Posts in Category: Sunday
A Stack of Cranes: Happy Sunday!
This is an unusual shot. The normal flight pattern of Sandhill Cranes is in a line, with each bird drafting the one ahead, riding the wave of the first birds passage a little above or a little below. They don’t do the V thing geese do, with each bird a body length to the left or right of the leader. In all my flight shots of cranes from this year’s trip to Bosque del Apache, this is the only one where they are stacked up.
Of course, if you look carefully you will see that the highest bird in the stack is actually the second bird down (notice the position of the top bird’s feet under the wing of the second bird), which throws the apparent order into total confusion. I am no longer sure where the birds were in actual relationship to each other. It might actually be two intersecting groups of two, caught as one group passed the other.
Whatever is actually going on, it is a striking image…and there is no escaping the beauty of those huge wings.
Canon SX50HS in Sports Mode. Just under 700mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 320. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: I thought I was going to write about the absence of drafting behavior in our kind, until I remembered trucker convoys on the highway, and racing strategy (both bicycle and auto). You would have to consider the first as pretty much the same kind of cooperative drafting as geese and cranes employ, where the lead position rotates through the group to average out and distribute the advantage to the to each individual in the group…and the second as a competitive adaptation of the technique, where individual advantage is taken a the expense of the leader…but both are undoubtedly genuine examples of the behavior in human kind. We do draft one another, when there is enough advantage to be gained. No different than geese and cranes. From my observations of cranes, I even suspect that their drafting behavior is closer to the racers’ than it is to that of the geese and truckers.
I am not certain there is a clear spiritual lesson in there anywhere…or rather, I am pretty certain there is not.
What would spiritual drafting look like? Would it be something like the veneration of the saints…or the orders of religions orders? And which form of drafting would each of those be…cooperative or competitive…geese or crane?
Can we see the spiritual drafting principle in Jesus’ words. “Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls. For my yoke is easy and my burden is light.” Can we ride the wave of his passage as the Son flies to the Father and eternity? And do we look like a flock of geese or a line of cranes as we go?
Or maybe we look like a stack of cranes…a rare site indeed…ungainly and unlikely but with the beauty of our wings fully spread?
Bosque Dawn 2: Happy Sunday!
On Saturday at the Festival of the Cranes I woke myself up early, grabbed a shower and a banana from the breakfast buffet at the hotel, and made the 25 mile drive out to Bosque Del Apache National Wildlife Refuge to be there well before dawn. When I made the dawn run on Thursday, I had been just slightly too late, and I had driven all the way in to the Flight Deck on the main pond at Bosque. I almost missed the rising of the Snow Geese who, that morning and in that place, were up and in the air a good ten minutes before the sun touched the horizon. I did not want to be late again…so I left earlier and I did not go so far into the Refuge.
I stopped at the newer ponds along NM 1, just inside the refuge. Good thing. The parking lots were already about full, and close to two hundred people lined the service road that boarders the ponds…many of them with their 600mm Canon lenses on big tripods, and at least one other camera body with a shorter lens for flight shots, but just as many with no camera at all…or with only a phone camera. I know why the big lens guys (and girls) are there, but I am always impressed that normal citizens, with no photographic imperative (or only so much as a phone camera indicates) will leave warm beds, bundle up, and drive out to shiver in the dawn to catch the rise of the geese and cranes.
I am impressed by the numbers, but I totally understand the motivation. Anyone who has ever seen the geese and cranes rise at dawn once will be indelibly marked with the desire to see it again. And anyone who has heard a friend or relative describe the experience…who has witnessed the glow in the eyes and the grin that cover the inadequate, stumbling words of the description (which often amounts to no more that “you just gotta see it!”)…will have reason for enough curiosity (if they are alive at all to nature) to want to see it for themselves. Some of these people have driven down from Albuquerque this Saturday morning, getting up at 3 am to arrive and stand beside me on this patch of dirt road beside the shallow flooded field ponds. Some of the big lens crowd have traveled (as I have) across the breath or depth of the USA to be there.
Wherever we come from, we share the anticipation, the eager excitement, as we wait for dawn. Myself, I can not resist running out to the edge of the road on the other side of the parking lot to catch a few shots of the sky as the sun rises, though I know each time I do that I might have my back turned when the geese rise.
Or I turn to watch the color come into the southern sky over the mountains and the cars in the parking lot.
The geese are late this morning. Something in the air is holding them on the ponds well past the real dawn on the opposite horizon. We are getting cold now.
And then it happens, without any warning beyond a sudden increase in the volume of the constant chorus of geese honks and cackles, and prehistoric voices of the cranes…woosh…and the air of full of gyring bodies, beating wings, and ashudder with the cries of the geese and the alram of the cranes. Only the geese come up off the water. The cranes are made of sterner stuff, and besides, lack the ability to leap direct into the air…they need a runway to get airborne…but the geese are enough.
In the half-light of the dawn my camera strains to catch more than a blur in the mass of geese. They spiral up and out…not a normal panic this, where the geese will settle back in the same pond or field after something puts them up…but a mass movement of geese to their daytime feeding grounds. They circle overhead, the flock stretching out and branching off as they form into different curving lines and head for the horizons across the delicate tints of the dawn to find some farm field full of unharvested grain…or some newly flooded crop field on the refuge.
And by now the sun is up, though still hidden behind clouds, and the last tints are fading to gold in the east. Over there the air is still full of the birds that have come up off the Flight Deck Pond, to far away for more than silhouettes and a benediction on the last of dawn.
Happy Sunday!
Sunset on the Flight Deck: Bosque del Apache. Happy Sunday!
For me Bosque del Apache has always been a very special place. I love the water and the mountains, the concentration of wildlife, the feeling of community among staff, the Friends of Bosque group, and the large group of full and part time volunteers. I like the small college town feel of Sucorro, which overlays the essential Hispanic cowboy and farming culture.
I like the fact that, year after year, the spectacle of the geese and cranes at dawn and sunset continues to attract crowds of people…not so much birders…as regular folk who make the drive down from Albuquerque and Santa Fe, or who include the Bosque in their vacation plans, just to stand to the edge of the road, the edge of a pond, or on the Flight Deck as the sun rises or sets and watch and listen. It is often cold, and people are bundled up, with hats and scarves and gloves…cold even in heavy winter coats…but they are there, waiting for the cranes to come in or the geese to rise.
And when it happens there is an energy that sweeps the crowd…a kind of glee…an obvious and overflowing delight. I love to watch the people coming off the Flight Deck…the uniformity and yet the vast variety of grins! You see the grin in the eyes of even those most muffled in scarves.
And that is just the spectacle of the birds. If you are at Bosque for a week in November (or almost any month) you are just about guaranteed one spectacular dawn and one spectacular sunset: the kind that touch the very deepest places of awe in us. The sun rises and the sun sets everyday…but there are sunrises and sunsets that are simply something to see! And you hear it in the crowd. “Now that is really something!” That is about as close as we can get to describing what such a sunrise or sunset does to us. Something. Something universal and powerful. Something that makes us glad to be alive. Something that fills us with thanksgiving. Something very close to the root of awe in us.
I finished at the vendor’s tent (I am, after all, at Bosque to work) just in time on Friday to get out to the Flight Deck for the sunset fly in of the geese. The Deck itself was already packed shoulder to shoulder with people and I had no intention of attempting to worm my way to a spot on the rail. I parked further down and planned to shoot the incoming geese and cranes from the edge of the pond. But then the sky happened, and the sunset bloomed. I took several shots from the road, out over the cars, but it really needed the reflecting water of the pond, and the only way to get that was get out on the Flight Deck. I found a spot at the rail on the boardwalk leading out to the deck that worked…that gave me the expanse of water and sky I had seen in my mind’s eye.
The Canon SX50HS has a hand-held night scene mode which I am experimenting with for sunrises and sunsets, and I used it here. It takes three very rapid shots and combines them in-camera. There is just enough exposure blending to extend the range of the image…to capture a realistic foreground as well as the drama of the sky. Just my normal processing in Lightroom produces among the most natural sunrise and sunset shots I have yet managed. Of course I had to try it here.
I took a lot of shots and worked hard to keep the Flight Deck itself out of the images, but actually, it this one where I intentionally included the end of the deck and the people on it as part of the composition that really captures the experience best for me.
And for the Sunday thought: for me awe is an essential element of faith…I don’t believe I could believe in, or put my faith in, a Creator who was not awesome in every way…who did not inspire a feeling of root awe in me in every encounter…in every aspect of the Creator’s person, presence and works…and in relationship to me. Wonder is required, and wonder is my most basic emotion. Followed closely by thankfulness. “I have seen the face of God and yet I live!” The most wonderful thing about the awe of God is that we can experience it, more that than, we can participate in it, in its full awesome glory and yet live to tell about it. The most wonderful thing is that we are made to tell about it…that telling about it is, at least in part, what we are created to do.
Wonder and thanksgiving are the compounded elements of love…and ultimately it is love I feel in a sunset like this one…and it is the Creator’s love I am inspired to tell about. I have been overwhelmed by beauty and splendor, and yet I live! That is love in its most essential form. Or that’s what I think.
The Wide View: Branch Brook Pano. Happy Sunday!
This is a two shot panorama from the viewing platform on Branch Brook at Rachel Carson National Wildlife Refuge in Wells Maine. Around the second bend you see in the middle distance there Branch Brook and the Merriland River join to form the Little River for its short winding run to the sea. The tide is full in, so Branch Brook does not look very brook-like.
This is actually two in-camera HDR images stitched together in PhotoShop Elements’ PhotoMerge tool, and then final processed in Lightroom. I used a handy post on the platform and simply rotated the camera between images. I am increasingly pleased with the ease and the quality of the Canon SX50HS’s in-camera HDR. It is not obvious at all, yet produces a very nice extended range image. The clouds, in particular are very natural, and yet the shadows are open and the greens of the evergreens are indeed green, not black. It gives me just enough extra to work with in Lightroom to produce some of the most natural images I have ever done.
For the full panoramic effect you really need to click on the image and view it full screen in the lightbox.
Canon SX50HS. Program with auto iContrast and Shadow Fill. Two 24mm equivalent field of view exposures. f4 @ 1/500th @ ISO 80.
And for the Sunday Thought. It is, sometimes, about taking the wide view. I love the small intricate details of life in this world, and if you flip back through my posts, you will see that I spend a lot of time celebrating them. I also love the big wide angle vista, which landscape under a dramatic sky. The last 3 cameras I have owned have had zooms that reach 24mm equivalent, and I doubt I will ever buy another camera that is limited to 28mm, or (shudder) 35mm at the wide end (yet, of course, I used to think of both 35mm and 28mm as wide angle.) And beginning about 2 years ago I have taken the occasional Panorama…where more than one image is stitched to create a view that stretches our perception of the reality around us…though oddly it does so by presenting a swath that more closely corresponds to our natural naked-eye view of the world. Part of my move to Panorama has undoubtedly been facilitated by the availability of software, in-camera, and in post processing, that makes it easy to stitch images together. But part of it has been a new appreciation for the wide view, even though those intricate details I love are diminished…submerged in the stretch of imagery across full width of my computer screen. I have come to appreciate the sweep of the landscape that overloads my senses and touches a bit of a different kind of awe in me.
And I am thinking of this in the context of the coming election. For me, elections are a very spiritual matter, and I really want to be sure that my spiritual self is fully engaged in my choices. In fact, I want to make sure that any decision I make that has the kind of consequences a national election has is made in the spirit and not in the flesh. And I find that what is required, by my spirit, is the panoramic view.
Sometimes it seems the election is all about the intricate detail of issues…with the hot issues…those that raise the most emotional heat…being the focus of all the attention. We are tempted, in fact we are encouraged by ad after ad and article after article and news story after news story, to make our decision based on the candidate’s position on those issues…on this issue or that issue…often on a single issue among all the others…one issue alone.
Among my people, my fellow Christians, this approach is particularly prevalent…and there are issues which have deep, undeniable and unavoidable, spiritual ramifications. Of course those issues and the candidate’s position on them are important…but they are not what my spirit craves when facing a decision of this magnitude. I find myself pulling back for the wide…the panoramic…view, where all such intricate detail is submerged in the sweep of the candidate’s life…what I can see or sense of the candidate’s spirit. I feel much more comfortable deciding based on who I perceive a the person behind the politics to be (difficult as that is to determine sometimes) than I do based on what the person thinks and promises about the hot issues.
Because I will be traveling to Texas next Tuesday, I have, in fact, already cast my vote. I am not going to tell you who I voted for (and certainly I am not going to tell you who you should vote for). But I will tell you that I voted on the wider view…I voted on the panorama of the person…I voted on what I could sense of the sweep of the spirit behind the politics.
Sometimes you have to take the wider view.
Gannets in the Dawn: Happy Sunday!
Most days in the fall, with binoculars or a spotting scope, you can see Northern Gannets off the beach in Cape May, New Jersey. They are generally fishing the waters well beyond naked-eye view. You might catch a glimmer of white from the winds as they turn, a shimmer on the horizon, but it is mostly faith that brings the binoculars or the scope up to scan the distance for these magnificent birds. And faith is generally rewarded. They are out there most days.
The Northern Gannet is a big bird. It is a yard long, with five to six foot wings, and weighs six and a half pounds. That is very heavy for a bird. They nest in the North Atlantic, almost 70% on rocky islands off the UK. I have seen at least one pair nesting as far south as Machias Island, off Rockland Maine, but that was very unusual. Generally they only enter US waters in late fall, through the winter, and into early spring. They spread down the US coast and around the Caribbean and just into Mexican waters. And as I say, they generally fish well out to sea, diving from a hundred feet in the air, completely submerging with a splash that could easily be mistaken for a whale spouting, coming back to the surface and taking flight with any prey.
Saturday morning, the coming storm (Hurricane Sandy is scheduled to make landfall right over Cape May on Tuesday morning) had driven the Gannets in, and there were hundreds of them…more likely thousands of them…visible just off-shore just after dawn. I watched them from the top of the dune behind the The Meadows (The Nature Conservancy’s Cape May Migratory Bird Sanctuary) and then walked out to a hundred yards from the tide line for even closer views. I had never seen so many Gannets so close. There were two local birders out there on the beach and they had never seen so many Gannets so close either.
The first image is a group of Gannets fishing what as apparently a fairly concentrated school of fish just off the beach and between me and the sunrise (well buried in clouds). (The line of birds low in the frame are Scoters.) The light was a challenge. It was after dawn but the heavy clouds kept it pretty dim. I switched to Sports mode for some flight shots, but again these images are pushing the boundaries of what is possible. They look pretty good at this size, but you would not be impressed if you viewed them 1 to 1 on a large monitor. They look more like clever drawings than photographs at that size…and, in essence, they are just that. The camera’s software used the data collected by the sensor to draw an image of the bird using tiny little dots of color…and in this light, there was barely enough data. Still, considering the conditions, and the difficulty of flight shots in the first place, I am pretty happy with the results.
And for the Sunday Thought: this new camera has features that are constantly tempting me to attempt the impossible. Really the light Saturday morning was just too dim for flight shots, to dim and flat for photography of any kind. A conventional DSLR and long lens (half the 1200mm focal length of the zoom on the Canon SX50HS) would have had extreme difficulty finding focus on these moving birds in the dawn murk. Yet, in Sports Mode, the SX50HS locked on, and, despite my lack of practice with flying birds, I was able to frame and follow the birds as I shot bursts of 10 frames. Sports Mode automatically pushes the ISO to 800 and above to give faster shutter speeds, and switches in 5 frames per second burst mode with focus between frames.
Considering what the camera had to deal with, I have no right to quibble with the results. These images would not have been possible at all without the advanced features of this little Point & Shoot Super-zoom. So when I blow them up very large and look very close, and see the less than perfect rendering, I try to remember not to compare them to what I had hoped to see…but to compare them to no image at all! By that standard, they are pretty good indeed.
Shifting to a spiritual view, I am thinking that we need to be tempted to attempt the spiritually impossible more often…you know, things like unconditional love, absolute generosity, self-less giving and self-less living, and even intimacy with the pure light of creation. The best we might manage is enough to make a rough sketch of the reality of those experiences, but then, we should remember to judge those sketches, rough and imperfect as they must be when we blow them up large and look close, by the standard of how they compare to no sketch at all. A very rough rendering in action of unconditional love would transform most of us…and any attempt at self-less giving and self-less living has to be more satisfying than the alternative. And just the tiniest glimpse of the pure light of creation, filtered through the imperfect medium of our lives and haltingly shared with others, is so much better than the darkness of unbelief!
We have to be thankful for any image of Gannets against the dawn.
Little Blue Butterfly. Happy Sunday!
I am just back from a week in Virginia at our corporate offices. We moved recently, to an upscale business park west of Richmond, and our building is right next to the last in an extensive system of landscape and drainage ponds that run the length of the park. There is a surprising amount of wildlife around those ponds…from Canada Geese, by way of Belted Kingfisher, to Dragon and Butterflies. I always try to spend a lunch hour or two, or some time right after work, around the ponds on every office visit.
This is an Eastern Blue butterfly, and it is really tiny…less than a half inch wing tip to wing tip, so looking at it on the lcd of my 14 inch laptop it is about 2x life size. The little tails make the identification easy as the other Blues common to VA do not have them.
I like how the butterfly floats above the out of focus busy background and how the powdery blue stands out against the light tans of the fallen reeds.
The image was taken from about 5 feet, at about 1800mm equivalent field of view (1200mm optical zoom plus 1.5x digital tel-converter function). Canon SX50HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. f6.5 @ 1/640th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday Thought: I always find a week in the corporate office twice as tiring as week working from my office at home (more tiring even than a week of back to back birding festivals where I am out early and in late, and spend hours at day talking to birders 🙂 I don’t work any harder in the corporate office than I do at home, and I certainly don’t get any more done (generally not as much), but it takes more out of me. And it is not that I get less rest, living in a hotel. My evening routine processing images if I have any, then watching a few Hulu or Amazon Prime shows is the same, and I get to bed at the same time. ?? Though I talk to my wife less, we do talk at least twice a day, and often longer at a stretch than when talk at home some days.
Partially I think it is the lack of natural light. At home I work in front of a window and can look up and out anytime. In the office I am buried in the back of a maze of hall ways, with no view to the outside.
Then too, at home I can walk to the kitchen and make a cup of tea when ever I want to. We have a kitchen, and when I remember to bring it, tea at the office too…but it is not the same. At the office I have to go out to eat for lunch…find a restaurant, and generally since I am eating with colleagues, talk a good deal of business over our enchiladas or pizza. At home I eat at my desk, and spend most of an hour outside about 3 days a week. Even if I don’t get outside, I read or watch something from Amazon and do not think about business at all for an hour.
Of course, the only connection to this picture is that it was taken on a day at the office when I ate alone and got back in time to spend a half hour outside.
The truth is, the weariness I feel after a week in the office, is not a physical weariness at all. It is a soul weariness. The soul (our inner self and the self we present to the world) is, or should be, the physical, temporal manifestation of the spirit, in all times and in all places. It should be the spirit at work in the world. The energy and life of the spirit fill the soul like rising waters fill a spring, like sunlight through a window fills a room with light, like the air I breath fills my body with oxygen, like electricity turns a lump of plastic or metal and silicon and copper (my laptop or my Kindle Fire) into a universe of music and images and ideas…into whatever I want or need from the world around me.
When I am in the office my soul is so focused (necessarily) on getting the job done and making the business work for all my colleagues, that the flow of life from the spirit is pinched, constricted. It is not that I stop breathing the life of the spirit, it is that my breathing becomes shallow, and sometimes it is too long between breaths. It is like I am trying to run my laptop on batteries without ever plugging in long enough to fully recharge, or like the electricity that the wall plugs supply simply does not have the amps to get the job done.
I don’t know that there is any cure for it. I suppose I would get used to it if I worked in the office full time. Or then again, I might just get used to being that tired all the time.
I know that when I have to spend a week in the office, it is the little blue butterflies at lunch time that help to get me through it.
September Skies. Happy Sunday!
I have posted two other shots taken under this magnificent September sky, both featuring ponds and reflections of the sky and the first fall color. This was taken just up the road from the ponds, where Rt 9 crosses the Mousam River. I love the drama of the heavy clouds over the landscape, and the line of the river and the fall touched trees running at a slight diagonal across. I like the way the small pool anchors the marsh in the foreground.
Unless you want to shoot sea-scapes, there are only three places within easy drive of my home to catch a big sky. You can go to Laudholm Farm and shoot from the crest of the hill above the farm buildings, or you can go the the Kennebunk Plains, or you can go here to this view up-river on the Mousam. This view has the most potential because you can always play with the marsh and the river to add interest to the foreground, and balance the sky somewhat. But of course a shot like is really all about the sky! September skies.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 24mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 160. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness…using my hyper-real preset to bring up the full range of light values in the image.
And for the Sunday Thought: Every photographer struggles with the simple fact that the technology we work with is simply not capable of capturing or displaying the full range of light we see with our eyes. Digital sensors have improved dramatically, and the best of them, coupled with some automatic in-camera processing, do a very good job of stretching what can be recorded…to the the point where we now can catch a range that was impossible in the days of film. And, with some work in post processing, we can turn that digital data into a representation of reality that, when viewed on our LCD monitors, gives the impression of catching the full range of light that we would see if we were standing before the view in the flesh. But it is still only an impression. The range of light and dark is still considerably compressed. It is a rendering of reality, not reality itself.
And yet it is very satisfying. So satisfying that almost no one, beyond photographers themselves (and maybe some artists) is aware of the compression. A good digital image, correctly captured and intelligently processed for display on an LCD monitor looks amazingly real. When a photograph is well done today, the average viewer will see something very like what the photographer saw in landscape and the sky…and share something very like the same experience. For all it limitations, digital imaging works.
So is there a spiritual side to this?
I don’t think any human being, bound as we apparently are, in time, can come close to capturing or displaying the eternal reality that is present to us in the spirit. There is a light that is love, and love that is light. There is a landscape of unending possibility, with wonder moving up over the horizon like clouds in a September sky. Like the digital imaging of light, our ability to express the light of the spirit, the landscape of the spirit, is limited by the technology. We are the technology. We are too small to hold it all. The best we can do is to capture a compressed range of what we experience in the spirit and process it through our lives to present, and to share, our best rendering.
And the wonder is that it can be so good, so satisfying. I can’t give you September skies over the reach of the Mousam…but if I try, if I do my best with the technology I have, I can come close. I can’t give you the infinite love that is the light of the eternal landscape, but if I try, if I do my best with what I have, I might come close.
There might even be a bit of that eternal light caught in these words and in this image of September skies!
Dog on the edge of Autumn. Happy Sunday!
Despite the weather app, which called for a partially sunny day all yesterday, it rained in the morning and we did not see any sun at all until after 2 in the afternoon. Even then, the coast was still under the cloud layer, so I headed inland to Old Falls on the Mousam River…hoping for dragonflies and maybe a touch of fall color.
Old Falls is my classic Autumn shot…with the rushing white water in the foreground and generally a smooth expanse of reflective water behind, receding into the flaming maples and the dark green pines. With the right sky, it is spectacular, and I will certainly get back the over the next few weeks to try to catch the colors at their peek (and the right sky :).
Yesterday though was special in its own way. Though the trees are just beginning to turn, there was enough color to make it interesting. I parked and walked across the road to stand at the rail of the bridge over the Mousam for a picture, and there was this dog there, swimming in the water. As I watched, it climbed out and walked to the end of a point of rock and stood, or eventually sat, and watched the river flowing by. It must live in the house above the river on that side. It looked perfectly at home, and it was certainly unattended. No one was throwing sticks in the water for it to fetch. It was just there, right were it needed to be for my images.
I have several different shots, with alternative framing. You will probably see at least one more as the week goes on.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. About 280mm equivalent field of view. f5 @ 1/200th @ ISO 200. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. More than usual work on balancing the light for best effect. Cropped slightly at the bottom for composition.
And for the Sunday Thought.
A couple of things actually. Shots like this continuously remind me of how dependent I am, as a photographer, on circumstance for my best images. I don’t say chance. I don’t believe in chance. If such encounters, such circumstances, are intended, then certainly our response must be thankfulness…even as we enjoy them. I nearly laughed out loud when I saw the dog there, framed in the first reflections of autumn foliage, perfect on his rock. I mean, what a gift!
I feel it every time I go out to take pictures, but, of course, the intention behind my photographic encounters must operate in every circumstance of my life. Sometimes that is harder to remember (and harder to appreciate).
Then too, I think that each photographic encounter, intentional as it is, is only as good as I make it. The dog, the foliage, the flowing water, the rock were all a gift. The images I made of them, and my sharing them with you, are my gift back…the tangible expression of my appreciation. The images depend on how well I respond to the circumstance. When I do well, and that is affirmed by the response of others to the images, then that just increases my thankfulness. It is a privilege to part of the intention…for in the end…the intention was not to show me the dog on the rock in the river framed in fall reflections…but to show how I saw it to you. It is all the gift. It is all a single flowing act of creation.
And now I am thinking how it might change my life if I could see every circumstance that way…if my first thought was, “What can I do with this to show my appreciation and make it a gift to others?” What if every interaction with the world around me were as intentionally creative as my photography? Words spoken at the checkout at the grocers. Every conversation on every car ride. Every trip to the post office or the mail box. Every phone call received and every ppt written for work. What if I could see every circumstance of my life as part of the flow of creation: see the gift in every encounter, turn it to gift of my own, and pass it on.
I think that might be what it means to be a saint. I have a ways to go yet, myself, but I see the possibility, in a dog on a rock in the river surrounded by autumn color and light.
Christmas in September, take 2. Meadowhawks
Last Monday I posted an image of a Green Darner Dragonfly mating wheel in a Blue Spruce tree, under the Christmas in September heading. This is even more Christmassy. It is a mating pair of either White-faced, Cherry-faced, or Ruby Meadowhawks. These three, with bright red males, are all here right now and all so similar that I can not tell from the photo, and I did not see the pair from any other angle. You need to see the face, and even then, it is a chancy thing. We also have the Autumn Meadowhawk right now, in great abundance, which is another one easily confused with this trio, but the Autumn would show lighter colored legs. Close as I can get.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 1240mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/200th @ ISO 400. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness.
And for the Sunday thought: I am rapidly coming to the end of dragonfly season. The last Odonata fly in Maine in October. Already the pond, which was alive with dragons and damsels a few weeks ago, is very quiet. You have mating Meadowhawks and Bluets in some numbers, a few Common Darners still flying on warm afternoons, and a solitary Black Saddlebags. There is only one pair of Pondhawks still there, and all the Blue Dashers are gone. I expect one day soon to find the pond and the air above it empty, at least of Odonata.
And, since dragon and damselfly hunting has been such a big part of my summer, both personally and photographically, I am faced with more than the usual fall “what next?” Oh, I know, we will have foliage in a few weeks, and just yesterday my daughter was remarking that the “September skies” are back. By the end of September my travel schedule kicks in, with trips to Oregon, New Jersey, Texas, and New Mexico before Thanksgiving. So I will be busy, and there will be lots to photograph. (And dragon and damselflies still flying in the southern reaches of the journey!)
Still, today, I am caught with that “seasons passing too quickly” feeling. My soul is singing “Where have all the dragons and damsels of summer gone?” The wheel of time is threatening to run me over.
And I was thinking about time and eternity in another context this week, thinking that too often we think of eternity as an “unimaginable and unending stretch of time” when in fact, eternity is the absence of time altogether. Time and eternity are two alternate views of reality, and they exist side by side, or, better, intertwined…not as we picture them, one after the other, sequentially. Especially NOT “time while we live, and eternity after we die.” And every religion worth the name has offered some way out…some way to transform the temporal view to the eternal. The temporal is, well, temporary at best, and often seen as illusion. Only the eternal is divine. Every religion values eternity and devalues time.
Strange that.
Because, of course, rightly seen, time is just the way we humans experience eternity. We see the passing seasons, and we know, especially as we age, that we have a limited number of them. We see people born and we see people die. Here and not here. And because of that we begin to count the moments…to see each moment as one more or one less, rather than as the moving point, the living point, where we touch eternity…the moving point, the living point, where eternity touches the world of matter in each of us. The only true way out is to learn to see the eternal in every moment, to be the eternal in every moment…to live in time as though there were no time.
Now don’t think I am devaluing time here again. What I mean is that we should each bring the full rich living experience of eternity to bear on every passing moment, so that every moment becomes as valuable to us as all eternity. I mean that we, each of us, should become the moving, the living, point were the eternal divine touches the world.
Seasons come and seasons go. The dragons and damsels of this year are almost gone. And the question is not really “what’s next?” It is always “what’s now?”…an eternity of what’s now…a now that is eternal.
And in saying it, I can almost grasp it. I can almost see it, taste it, feel it. It is almost my reality. And maybe that is as close as we can get…the rest…in this as in everything…must be faith.
A moment filled with meadowhawks in a Blue Spruce tree is, by faith, eternal.
High Seas! Kennebunk ME. Happy Sunday!
My weather app was flashing red yesterday with high surf warnings. We are getting the last tired remnants of hurricane/tropical storm Leslie moving up the Maine coast, bringing strong onshore winds and high seas, followed by a night of thunder storms and a morning of showers. This being southern Maine, and there being actually no real threat to life or limb, such a warning brings out 3 types: surfers, tourists, and locals…so, actually…just about everyone left in Maine in September. 🙂
There were probably 100 surfers in the water off Gooches Beach in Kennebunk, a high number considering Maine waters are wet-suit waters, and a good run on the best of days lasts about 30 seconds. Still if you are a surfer in Maine, you make the best of any opportunity. There were also more tour buses along the beach than I have ever seen on a single afternoon. It is the start of the fall foliage tour season, so I expect to see the leaf-peeper buses begin to arrive, but I suspect this weekend some enterprising tour company in Boston put on a Maine surf special, or, at the least, more than your average number of buses left the interstate in Kennebunk to loop the beaches and see what the waves were up to. And finally, there were the locals like me…drawn to the beach to take a few photos of higher than average seas…hoping for some drama.
Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1/3EV exposure compensation. 235mm equivalent field of view. f5.6 @ 1/1250th @ ISO 125. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness. The 4 frames per second burst rate on the SX40 is just the right speed to catch the waves at peak if you shoot through.
And for the Sunday Thought. It is beyond denying that there is something in the human spirit, or at least in the human soul, that enjoys bad weather…that wants to walk the edge of the storm…that that wants to face into the wind and feel the sting of flying water. As above, it is, at least in part, the drama, the excitement, the mild rush of adrenalin that a calculated risk, a considered threat to life and limb, brings. There is a tipping point of course, where the excitement of the storm tips over into terror, but when it is just a high surf warning there is little danger of that.
I would like to think too, that there is a real spiritual element to it…that in facing the awesome power of nature we affirm both our selves, in our most durable, and yet totally vulnerable, smallness, and our relationship to the awesome and the overwhelming. It is a taste, and only a taste, of the root of all religious experience. It gives us, whether we know it or not, whether we are ready to admit it or not, a hint of what it might be like to be overwhelmed by the awesome love of the creator God…to be caught up in the surf of grace and lifted in a glorious spray over the rock of our selves into brief beauty. It gives us a sense of how small we are in our own loves, and how great and all embracing is the love of God in which we are submerged, in which we are carried on toward glory. And yet we endure. We are safe. We are, when surrendered to the awesome, most certainly and most truly ourselves. Our durability is in our vulnerability, and we can actually delight in our relationship to the awesome and overwhelming.
I would like to think (and really there is no one to stop me) that that taste of the divine is what draws us all down to the beach when the high surf warnings are flashing.