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.