Straight down the line
She wondered if it would be easier to go the normal way and just take the 376 stairs to the top. She really wanted to hop right down the middle, stepping on the plants and decorative stones as she went. It reminded her of Greece, this tiny little walkway in Hollywood, California. So quaint, yet so descriptive, it seems to tell a story all by itself. How many stray cats wandered along the tops of the big brown picket fence? How many birds made soft nests in the canopy trees above? How many young children chased each other up these steps? The small neighborhood back-way was mysterious and beautiful...
Steps
leading
to a place and time
where it matters not
what background you come from
or what you look like...
only if you can reach the top.
Places have a way of affecting the way that we see things.
Sometimes a place can make us create stories about it............
Weaving our own ideas and images into its history.
Maybe it happened, and maybe it didn't...
But it happened somewhere...even if that somewhere was just in your mind.
Steps are reflective...When there are many, it takes time to get to the top, and once you get there, you have reached a conclusion. You either succeeded in climbing them, or you didn't. Sometimes the answer to success isn't always in completion....
But rather in how you attempted to make the climb.
Her story is forming as you are reading this...
Steps are reflective...When there are many, it takes time to get to the top, and once you get there, you have reached a conclusion. You either succeeded in climbing them, or you didn't. Sometimes the answer to success isn't always in completion....
But rather in how you attempted to make the climb.
I chose this picture as my image because I think it is a wonderful example of a sense of place. It is unique, and even though it isn't a giant, open landscape, it still tells a story, or multiple stories. I really liked the idea of stairs as a metaphor for a text. With stairs, you can go up, down, skip a few steps, walk backwards up them, or skateboard down the ramp and bypass the steps altogether. This is akin to the way we each process texts differently, and they all have different meanings to each of us.
ReplyDeleteTo me, it looked like a little Greek cottage, complete with hanging canopy plant life and cobblestones. To another, it might look like a mansion. The background wallpaper is symbolic of the many different sizes and shapes of the steps that we take to reach the top, and yet they are all connected somehow.
Most of the text is blue because I see it as a sort of reflective color, and those are the parts with which are best associated with my narrative.
The blog, Stepping out of the Box, highlights taking the harder path in order to reflect on the choice to avoid the easy way out of life. The author compares the choice of the several hundred stairs to the struggles of life. Small details such as birds living in the trees or children playing tag may intrigue the viewer but the stairs are a personal challenge that has to conquered by the unnamed character alone. The process of climbing the stairs is a metaphor for the obstacles in life where you can either succeed or fail, but you still have to try. The author of the blog used different colors to emphasize a change in perspective and mood, with bold-face font used to cement the central idea that trying is better than simply giving up. The stairs are mimicked in the structure of the paragraph "leading to a place and time" with the phrases going up and down like the steps. The photo itself is taken from an angle that forces the viewer to visually walk their eyes up the steps and almost feel the effect that reminds the viewers of the changing altitude that occurs when climbing steps to such a height associated with 376 stairs to the top of the obstacle the character is climbing. As she climbs the steps, the character notices the various activities happening around her and the ideas that form in her brain during the ascent. The climbing is not easy, but the process of trying to reach the summit broadens her horizons and makes her a better person. The stairs put all of the people attempting to finish the climb on an equal level, just trying to finish the shared goal. This idea may be compared to the goal of just being happy in life, where the stairs resemble sad events and struggles inherent in life.
ReplyDeleteVisually the blog sits well with the title ‘Stepping Out of the Box’. I very much like the background relating to the title. My main concern lies however in the font choice and color scheme being a bit strange. The blues and pink hues don’t compliment each other very well and look a bit off. Think about big corporations of sleek looking advertising; font and color scheme have so much to do with the advertisement’s overall success of being taken seriously, of catching the eye, and making it memorable. A lot of times ads have barely anything more to work with then text, color, and a simple image.
ReplyDeleteThe blog itself is very narrow and therefore only allows for small images before they start spilling off of the main center column and into the background. Blogs are typically extremely visually and media centric and therefore need to revolve very closely around the presentation of such content.
The form of the written content is quite interesting. I enjoy how it relates back to the narrative and the image used by arranging words into steps. Just as the image has leading lines into the frame, the leading lines of the words lead me through the overall piece nicely.
The ambiguity of the narrative made it a bit difficult for me to grasp on to it. I wanted to possibly have characters introduced that were going through the journey up the steps and experiencing all these thoughts. Make it personal, make it individual and that way it becomes relatable and memorable.