going to try to analyze further. This is just the message from my heart this month. It will be clear in time.

What is your Photo-Heart Connection telling you this month? Does it speak of sadness? Hope? Or something altogether different? Link in here and share with us.
Please note I won’t be by to visit until later in the month, after the link up closes. I’m off to China and Taiwan on a business trip this week, and I’ll catch up when I’m back.

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Trust and Belief: The Lessons of a Twitter Hacking

A few days ago, I had my Twitter account hacked. I could have kicked myself, because after the fact I realized that I was a willing participant to the hacking. After living in a world of internet spam, with all of the suspicious emails, tweets and blog comments I see all the time, I finally fell for one. Ouch. A blow to the pride for sure, but it taught me a thing or two about myself. About trust and belief.

So, how did this happen? First, I got a direct message from someone I know. I don’t follow a huge number of people on twitter, and while some of them are big names who don’t know me from the next person, many of them are people I’ve interacted with online or in person. This message came from someone I know, have met in person and exchanged emails with. A friend. So the first step in my downfall was receiving the message from someone I trust. It gave it a credibility it otherwise wouldn’t.

The second, and more insidious piece, is how I believed the message. I’ve never fallen for wiring money to Africa, or making thousands of dollars working from home, or the latest pharmaceutical scam. But this message preyed upon my vulnerability, saying, “You seen what this person is saying about you? {Link} terrible things.” I believed it. I clicked the link, “logged in” to twitter and willingly gave up my password. Why? Because I’ve always had this underlying fear that sometime, somewhere, someone was going to say terrible things about me on the Internet. It has to just be a matter of time, when you put yourself out there publicly like this, right? I realize now this wasn’t just a fear they preyed upon, I carried it around so long it became a belief. I have been sure that it would happen. Steeling myself against the day when it would come. So in my head I said, “Yep, it’s finally happened.” And I clicked the link.

I have to admit the smarts of these hackers, preying on our trust and belief like this. I have to admit chagrin, that I’m not as savvy against hackers as I thought. The hackers only took advantage so far. My own belief helped them the rest of the way.

I apologize if you got the same twitter message from me this week, I hope you saw it for what it was and didn’t click the link. I hate to think that I might have lost the trust of others in this way. But I did learn one important lesson out of all of this. I’ve been carrying around a belief that needs to go. No one has said terrible things about me yet. Maybe someone will someday, maybe they won’t. There is no point in believing it will happen. That just makes me vulnerable, to my own insecurities and hackers alike.

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Coming and Going

While wandering around Inverness trying to find a restaurant one evening, we passed this church graveyard. I was fascinated by the old stones, you could read as far back as the 1800’s but there were definitely some that were older and unreadable. I could imagine people visiting here, searching out their ancestors and doing grave rubbings. I remember doing that with my mom as a child on a visit to her roots somewhere in the midwestern USA.

There is such a focus on heritage and history in Scotland, it made me wish I has some Scottish in me so that I could be part of it. Genealogy centers, clan history books and tartans… all welcoming people back to their roots. Patrick‘s great-grandfather was from Scotland, with the surname Barron. We had a time of it trying to find anything on this name, but eventually discovered it was part of the Rose clan and there was a tiny bit more on them. Apparently, Rose or Barron were not the most prolific of clans from the little we could find. But that small little connection for Patrick and Brandon made it a bit more fun.

The Picture Inspiration prompt this week was “double vision,” on diptychs using photos of the same thing from two different perspectives. I liked this gravestone from the two perspectives, and putting them together in this way created a stronger emotion. I couldn’t quite describe it, but one of my classmates commented, “I like the flare and blurriness in the one on the left. Reminds me of the mystery of death. And the one on the right is so black and white like life and death.” I like her description, it puts something concrete to the feeling of the images.

What feeling do you get when you look at this pairing?

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