Posts in Category: The Generous Eye
And the sky above… Happy Sunday!
Back Creek Marsh, Kennebunk Maine
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
I could see from my yard that drama was building in the sky to the west, and would sweep over us in the next rew hours, so I packed my cameras and headed out to catch some of it. We live a forested landscape…so much so that there are few places with a broad horizon…at least to the west. To the east, of course, we have the sea, and as broad a horizon as anyone could want, but weather systems move over us from the west, and the best you can do on the east is catch the storm going away. Still, the beach, and the marshes behind the dunes, do provide enough sky so that is the first place I headed in search of photos of the coming storms.
This is a sweep panorama of the western sky and the marsh from just behind the dunes. The clouds high in the sky are just the harbingers…the real storms are still down on the horizon just above the trees. I drove further inland, to the Kennebunk Plains, to catch those. Still, the sweep of the creek, the line of the road on the right, the trees on the horizon, and the balance of the sky make for a beauty worth seeing…and worth sharing.
I think our love of moving water and stormy skies comes from somewhere very deep within us. I think we see the power of our God, and the beauty, in such a landscape. God speaks presence and present action. “I am here and I am working. See what I make. See my making.” Or at least that is what the generous eye sees and hears.
It took the storms on the horizon about 90 minutes to reach the coast. Heavy rain, high winds, and thunder. I was out on the Plains when the weather and the drama reached there. Beauty runs ahead of the storm. Beauty runs in the storm, and beauty comes after. God is all in all.
Happy Sunday!
Florida Scrub Jay. Happy Sunday!
Florida Scrub Jay, Merritt Island NWR, Titusville FL
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
This is my third post of Florida Scrub Jay pics from my encounter with a pair on my last day in Florida for the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival. It was an extra, as in unplanned, day. My flight home was canceled, so, after a morning in the flied with my daughter Sarah, and after dropping her off at the airport in Orlando for her fight back to New Mexico, I made one last run out to Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge to catch the afternoon/evening light. Since it was extra time, I took the time to go look for Florida Scrub Jays where Sarah and my friend Rich had seen them one day when I was busy teaching a workshop. And they were there! Just two, likely a pair, but it was my first FSJ encounter in over 10 years, and my first ever on Merritt Island. I took way too many pictures. This is a collage of two shots that provides evidence for my contention that the Florida Scrub Jay is the most beautiful of eastern Jays.
The encounter was even more special because it was shared. A couple, the husband a fellow photographer, came up behind me and, feeling generous, I waved them up to stand with me so they could get photos too. (By then I was confident that the Scrub Jays were not alarmed at our presence at all…and in fact they were still sitting on their bushes when we decided we had devoted enough camera memory to them and walked on.) Sharing an experience like this with others, even if strangers, deepens my pleasure considerably. It is the shared wonder…awe reinforces awe…and the result is more joy. It is even more intense if you are sharing the experience with someone you already love, and I really wished Sarah were still there in those moments, but it is impossible not to love the ones you share with…or at least it is for me. I felt like I was radiating good will…good will that encompassed the cooperate Scrub Jays, and certainly my fellow photographer and his wife, in one big bubble of delight.
And I feel a bit of that right now. Partially it is memory, but it is also this sharing by proxy that is this post. I intend for you to share in the joy of discovery, in the wonder I experienced there in the field with these Jays. The thing about the generous eye is that light builds on light. In generosity you always get back as much or more than you give. Always. Because the light in you is met by the light in others, and is amplified. That is the way it works. Always. God is just good that way. God is good in all ways.
Happy Sunday!
Humming in the rain. Happy Sunday!
Rufous-tailed Hummingbird. The Lodge at Pico Bonito, Honduras
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
On my last morning at the Lodge at Pico Bonito in Honduras, while I waited for the bus to the airport, I spent 3 hours around the Lodge in the rain…mostly shooting from the covered decks and walkways. I made the occasional foray out into the grounds with my umbrella when something worthy presented itself and tempted me to chase it (the Toucans for instance). This Rufous-tailed Hummingbird was using one of the flowers right off the deck at the restaurant for a perch. It was a favorite perch…I saw Rufous-tailed, Crowned Wood-nymth, Jocobin, and Saberwing use it over the course of the three hours. Despite the subdued light, there is a lot to see in this image. You get a bird-in-the-hand view of the feather texture. You can see where the angle of the light catches color from the feathers under the neck, and what they look like when the light is not refracting through them. I love the little drops of water on the head, and the rain streaks caught in the back and foreground. I love the clarity and the liquid perfection of the eye.
The shot has an intimate feeling to it…I think because it captures something shared: a shared attitude. Both the the hummer and I were enduring the rain…making the most of a “bad” situation…or rather transforming a potentially bad situation into a good one by the persistence of a positive attitude. A little rain is not going to stop either of us from doing what needs to be done…and, in my case at least, from doing what I enjoy doing. It would be ungenerous of me to think less of the bird. I suspect, from the look of him, that he was enjoying the morning too. It is a shared moment of enjoyment…in the rain. Intimate.
I would like to think that God looks into my rainy days in the same way…enjoying my enjoyment…sharing an intimate moment. It would be ungenerous of me tho think otherwise of God, don’t you think? And when your eye is generous, God is always the third in any intimate encounter between two creatures. Enjoying the enjoyment! Or that is what I think.
Happy Sunday!
Winter Robin. Happy Sunday!
American Robin, Roger’s Pond, Kennebunk Maine
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light.” Jesus
I went out, after clearing the next to the last snow storm out of the drive before dawn, to catch the early light on the fresh snow at Roger’s Pond, and to see if the Eagles were in. I was so early the fruit tree by the picnic shelter was still in shadow, but the Robins were there, perched on the snowy branches, eating fruit at a astonishing rate. It is a classic winter Robin shot, with the snow capping the red fruit, and the open beak of the bird.
Okay, so seeing a picture like this, I have to think of the time Jesus once told his disciples that they should not worry themselves about what they would eat. “Look at the birds of the air;” he said, “they do not sow or reap or store away in barns, and yet your heavenly Father feeds them. Are you not much more valuable than they?” These days, Robins can live through a Maine winter. They get by, at least in part, on the ornamental fruit trees we have planted around our houses. If food gets scarce, they do what they did before we got here…they go as far south as needed to find food. And, to be honest, not all of them make it. But that does not diminish the truth of what Jesus was really saying. Jesus was not saying that we would not have to work for our living (birds certainly work for theirs), or that life would not sometimes be hard to the point of breaking…he was saying that we should not worry about it…that we should simply trust in God and get on with it. We should have confidence that we matter to God as least as much as the birds. We should live with confidence, firmly founded on faith in a loving God.
In my experience, this is one of the hardest lessons faith has to teach us. And I think of that, and am both challenged and encouraged, when I see a winter Robin, eating red fruit in a snowy Maine tree. That too, is part of the generous eye.
Happy Sunday!
Gull in Glory! Happy Sunday!I
Herring Gull, Mousam River at Roger’s Pond, Kennebunk Maine
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
I will admit to having a prejudice when it comes to Herring Gulls. Their behavior makes them hard to love. They are bullies: aggressive egg and chick eating, catch stealing, beach hogging, bullies. And yet I have to remind myself that their “bulliness” is in my eye as much, maybe more than, in their nature. They are what they are. They do what they do to survive, as any creature must. In order to see their beauty, I have to be unusually generous of eye. I have to withhold judgement, especially judgement by my own, very human, standards. And, really, withholding is not enough. To be truly generous I need to bypass judgement at its root…to see them, not with my human eye, but with the eye of the spirit…the creative eye of the creator who creates with love.
This image, taken along the Mousam River in Kennebunk, helps. The gull was standing on a snow covered rock in mid-stream, while the rushing rapids behind him threw sparkling droplets into the air. It is certainly the bird in all its glory, and I am just generous enough to see the beauty.
May the Good God grant us all, somewhere in our lives, such a rock to stand on…that even the least generous might sometimes see our beauty. Happy Sunday!
A picture about nothing. Happy Sunday!
White Birch, Laudholm Farms, Wells Maine
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
On my photoprowl out to the snowy fields and forest a few afternoons ago, I was on the boardwalk at the Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farms in Wells, looking for whatever spoke to me of winter. It was early afternoon and the light was already almost horizontal, but where, in the days before the snow, it seemed to pick out the warmth and texture of the world…now it cast blue shadows and drew the detail sharp. The contrast between the texture of the bark on this birch, standing a foot from the boardwalk, and the fine grained texture of the snow behind it caught my eye. There was something in the shadows, the way they lay across the snow and behind the birch, that added interest, and the little shattered stump, so pointy, fell in place as an accent. It was the matter of seconds to lift the camera, already set for great depth of field, frame, placing the diagonal just so, and shoot. In-camera HDR and processing in Lightroom brought up the shadows on the trunk and in the snow to make them look natural, subtly molding the surfaces the textures where they fell.
And still it is a picture of nothing in particular. It is a composition about composition…an image about imagery. I could look at it forever. I am tempted to make a really large print of it and hang it where my eye could discover it again, sometimes, in passing, and pause to see what is new in it. It would make a great picture for the wall of a doctor’s office. 🙂
It is, so to speak, a playground for the generous eye…inviting vision…inviting the light inside to come out and play. I think it brings the spirit to the surface, so it fills the eye, brimming like water in a spring. I think it wakes the wonder that is the life of our souls and tempts us to touch what is eternal in us and in the world. Ah, but it is just a picture, you say…a picture of nothing in particular. Yes, I say, and that is what is so wonderful about it! But it takes a generous eye to see. Happy Sunday!
Mocking December. Happy Sunday!
Mockingbird, Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farms, Wells Maine
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
The warm December in Maine (and the whole east coast) continues…setting all kinds of temperature records. If all the rain we are getting was falling as snow, we would already have huge snow-plow piles in every drive…but as it is, the fields are still bare, and the forests are still skeletal. Worse yet, the birches are already red at the tips.
I spent a few hours at the Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farms yesterday, walking the trails to see what I could find. Not much was moving. In that, and nothing else, it was a typical December day. I did come on this lonely Northern Mockingbird and a few Blue Jays, and of course there were gulls on the dunes on the back side of the beach (the front side too, I am sure, but I did not get that far).
We were talking about all this, the unseasonable warmth etc., at dinner, and one of my daughters said, “yes, our earth is certainly deteriorating.” I replied, “Our earth is certainly changing…there is lots of evidence of that…but there is no evidence that it is deteriorating.” I am not one of those “climate change deniers” but I am also not convinced we fully understand what we are observing. Of course I do see that part of what is going on is very likely tied to our dependence on fossil fuels and our sheer numbers on the planet…but the earth is a living thing…incredibly complex…and with its own immune system and sources of healing. I think we know way too little to say that the earth is deteriorating…that it is sick. Changing, yes. Sick, maybe. Able to heal itself, undoubtedly. And we, of course, will be part of that healing. If we are part of problem, we are also part of the immune system. Hopefully the intelligent part…the creative part…the problem solving part. The part that embodies the creative love that created the earth and the universe, and that sustains it now.
And, of course, all the long range forecasts predict another abnormally cold and snowy winter for Maine this year. A month from now, things at Laudholm Farms might look totally different.
The generous eye sees hope, because hope is in the light that fills us. Like the Mockingbird on an unseasonably warm December day, we may be confused by the weather, but that dose not mean we are not storing up songs for the spring.
Sunset through Beach Rose. Happy Sunday!
Sunset through beach rose, Kennebunk ME
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
The Beach Rose, in December, going on for Christmas, looks brittle and broken…a tangled mass of hairy, thorny stems without much redeeming beauty…but put it in front of the setting sun, and suddenly it is alive again, and full of light. It is all a matter of perspective…of attitude. I find it interesting that these two words, which name the physical relationships between objects, have come to also mean our mental, or even spiritual relationship to the world around us. Perspective names the effect of distance on the apparent relative size of objects between us and the visual horizon…and attitude, in its physical sense, names the angle of incline of objects relative to a plane (a ship on the sea has an attitude measured in degrees, relative to the sea). In the mental/spiritual sense, when we say we have perspective on something…we mean we are viewing it in right relationship to the really important things in our life. If someone says you need an attitude adjustment, they mean that that you need to change your “slant” toward the world. Instead of measuring it in degrees, we say there are bad attitudes and good attitudes…cheerful attitudes and sour attitudes. It is a matter of how you are holding yourself in relation to the world.
The generous eye, the eye that both open to let in the beauty and wonder of the world around us, and open wide enough to let the light within illuminate the beauty and wonder without…which is really saying the same thing twice…determines both our perspective and our attitude.
You can choose how you see the tangled mass of Beach Rose stems. At least at sunset, when the light is shinning in your eyes.
Happy Sunday! And a blessed season, as we approach the celebration of the rising, the birth, of Jesus, son of God and son of man…who taught us to look with generous eyes, and whose light fills our whole beings.
A First! Red Squirrel in the yard. Happy Sunday!
Red Squirrel, the yard, Kennebunk ME
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
I don’t have a lot of patience with squirrels around my bird feeders. They can finish a block of peanut-butter suet in a morning, depriving the birds of the treat. I do what I can to discourage them. They have learned to keep away from the seed, but they simply can not resist peanut-butter suet blocks. 🙁 We have the common Grey Squirrels in our yard…cute when encountered in the forest…not so cute on our deck with the feeders.
There are Red Squirrels in our corner of southern Maine. I have seen them along the Kennebunk Bridle Path, and in a few spots on the grounds of the Wells National Estuarine Research Center at Laudholm Farms just south of us in Wells. This summer they were pretty regular…I saw them on at least three separate visits…along the boardwalk through the Maple Swamp there. Even so, compared to the abundant (especially so this year) Grey Squirrels, they are pretty rare. I have never seen one in your yard…until yesterday that is. I came back from a trip to the store to find one gathering left-over seeds from the deck and the rails under the feeders.
I can’t speak for other folks, but I find the Red Squirrel much more attractive than the Grey. They are a size smaller, with little round heads and perky ears, and delicate shock of tail when compared to the dense brush of the Grey. And they seem to have more personality…or squirrelality…or however it needs to be said. They are fearless, curious, and somehow engaging. The Red Squirrel on the deck, even when I got my Nikon P900 and went around outside for some pics, went boldly about his business…but he kept running out to the end of the deck rail nearest me to sit and watch me as he ate his latest seed find. Even when he went for the seed feeders, he did on glom on like a Grey, wrapping the feeder in a squirrel coat and stuffing as many seeds in his cheek as is squirrelly possible…no, he made a lighting, leaping, raid…only touching the feeder long enough to grab a single seed. Just like most birds. And then, again, he would run out to sit up above me on the rail and nibble it until it was gone. After, he would sit, Buddha like on his behind, back feet tucked under, upright, with his front paws just touching above his belly, and contemplate me for a few moments before scampering off in search of another seed.
When he left the deck he did the same thing in the branches of the young maples that edge our yard. Instead of running away, he worked his way out on the branches until he was practically right above me, and sat and enjoyed a few seeds from his cheek pouch…spitting each one out and maneuvering it with his clever paws, so like hands, as he again nibbled it away. We had a good time there, for 20 minutes or so, he posing, and me taking pics…until he scampered away into the neighbor’s yard. (He came back an hour later and repeated the performance for my wife, two daughters, and a partner who had joined us for a Saturday lunch…providing another fifteen minuets of entertainment after the meal.)
I have read that Red Squirrels are actually more of a problem for humans than Greys. Perhaps because of their boldness, they are more likely to damage buildings and ornamental plants than Greys. Some college campuses have imported the Black variant of the Grey Squirrel (a slightly more aggressive variety) specifically to cut down the number of Reds. On the other hand, in the UK, where the invasive Grey Squirrel has lead to a drastic decline in Red Squirrel numbers, there is an active “save the Red Squirrel” campaign pretty much nation wide. Here in Maine, at least for me, a Red Squirrel is still a special treat.
Or, since it is Sunday, a blessing. The Red Squirrel visit filled me with joy…and delighted the family at lunch. Delighted! Filled us with light…or at least topped up our light supply. It was an “all creatures great and small” moment, when we felt generous toward all that lives. And I am still feeling generous this morning. So generous I think I will put out another block of peanut-butter suet for the Grays! God’s creatures, after all. And for that they can thank the Red Squirrel.
Happy Sunday!
Three cranes standing. Happy Sunday!
Sandhill Cranes. Bosque del Apache NWR, Socorro NM
“If your eye is generous, your whole being is full of light!” Jesus
Snow chased us down from Santa Fe through Albuquerque to Socorro, and we woke on our first morning at the Festival of the Cranes to overcast skies and a fresh white cover on the mountains rimming the valley of the Rio Grande. I was there for the flyout, and watched the Cranes take off in the half-light from the ponds along Route 1 on the way into Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge, and then worked my way around to the backside of the north loop, to Coyote Deck. There was a cluster of cranes feeding along the dyke just north of the deck. The light on the refuge was subtle, and there was still a touch of frost on the fields. These three cranes were coming up the north slope of the dyke to cross to the main group in the field to the south. Something in their attitude, framed against the weeds beyond the dyke in the soft light, arrested my attention and pulled the camera around. And now, looking at the image, I am arrested again…by a beauty I can’t quite wrap in reason…a beauty that goes beyond the elements of composition, texture, detail…or the living vibrancy of the cranes…to become something more. The image is not perfect. The center crane was moving its head just a bit too fast for the shutter…perhaps just swallowing or raising its crest…or about to call…and is blurred, but somehow even that works.
Beauty, light, comes out from the generous eye to embrace the world, and the world responds with beauty. The light within and the light without are the same light…the light of creation…the light of love. Jesus, child of God, is the light of the world, and as we come into the season when we celebrate that light, we only need to open our eyes wide to both give and receive…beauty, light, love. In us and around us, children of God by faith, light…love…beauty. Like three cranes standing in a frosty field.
Happy Sunday!