Each of my five novels centers around a virtue or an ideal that I hold dear. Peace, joy, and hope weave their way through x0, y1 and z2 respectively, and every so often on my blog for each novel I go searching for the best images or best songs to represent this theme.

Bravery, as found in humans of all sizes, ages and genders is at the core of my novel c3. But for some reason, I’ve left courage alone. Why? I suppose I thought of it as less easily captured by a simple image, or that I thought I would only find the expected photos of warriors. Today I tested this theory, and was surprised by the wealth of poignant images that capture the feeling of courage without saying a word.

I’m posting my six favorites here. I’ve grabbed them off the web. This is something I prefer not to do, so to mitigate this as best I can, I’ve set it up so that clicking on the image itself will take you back to my original source, and I attribute that source in the caption. If you like what you see, please go there and show them some love.

The images did tend to fall into a few categories. Small cats and dogs standing up to or seeing themselves as lions and wolves were popular. Mountain climbers were well represented, as were people jumping off things, often into the water. Many images didn’t make much sense without the words they came with, and I eliminated those for now.  “Best posters about courage” will have to be a category for another day.

I was also surprised by the sources. I used images from a site selling business software, another selling leadership courses, a site for stock photos and a newspaper article. You also see photos here from two other personal blogs, both of which look quite interesting. I’ll have to follow them both. Neither listed an orignal source, at least that I could find, or I would have attributed that too.

Because my theme is more about courage shown in every day life and in unexpected places, I did avoid the pictures of  firefighters and of men and women in uniform. This was in spite of the fact that I agree that these people often show amazing bravery, and I have a great deal of respect for what they do. Only one such image tugged on my heartstrings until I could not resist, but it wasn’t the military man who swayed me. It was the little boy, doing his best to stay strong. That’s courage.