March may come in like a lion, but February decided to celebrate Leap Day with a glimpse of spring. Compare these blooms with yesterday's photo of the same flowers. Take a sheltered window well, add a day in the 60's and presto -- instant spring. I went over to Witmer Woods and wandered the woods of my childhood, when we lived on Carter Road, just south of the College Cabin, on the other side of the drainage ditch. All woods were mostly brown and barren, but the moss was looking lush. Think of the tooth work it took to reach the nutmeats in this one. I spent a restful time sitting by the river, listening to the water lapping against the shore, the wind roaring in the branches overhead, and red-wing blackbirds calling in the bushes.
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Joy -- my schedule was finally such, and the weather warm enough, that I was able to go out for a walk with my camera this afternoon, to see what I could see. Granted, it was a gray day, as you can see above, but it was a gentle gray, a soft, peaceful gray. What caught my eye today was the cycle of change-- the delicate calligraphy of a dead and dried weed against the gray sky, and the range of decay on these orange berries, with new buds showing tight and plump on a side shoot. Everywhere I looked there were broken and decaying plants, and a few lines from Henry Lyte's hymn Abide with me started running through my head:
Abide with me, fast falls the eventide. The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide. . . . Change and decay in all around I see, O thou who changest not, abide with me. Which sounds like it could have been really depressing, but it wasn't. The old, broken, dried up stuff will make way for new growth soon. In fact, when I got up close and looked carefully, I kept seeing signs of that new growth already present, like the pale buds on the stem in the photo above. I saw this old log from a ways down the bike path, and it looked from that angle like the epitome of death and decay. But close up, it was full of all sorts of amazing moss and lichens. Life is full of surprises -- and, apparently, so is death. I took this photo of a mullein back in early November. I was trying to catch the way the light shone through some of the leaves and sparkled off the down on other leaves. Spurts of wind kept tossing the larger leaves up and in the way, blurring the picture. Finally, on the third attempt, I got this picture. It wasn't until later, as I was looking over the day's images, that I noticed the spider. He crept into a quieter refuge, or I shifted my angle, sometime between the first and second photo, and by this third photo, he was lit by sunshine. There are multiple levels of discovery with this practice of contemplative photography -- what I notice as I wander with my camera, what I find as I look over the photos on the larger computer screen, what becomes visible as I crop photos, or as I look over photos at a later date. There is seeing and noticing, and then there's what we notice with a second look, or as we ponder an image that speaks to us in some way. I'm pondering this trio. I took this photo of St Ignatius as The Pilgrim at the Jesuit Retreat Center in Wernersville, PA, with the early morning sun on his back. Later when the shadows had shifted, I took this second photo, where it is easier to see that he carries a book and a staff. And then just as we were leaving, I saw the same statue from another angle, and took the following photo. It was only after I was home and going through the images from the week,looking at this one in the larger Picasa format, that I noticed the staff propped invitingly in the corner. I'm not Catholic or Jesuit, so I'm not picking up his staff in that sense, but I hear the verse of a familiar song:
We are pilgrims on a journey, we are travelers on the road. We are here to help each other walk the mile and bear the load. May we also be taking up our walking staffs, moving out in pilgrimage, following Christ, in our own time and place. I've been enjoying the sunshine streaming down the last couple days, though due to other commitments and the challenges of taking photos when the temperature is below freezing, I haven't been able to explore sun on snow as much as I would have liked. At least my spirits can be lifted by the sight of sun and snow from inside the house -- though the snow has been melting since this photo, as the temperatures climb into the 40's. Given that we are still in Christmastime, this 11th day of Christmas, I've been enjoying the way the sunshine brought out these traditional Christmas-y colors. And a different sort of spark of light --
On JRR Tolkien's birthday, January 3rd, Garrison Keillor included this story about him on his daily Writers' Almanac. Tolkien was a professor of English Literature at Oxford, and one day when he was grading exams, he found that a student had left blank an entire page of the exam booklet. In that empty space, Tolkien scribbled the sentence "In a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit." He went on to develop that into a story he told his children and, eventually, his book The Hobbit. I'm enchanted by this snippet. What if there hadn't been a blank page just then? What if Tolkien hadn't let his diligent prof-grading-exam identity drift away? What unsuspected delights might come popping out for us, if we find a little time and space in the midst of our everyday duties, and let our creative selves playfully scribble a mysterious sentence, a joyful doodle, a half-heard tune? |
My approach to contemplative photography --
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver in "Sometimes" Archives
August 2020
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