Imagination is a tool of wonder if applied properly, particularly when accompanied by visual aids. The weaving of rhyme adds rhythm, a song without the singing when performed in tandem with the pictures opening a world filled with orbs of beauty the likes of nothing ever seen.

New worlds are becoming hard to come by, so when the opportunity to explore one arises, you take it. Mine was done with a camera, going places no one has gone before, inside the ice to capture scenes that are hard to fathom. A guide was deemed necessary, and Bubbelo Bill was born, a being of the ice worlds with an ice saucer as our ride.

My story is told in rhyme, snippets of what lies within the photo before us, mostly dealing with the beauty but finding the occasional humorous observation and even a dark side in some. The adage, a picture is worth a thousand words, comes into play, a four-line stanza barely grazing the surface of the beauty buried within each photographic representation of an ice Shangri-La.

The pictures are surreal, like nothing ever seen, colors and shapes calling to the eye for an explanation, and the tale plays second fiddle to the icescapes that fill the eyes with wonder causing us to question what we are seeing especially when we find some have eyes and are staring back at us.

The scenes we question are painted with air bubbles in the ice that are scattered and stacked, sprays and sprigs of them filled with colors I applied, part of an experiment that went wonderfully right. It's a playful romp meant to bring attention to the art of stacking bubbles, something as hard as it sounds, a thing of beauty I have been unable to repeat; the only things left are my photos and puddles of melted ice.

It was December 10, 2013, and a snowstorm had come thru a couple of nights before leaving the usual winter wonderland we were dealt two or three times a year, something I love because we rarely saw snow my whole life living in south Louisiana.

We were performing an experiment that my favorite daughter in the whole world had told Holly, my favorite wife in the whole world, about. We set it outside after the first day of snow and let it spend the next several nights there. I would check our little exercise in liquid solidification on occasion, but it took several days for them to come to fruition, albeit frozen fruition.

Every day I would take my camera out and get pictures of the snow and ice covering everything, looking for that special one that made the trip through the slippery slopes worthwhile. We had deemed the experiment a failure, and I took the icy flotsam pieces and put them on top of our car, a thick layer of snow guaranteeing they wouldn't scratch it. I was passing by with the camera later when I happened to look into one with the light coming from behind it. I saw something, but it was hard to make out. I took up my camera and began recording still shots.

The clouds opened and the heavens were suddenly bathed in light, a joyous refrain began ringing, as angels began singing, a chorus of hallelujahs, for the ice bubbles had been discovered. Not really, but they should have, for I found an alien landscape in every one of our surviving experiments in H2O molecular bonding.

I didn't realize what I had until I brought the camera inside and hooked it to our TV. Kumbaya, kumbaya, Om Mani Padme Hum, go tell it to the mountain, and an icescape of elaborate designs and wondrous colors opened before me.

These photos are the chosen ones from the thousands I took, their je ne sais quoi magnifico. They tell a story with an allegory, hopefully, hidden in the enjoyment of the tale so it sneaks up on you.

Enjoy,
Joe Paul