Foggy Christmas Morning

This morning because it was a

I gathered my camera and coat and headed to West Medicine Lake park to photograph the fog.

The number of people out and about in the park on Christmas morning surprised me. There were lots of dog walkers, runners, mallards in the creek beside the lake, and glorious fog everywhere I looked. Looking across the lake was like looking at a soft white curtain. I could see nothing except the fog. The beauty of the soft landscape all around was inspiring.

Many of the people out running or walking their dogs wore some kind of festive wear to mark the day. These two guys and their dogs were my favorites. When I asked them if it was okay for me to photograph them, the guy on the right said, “I don’t know, you’ll have to check with my agent,” pointing to the man in the red coat on his left.

It was lovely to laugh and chat with them and wish them a joyous day.

Every once in a while as I walked I felt like I needed to pinch myself. This is Minnesota on Christmas day and it’s almost 50 degrees. Instead of snow the landscape is covered with a curtain of fog. I’ve never before seen weather like this in December! It felt a little surreal.

Still, when I go out camera in hand looking for beauty and looking for God, I find beauty and I find God even on a foggy Christmas day in Minneapolis.

Here’s a poem by Mary Oliver that I found helpful today. I hope you do too.

Sometimes

1.

Something came up
out of the dark.
It wasn’t anything I had ever seen before.
It wasn’t an animal
or a flower,
unless it was both.

Something came up out of the water,
a head the size of a cat
but muddy and without ears.
I don’t know what God is.
I don’t know what death is.

But I believe they have between them
some fervent and necessary arrangement.

2.

Sometime
melancholy leaves me breathless…

3.

Water from the heavens! Electricity from the source!
Both of them mad to create something!

The lighting brighter than any flower.
The thunder without a drowsy bone in its body.

4.

Instructions for living a life:
Pay attention.
Be astonished.
Tell about it.

5.
Two or three times in my life I discovered love.
Each time it seemed to solve everything.
Each time it solved a great many things
but not everything.
Yet left me as grateful as if it had indeed, and
thoroughly, solved everything.

6.

God, rest in my heart
and fortify me,
take away my hunger for answers,
let the hours play upon my body

like the hands of my beloved.
Let the cathead appear again-
the smallest of your mysteries,
some wild cousin of my own blood probably-
some cousin of my own wild blood probably,
in the black dinner-bowl of the pond.

7.

Death waits for me, I know it, around
one corner or another.
This doesn’t amuse me.
Neither does it frighten me.

After the rain, I went back into the field of sunflowers.
It was cool, and I was anything but drowsy.
I walked slowly, and listened

to the crazy roots, in the drenched earth, laughing and growing.

— Mary Oliver