As I gaze at the beauty of this season I feel a sense of
Enchantment and Magic All Around
me.
The unfolding green leaves on all the trees amaze me with their profusion and perfection. Crab apple blossom petals carpet the grass under crab apple trees already. A mallard duck and her ducklings are regular visitors in the grass at the edge of the pond behind our house. My mind says, “Too soon they are gone,” but my heart knows that the magic of this season is brief.
Enchantment came so easily to me as a child, but I wrongly thought it was small, parochial, a shameful thing to be put away in the rush towards adulthood. Now I wonder how I can find it again. It turns out that it had nothing to do with beauty after all—not in any grand objective sense. I think instead that when I was young, it came from a deep engagement with the world around me, the particular quality of experience that accompanies close attention, the sense of contact that emerges from noticing. I worked hard to suppress all those things. I thought it was what I had to do in order to grow up. It took years of work, years of careful forgetting. I never realized what I was losing.
But enchantment cannot be destroyed. It waits patiently for us to remember that we need it. And now when I start to look for it, there it is: pale, intermittent, waiting patiently for my return. The sudden catch of sunlight behind stained glass. The glint of gold in the silt of a stream. The words that whisper through the leaves.
― Enchantment: Awakening Wonder in an Anxious Age
One of the reasons I love photography so much is that it brings me that sense of enchantment, awe, and wonder every time I pay attention to nature around me. We are surrounded by miracles and blessings every day whether we recognize them or not.
Incidentally, the world is magical.
Magic is simply what’s off our human scale… at the moment.
― The Perpetual Calendar of Inspiration
Two weeks ago I visited my aunt and three cousins in northwest Iowa, thinking, “Time is short, I want to see my aunt again while I still can.” Last night I learned that my cousin’s husband had died due to complications of open heart surgery earlier this week. Though I didn’t see him on that visit I did see my cousin and could clearly understand her concern for her husband’s health issues. I was glad that I got to see her, hear about what was going on in her family’s lives, and to hug her.
This short season of spring grace is a reminder to (in the words of Mary Oliver) “pay attention, be astonished, tell about it.”
Yesterday I visited the trumpeter swans at the nearby park again, this time with my long lens. One of the swans was still on the nest, the other out foraging for food. “What a gift!” I thought. As I was leaving another swan lover was arriving. “Did you see any babies yet?” she shouted to me. “Not yet,” I answered, “but soon I’m sure.”
Have a beautiful day friends.
May you walk in beauty.
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