Since getting interested in dragon and damselflies, I spend a lot of my time outdoors looking down, or looking in-close at least. When I close my eyes at night, small agile forms flit across my inner light. Oh, I still look up for birds, and the occasional spectacular landscape opportunity, but those images come as breaks in the dragon and damsel hunt. I will be traveling to new vistas, my first trip to the Netherlands, in a few weeks, and, hopefully I can get back into the habit of looking up and out…otherwise I may come back with nothing but the bugs and closer birds of Holland. 🙂

So I am posting this atypical shot, taken a few days ago on the Kennebunk Bridle Path, as a reminder to myself to look up an out. I am always attracted by the light in the tunnel of trees over the Bridle Path just here, and have attempted to photograph it many times. When these cyclists passed me, I turned to watch them cross the light, and had just the presence of mind to shift the camera off my dragonfly settings and grab a few shots.

The image has a posterish look to it, emphasized by the higher ISO and the long-lens perspective, so I brought that up a bit more in processing. I like the result quite a bit. It has a certain serenity to it…an gentle arrested action feel…and Alice down the rabbit hole from the tunnel effect…that gives it a painterly charm.

Canon SX40HS. Program with iContrast and –1 EV exposure compensation.  Around 600mm equivalent field of view. f5.8 @ 1/160th @ ISO 640. Processed in Lightroom for intensity, clarity, and sharpness, and for that poster like look.

And for the Sunday thought: We often retreat to nature to get away from man…man and all his works. It is the John Muir attitude that traces its modern roots to the late 18th century romantic naturalists and their rebellion against the industrial world that was beginning to dominate the landscape, as they saw it, both physically and spiritually. We sometimes draw a dichotomy: manmade equals bad, natural equals good.

And, of course, I experience some of that myself. But, increasingly, as the dichotomy between physical and spiritual begins to disappear, I also become distrustful of the man vs. nature dichotomy.

I attempt to see the spiritual in the physical in all things. I am convinced that the physical is always the manifestation of the spirit, in all ways and in everything, and indeed, that you can not imagine, or conceive of, the spiritual without its physical manifestation. We have to look no further for the divine than our daily experience. God is all in all and in all. God is all that is, and all that ought to be.

And God is most especially God in man. (I know a Christ who makes it so.) So, it follows that I am challenged to look at man and all his works as natural. Oh, that does not mean that I do not still object to the power-lines crossing the view…but I am becoming aware that is disingenuous to do so while standing on the road that gives me access to the view in the first place, next to the car (or electric scooter as the case may be 🙂 that carried me there.

And I am not saying that the greed that is like a cancer in man (exactly and specifically like a cancer) does not threaten nature…I am just beginning to doubt that it is helpful to cast man and nature as enemies…to define man by this disease and deny our unity with nature, our natural state, our oneness with all that is. 

Part of the charm we see in cyclist on the Bridle Path, riding down a man-made tunnel of leaves and light, on bicycles that are triumphs of modern technology, captured with a camera that a small computer with a lens…is that we glimpse how man and all his works might be integrated with nature, without harm, without disturbance or distortion of the spirit of all that is and all that ought to be.

Or that’s what I think anyway. Happy Sunday.