Yesterday I finally finished updating my photography catalog backups and started a new photo catalog which I am calling “2020 Catalog”. (I know, it’s not a very imaginative name, but naming my catalogs for the year that I started them helps me to know where to look when I’m searching for photos I made in past years.)
So I was so glad to finish copying catalogs from drive to drive and removing unneeded catalogs. I have made more than 100,000 photos in the past 10 years. It takes many hours to copy a large photo catalog with 30,000+ photos in it from one place to another. Each time I got ready to drag a whole catalog to the trash (because it was a copy that was no longer needed on that particular drive) I almost held my breath. I checked and checked again to ensure that I didn’t lose any work.
When I finished doing all the chores I didn’t like doing I decided that it was
Time to play
with watercolor and some impressionist photos of the pond and my backyard tangle of wild plants. While I listened to a video by watercolor artist Angela Fehr, I painted the painting you see at the top of this post. It was total play. When I was almost finished listening to Angela Fehr’s talk, I splashed some bright colors into the painting just because I could.
While working downstairs with Jon I was able to watch the wood duck family splash, swim, and play in the pond. The young ones are flapping their wings a lot now, probably strengthening them for when they finally learn to fly. It’s so delightful to watch them.
Spending Time in Wonder
Each day I gaze out the windows towards the pond many times. I’m often not impressed with what I see. Maybe there’s a lot of scum on the pond, or the light is bright and glaring or my mind is tired and I think I’ve seen it all before a million times.
But more and more often I’m filled with wonder seeing something that I never saw before. To see this way, I need to suspend all the chatter in my mind, all of my preconceived ideas about how things look, and simply be.
“Experiencing the present purely is being emptied and hollow; you catch the grace as a man fills his cup under a waterfall.”
― Pilgrim at Tinker Creek
I think it is a gift to have the time, space, and inclination to be empty enough to catch grace this way.
How are you doing today in this fifth month of pandemic? Do you need to take time to play? Are you catching grace and spending time in wonder?
May you walk in beauty.
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