“Weeds are flowers, too, once you get to know them.”
A. A. Milne
Tag Archives: Spirituality
On Channing Pond
Our neighbor up the street has pond-front
property as a result
of the street being re-paved.
Purple iris
when to enjoy
your iris?
NOW!
Yellow iris
Bend in the Road
A bright, warm Saturday afternoon in October, what could be better than going for a ride in the country to find apples and black walnut fudge?
Alex and Claire had been married a year now and whatever they did, they plunged in and found the fun in it. Responsible people on their jobs during the week, they walled off the weekend for their time together. Work hard, play hard together, that’s Alex and Claire.
Apple in the cup holder and fudge in his right hand, Alex steered with his left. “Oh this fudge is good” he said. “There’s nothing that sets it off better than black walnuts, a dark, delicious taste.”
Claire agreed.
Alex and Claire had never been back in here, along this road. A dirt road but well kept.
Alex was perhaps concentrating a little too much on the fudge as they went around the bend.
Sheep! A herd of sheep in the road! Alex slammed on the brake, fishtailed and corrected but not fast enough to save one of the sheep. It was pretty clearly dead as it lay in the road.
Alex jumped out of the car and the farmer yelled “What are doin’ Mister, drivin’ so fast on these roads? You killed one of my favorite ewes.”
Alex was speechless. He tried to swallow but couldn’t. He pulled himself together and said “I’m very sorry and I know that is not nearly enough. What can I do to make up for this?”
The farmer scratched his chin with a broken finger nail, looked up at the sky and said “I know you didn’t mean to do that but I’m out one good ewe. $200 would help.”
Alex and Claire counted out their money and handed the farmer ten $20 bills.
The farmer took them, licked his finger and counted the money. “OK. I’ll move the herd and you can go on. But you be more careful.”
Just then a police car came around the bend and just missed the closest sheep before it stopped. It was a county cop and he took down Alex’s license number and checked it before getting out of his cruiser. He opened the door and got out, his belt creaking with the pistol, baton, bullet case, flashlight and handcuffs he had on it. He walked, not fast, not slow, over to Alex and the farmer.
Ignoring Alex, the cop turned to the farmer and said “Orvie, we’ve talked about this in the past. You’ve pulled this trick once too often. Get those sheep back in the field. You and I are going for a little ride.”
The cop turned to Alex and said “Well, you were going too fast coming around that curve weren’t you? How much did Orvie take you for?”
“$200.” Alex said, rather abashed.
“There’s a lesson for you. Why don’t you go on your way and just be more careful, will you?”
Stillness
Image and text copyrighted by Barry L. Lively
The marsh was beyond quiet, it was still. It was not asleep, it was still, watchful. Nothing moved.
If we could speed up our perception and look more closely at the intervals between what we think of as events, perhaps we could experience stillness there. Possibly a “flavored” stillness which in some way reflects the most recent events. But we are usually thinking about something in the past or anticipating something else in the future. Appreciation of stillness means living in the Now.
Claude Debussy is credited with saying that “Music is the silence between the notes.” Now that might also be “flavored” stillness, stillness in and of music.
I moved on. We later walked back the same way and the heron was gone. The surface of the water was ruffling in the breeze.
In the Window
Fiction: image and text copyrighted by Barry L. Lively
I’ve passed this egg in the window of the Second Use store every day for the last three months, as long as it’s been there. I’ve not gone in to check on the price but I know it will be more than I can afford. Maybe someday, if it’s still there.
A lot of people have walked by this dusty store window but no one has bought it yet. It probably doesn’t mean much to them but my mother used to have one something like this and it always fascinated me.
The egg was a gift from my dad to my mom. I wasn’t born yet so I didn’t see him give it to her. I know it was precious to her because I often saw her smile at it as she was dusting the top of her dressing table or brushing her hair in front of the rather cloudy mirror behind the table.
We didn’t have much so this was extra special.
It was special to me, too. From when I was very little I can remember staring at the egg, making up stories about it. I was going to give it to the Queen of America, not knowing that we didn’t have a queen.
There were other items, a small vase, a statuette of Mozart and perhaps other things I can’t remember that I picked up and promptly dropped, breaking them. I knew this so I was very careful when I touched the egg.
Mom let me touch it and I was even allowed to pick it up when she was there. For the most part I didn’t even touch it when she wasn’t around.
It was heavier than it looked and the painted flowers were beautifully done. It was smooth and cool to the touch. I don’t know where the scent came from but it even smelled like one of Mom’s perfumes.
That egg was on her dressing table when I was little, and when I was in grade school and high school. It was still there when I graduated from college and left home to get married. In recent years it had been on her bedside stand in a dementia unit. Often when I would visit, she would pick it up and smile. I held it once in a while too and I smiled.
Mom died one morning at 3:00. There was a little smile on her face and the egg was on the floor, unbroken. I don’t know what happened to the egg. The staff on the unit was very good about leaving things alone. But someone took it, I guess. I hope it brings them the happiness that it did Mom.
That egg in the window. I think that would make a nice gift for my wife. I’ll check on it. I smiled.
Greeting God with a camera
Taking pictures is a spiritual experience for me. It is a raw point of contact between something within and a moment in the flow of life out in the world. That contact is brief, often in the range of 1/1000th to perhaps two seconds.
A friend of mine and I will go out to shoot and if you give us two acres in which to roam, we will bring back very different sets of images. Why do we point our cameras in different directions? We are different people and that which is within each of us is different and those differences guide our creative rudders in different directions.
After a long period of slow awakening, I have come to understand that spirituality is at the core of my photography. My personal definition of spirituality is a seeking of contact with God coupled with an awareness of God’s hand in creation. Going out with a camera encourages me to look at the world while spirituality guides what I see. If the life experiences of my friend and I are different and our spiritualalities are not the same, it is not surprising that our creative rudders point us in different directions.
The spiritual framework is always present but something I see or hear is often useful for me to become aware of it. For example, going out early in the morning of a beautiful day might bring to mind the first verse of a hymn known to many:
When morning gilds the skies my heart awaking cries:
May Jesus Christ be praised!
Being as fully present to the moment as possible is essential. “Multitasking”, that peculiar human penchant for doing more than one thing more or less simultaneously and always almost competently, doesn’t work here. The most intense spiritual awareness often comes in a brief period of time and there isn’t time to switch attention. For example, the good lighting for this island in the mist was there for well under a minute.
This backlit spider web and leaf was “good” for only a few seconds.
One is not likely to hear the “still small voice” when juggling tasks.
I think it is no accident that light is a metaphor for God and God’s teaching (e.g. “It is you who light my lamp; the Lord, my God, lights up my darkness” Psalm 18:28) while it is often light that makes or breaks the image in photography. The two are connected for me. God’s presence is especially noticeable in the viewfinder when the light is good.
But photography also nourishes spirituality. I am not good at prayer, my prayers are stale. A breakthrough came when Barbara Brown Taylor, in her “An Altar in the World”, pointed out that just about any activity could be a prayer if God is at the center of it. One of those activities for me is photography. So going out to shoot can be a communion with God. This doesn’t always happen and I’ve found that the best preparation for it is to simply be there and nowhere else. My camera is not also a telephone. It does one thing and it does it well. It points and when I am fully present, God’s creation is there in the viewfinder.
I’ll bet that you have a camera too. If what is written here is of interest to you, a camera-aided spiritual experience can also be there for you. Practice the photography and know what the buttons do. Then go out and greet God.
Contrasts
Life is filled with contrasts. For example we’ve all taken exams where we are to compare and contrast two ideas, on the one hand find their similarities and on the other, their differences. We find textural contrast when we eat lightly boiled broccoli with grilled salmon, mashed potatoes with crunchy vegetables and chewy meat.
Here’s an example of what is called simultaneous contrast. A bar of middle gray is surrounded with a wider bar of black shifting to white. Despite knowing that the gray in the center is the same in all its parts, it still looks as if it is going from lighter to darker gray. There is good reason for this, the nerve fibers just behind the retina of the eye look for contrast and magnify it.
We also experience contrast in succession as well. For example, in listening to the four movements of the Beethoven Ninth Symphony, we experience “fast”, “faster”, “slow and stately”, and then “very fast”.
Wabi sabi deals with impermanence, imperfection and simplicity (see this post as well). I am seeing impermanence as a state of being that transforms over time, going from the young and fresh to the old, experienced and not as strong, another form of contrast in succession. If our lives were compressed into a single year and if the actuarial tables are correct, I am in the October of my life. If, when I was in the March of my life I was not thinking about the later months to come, I certainly am now. Not at all with sorrow but with a sense of wonder.
Autumn is a time of rapid change in the outdoors. At its beginning, there is much green, quickly followed by red and yellow and ending with bare limbs on the trees. It is a time of considerable contrast. And I suppose it is this rapid change which gives the season its special piquancy. I’ve always loved this season, even over spring when so much of nature is fresh and beautiful.
I don’t know how I would have responded to the idea of wabi sabi when I was young but now I think in terms of simplifying and finding beauty in what is, rather than what might be if only everything had turned out “right.” I would not say that I am either longing for the future or for the past. I long to experience what is.
My mother lived very much in the present the last seven years of her life. She was in a dementia unit. Had she known this mental decline going to happen she would not have looked forward to it. But, although she was always generous and cheerful, she became even more so on that unit. I saw her nearly every day and, if you let go of the need to carry on a “meaningful” conversation in words, it was a beautiful experience for me and for those around her. I’m not looking forward to that, should I live that long, but Mom showed how it was possible to contribute to the world even in that state. She dealt only with what is.
This time of life as a time of wonder. There is so much to see, hear, feel, taste. I hope that is still true in November and December. I’m going to assume that it will be.
Wabi Sabi
I don’t know where I first heard of it but I’ve recently been intrigued with the idea of wabi sabi, which appears to be so deeply embedded in Japanese culture that native Japanese don’t, and possibly can’t, give a clear picture of what it is. For them it just is. I’ve read several books about it, all by Western authors. One of these authors says that he has found no book on wabi sabi written by a Japanese. Perhaps in one culture there is only a need to experience and not explain while in our culture there is a need to explain just about everything.
The description that, so far, I find most satisfying is given by Andrew Juniper:
If an object or expression can bring about, within us, a sense of serene melancholy and a spiritual longing, then that object could be said to be wabi sabi.
Perhaps it is better to illustrate the idea rather than talk too much about it. I am a novice concerning this concept and what I write will be the thoughts of a novice. Might be better to show what it could mean and write about it just a little bit.
One of the defining features of wabi sabi is impermanence. This morning I had seen the light falling on a leaf just so. It was perfect. I went into the house, got my camera and tripod, came out and the light had changed. That moment of perfection of light and leaf was gone. But there were others. This one didn’t look like much at first but then the light touched it.
Another defining feature is simplicity.
But there is more in this image than simplicity, there are also other key features of wabi sabi, imperfection and impermanence. This car from a train is rusting away and will be dust someday.
Impermanence operates on every time scale. The backwash of water in the lower left in this image from the White River was gone in under a second. I am sure the leaves moved on when the water rose again. The rock and concrete are wearing down.
Simplicity, imperfection, impermanence. All these are part of life. There is beauty in all of it, if we’ll just stop and look. But what beauty was there when my father was dying from cancer? Where I saw beauty was in his dignity and his newly formed relationships with the hospice nurses. There was much beauty there. If there can be be beauty there, there can be beauty just about anywhere. Melancholy? Yes. Serenity in awareness? Yes.
Spirit and Seeing 