Here is my fourth photo and essay in my current photography/writing project. This is a shorter essay than those I wrote before. I plan to revisit it later to see if I have more to say on this topic. Writing a new essay for each photograph gets a little more challenging each time I begin a new one…
Emergence
When I go out to make photographs in wild areas I often discover a sense of order emerges even in completely wild areas. Elements of nature create repeating patterns suggesting different kinds of music to me. I especially experience these kinds of patterns in marshes and shallow lakes. They often remind me of a kind of primordial soup. At first a scene may look like chaos but the longer I look the more that I sense rhythms and patterns emerging from the chaos.
I’ve learned to slow down and gaze at landscapes with soft eyes until I find a pleasing pattern emerging. I wonder if this hidden order is a part of what makes something beautiful.
Over the many years that I’ve made photographs I have come to believe that one must learn through practice to look at the world through eyes that see beauty hiding in plain sight.
When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us. There are people who see only dullness in the world and that is because their eyes have already been dulled. So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see.
― John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
I began choosing to see beauty when I first began making photographs full-time. It takes time to see through eyes of beauty but it’s so worth it. And I think it also takes a certain mindset. I must be present and open and ready to see, also reverent, ready to experience wonder, and patient.
The fact that we are living on this beautiful blue planet circling our sun at just the right distance to allow life to emerge fills me with awe, wonder, and gratitude. The whole idea of emergence fills me with awe. Where did everything come from? For what purpose? When I consider the number stars in the sky and the size of the universe I cannot comprehend it all.
Emergence of ever more complex structures seems to be programmed into the nature of our evolving cosmos.
― The Syntellect Hypothesis: Five Paradigms of the Mind’s Evolution
Similarly when I look closely at a leaf, seashell, stem or plant I see incredible order and similar patterns. The more I look closely at the world and all of it’s huge and intricate beauty and forms, the more awe I experience.
When we approach with reverence, great things decide to approach us. Our real life comes to the surface and its light awakens the concealed beauty in things. When we walk on the earth with reverence, beauty will decide to trust us. The rushed heart and arrogant mind lack the gentleness and patience to enter that embrace.
― John O’Donohue, Beauty: The Invisible Embrace
The emergence of beauty, the emergence of life, brings order to chaos. A beautiful photograph does the same. In ever-changing landscapes, even the most chaotic, one can discover pockets of order, rhythm, balance, and beauty.
The whole is so much more than the sum of its parts. Balanced on the edge of chaos, beauty emerges.
May you walk in beauty.
Note: I made the following photographs yesterday while wandering through parts of the Minnesota Landscape Arboretum looking for scenes that tell the story of love and longing as the season continues to turn toward winter.
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