This first week of 2024 has been a quiet one for me. I’ve spent a lot of time beginning to plan the Flower Power workshop that I’m teaching at the Minnetonka Center for the Arts in late February. Every time I teach another photography class I discover the need to learn more deeply about photography myself. It is
A Gift
to be able to immerse myself so deeply in doing the things that I love. When I dive into seeing and photographing the beauty of this world my life expands to take in all of the beauty, contradictions and paradoxes of life—joy, sorrow, gratitude, longing, despair and hope—new life emerging, shining brightly, falling softly, graying, dying.
The light catches in the bare branches of the maple and clothes it in a fleeting dream of autumn, all pink and auburn and gold. The cardinal perched near the top of the tree bursts into radiance, into flame, and for that moment nothing matters at all—not the still soil nor the clattering branches nor the way this redbird will fall to the ground in time, a cold stone, and I too will grow cold, and all my line.
― Late Migrations: A Natural History of Love and Loss
What a World
Watching the birth of new things and the dying of the old helps me keep a perspective on my own life. I have begun limiting the amount of news that I watch, listen to, or read because it is hard to keep from feeling despair when I hear of the never ending cruelty, greed, and meanness that we humans inflict on one another and on the world. I prefer to watch the cycles of nature, initiate loving interactions with others, see and share the beauty I see in the world.
I’m not trying to hide from the truth but to balance it, to remind myself that there are other truths, too. I need to remember that the earth, fragile as it is, remains heartbreakingly beautiful. I need to give my attention to a realm that is indifferent to fretful human mutterings and naked human anger, a world unaware of the hatred
and distrust taking over the news.
― The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
There is more going on than I can see with my own eyes, the earth has survived cataclysms and catastrophes and still goes on. And there is so much we don’t understand, and forces that we cannot comprehend.
Even now, with the natural world in so much trouble—even now, with the patterns of my daily life changing in ways I don’t always welcome or understand—radiant things are bursting forth in the darkest places, in the smallest nooks and deepest cracks of the hidden world. I mean to keep looking every single day until I find them.
― The Comfort of Crows: A Backyard Year
This life we live is a gift my friends. I encourage you to look for the light shining in dark hidden places, to keep looking for and find the good, and to be a force of good in the world.
May you walk in beauty.
Note: Playing with depth of field, two lenses, and some flowers I bought at Trader Joe’s this week.
0 Comments