Resolution

Namibian Desert.  The dry river bed of the Tsauchab River shows as blue and white.  The bright white areas are salt.

I found a website published by the European Space Agency.   Among many excellent things, it has a gallery of images of earth, taken from space.   (All of the images  in this post are downloaded from that site with their permission.)  Links are provided toward the end of this post. 

I love the patterns in these pictures.  They show me that nature builds patterns upon patterns in the biggest and smallest ways.  It seems…well… kind of perfect.

Uluru (Ayers Rock), Central Australia. 

You know how Steve Jobs told Apple to make circuit boards that were beautiful, even if no one was looking inside the computers?  Well, nature is like that also.  I love it that such beauty has been out there for billions of years when no one could even see it.  I love it that the beauty we now can see from way up there has the same patterns as the beauty we have always been able to see down here. 

Before there was life, there was beauty.  I have this fantasy that beauty called to consciousness…”I’m here.  Come see me.”  That’s a creation story for you.  At least it was like this:  When the first breath was taken, beauty was already here to call to our senses.  Just like the wind made seed pods and wings… it helped to make us who we are.

 

Flander's Range, Australia

Great Britain and Ireland

I know I said this in an earlier post but there is a book called “Deep Survival”.   It studies the question of why some people survive when others do not.  Let’s say someone gets caught in a rock slide.  He amputates his leg with his pocketknife and hops 15 miles down a glacier at 10 degrees below zero to safety.  How is this person different from someone who has ample water, and food and fuel, and who has survival training, and two good legs, and help nearby, who decides to sit down and die?  Here’s one difference.  According to the book, every survivor says the same thing.  “I saw moments of incredible beauty.”

Iceland

That same book said that a child under the age of seven is more likely to survive alone in the woods than an older child.  Because of instinct.  Little ones feel what they feel…. hungry…scared…cold… but they don’t abstract from there to the concepts that arise in an older person.  So when they take action, it’s directed to the fact of the matter and not to an idea about it.  They don’t over-think and complicate.  They don’t waffle. They don’t waste precious energy or time or motion.  When they are tired they sleep.  When they are cold, they crawl into a hollow spot.

North American Snowstorm.  (You can see Block Island in this picture.  Look to the east of the tip of Long Island for a tiny dot shaped like a pork chop.  It's south and slightly west of the break in the Rhode Island coast that is Narraganset Bay.  Cape Cod, Martha's Vineyard, and Nantucket are to the north and east of Block Island. This picture was taken in January, 2011.  Look very carefully for a woman with two golden retrievers.  I was probably out there taking pictures after the storm!)

I think beauty is a call to instinct…to the things we all know without knowing why.  It helps in a deep and wordless way.  It is one of the ways to nourish our souls, to give us hope and energy, to guide our direction, to keep us from giving up.  It moves us out of our heads and into the complete and integrated equipment that we all receive when we get a body… and that equipment is very fine… our minds, eyes, hearts, senses, guts, breath… all honed through millennia, all in one body… all in one life.  I would say we are perfect, also.

It's almost the New Year, and time for resolutions.  A resolution means a lot of things:  a decree, a promise, a resolve, a solution, or the power with which something can be seen.

Southern Central Romania

I’ve been thinking that this will be my resolution.  I’ll practice seeing in all the ways that humans are able to see… like for hunting, shopping, working, loving, resting, drinking in.  Seeing with my whole body.  Seeing for a short moment.  Seeing and breathing together.  Seeing right now.

Sometimes I’ll see beauty.

Algerian Sahara

I know there is more beauty in the height and depth of the universe than I will ever see, and everything large and small is made with beauty.  I trust all the things working together to make beauty without my even knowing about it. 

I can spend some time each day, let the sand blow without interference… just observe and let things happen…let nature work her patterns in my life.

 

The Palouse Region, Washington State

Golden Curves, North Central Iran's Salt Desert, Dasht-e Kavir

Kagerdlugssuaq Glacier, Greenland

Tibesti Mountains, Chad

Siberia

Nejd, Central Saudi Arabia on the Arabian Peninsula

Iceberg Alley, Labrador

The European Space Agency is generous to allow use of many of their images for noncommercial purposes.   All of the images in this post came from their site.

To go to their "Earth from Space" gallery, go to:  http://spaceinimages.esa.int/content/search?SearchText=IOW&img=1 or click here.

To go to their home page, go to:  http://www.esa.int/ESA, or click here.

Here are more pictures.  Excuse me for getting carried away.  There are so many good ones, I couldn't choose.

Rainforest and River, Brazil

Dasht-e Lut Salt Desert, Iran

Russian Far East

Merry Christmas

I put a bird feeder by our kitchen and I sit with the window open, trying to catch them in flight.  It's tricky because those little buggers fly by at 50 miles an hour.  Sometimes I can get them as they are flying toward me...that gives me an extra second.  And sometimes, as in this case, I get lucky when a bird decides to fly after I've already started to take the shot.

They make the softest, fluttering sound.  I love this.  It's right up there with an infant's breath when I hold him against my shoulder, and of course it's up with the sound of snow falling, or the sound of the ocean at flat calm.  That sounds like nothing or sometimes it sounds like shhhhh or zzzzz as the water moves with the current, folding down, zipping itself along the shore.  Here on the island, especially in winter, you can hear the smallest things.

There are eleven birds in this picture, I think.  I was hoping for a twelfth bird of Christmas, but as far as I can tell, it's eleven.  And here is a closer shot of just one bird.  He looks small enough, and I can tell you from experience, if you held him, he would seem smaller still.  Him with his hollow bones, so strong and light and graceful for flight, and his pat-of-butter sized body, and the downy fluff that triples his size and weighs about as much as the air.  He is outlandishly red (and he's more skittish than chicadees on account of it) and when the wind blows you can see he's grey underneath.  He has a wildly beating molecule for a heart.  He's such a small, so easily freezable person but he flies out there, sleeps out there, stays out there.  That gets me.   Week after week, through the whole winter, he matches his tiny body to our vast, unstoppable, cold ocean wind, and lives.

May you have a Merry Christmas in the company of loved ones, and I hope you stay out of the wind.  And I hope you have a moment to hear the smallest sounds of the great wild winter and may you easily return to the warmth of your sheltering home.

A sturdy fellow.

A sturdy fellow.

Heart Photography

A beautiful wave on Block Island.

 

Before I lived on Block Island, I visited for a week or two every year.  I remember the feeling of release from my home obligations and the beauty that astonished me at every turn.  But when I moved to the island, I took those obligations with me.  I found it was possible for the beauty of the island to recede into the background.  When that happened, I lost the point of being here… without the beauty, Block Island is just a place where you can’t buy gasoline after 2 in the afternoon.

The same thing happened with photography… what was utterly beautiful, surprising and new to me the first year became “same old same old” five years later.  So I began to see the different ways I could go out to take my pictures.  I could go out as a hunter, as the language used in photography suggests.  I could "shoot" or "capture" or "take" my pictures.  I could go out as a shopper, with my recipes and my list, and gather them for a specific purpose.  I could go out open, ready to discover, ready to be surprised by something new.   All these ways were available to me and all created a different experience, a different way of seeing, a different focus, and even with the same subject matter, a different picture. 

A closer view.

There is a saying, "Keep your mind where your body is."    And taking pictures from a place of being in a relationship with the landscape helps me do that.   It helps me to come out of my head and out of my agenda and into my heart.  And then, to use the old language from the poem, "The Love of Tristan and Isolde", instead of using my eyes to capture or shoot a picture, my eyes can "go reconnoitering" for my heart.  When I see in this way, I can see the same things again and again, and they're always new and I am always part of it.  The island has become more beautiful to me, more intimate, and more nourishing.  I can find my place in the landscape, not as its owner or master, but perhaps as its guest, or in a certain way, as its child.  Then I feel that I belong on the earth. 

 

 

The Love of Tristan and Isolde

 

"So through the eyes love attains the heart:

For the eyes are scouts of the heart,

And the eyes go reconnoitering

For what it would please the heart to possess.

And when they are in full accord

And firm, all three, in the one resolve,

At that time, perfect love is born

From what the eyes have made welcome to the heart.

For as all true lovers

Know, love is perfect kindness,

Which is born – there is no doubt – from the heart and the eyes."

Guiraut de Bornelh (ca. 1138 – 1215); (From Joseph Campbell, “The Power of Myth”)

 

 

 

 

Coming Home

Rough Ride

I have become accustomed to the journey between the mainland and Block Island.  And it’s a real journey - you don’t just pick up and go.  You check the weather and the ferry schedules and those are limited in winter.  You make a boat reservation if you are bringing a car or you go down and load a pallet with your belongings if you are walking on.

In any case, there are stages.  You drive and wait, you get a ticket, you load up, go on the boat and then ride, unload, reload and then drive again and unload again.  It takes the whole day and usually requires an overnight stay.  So you bunch everything together… visits and work and groceries and sometimes a Christmas tree or some cord wood or a piece of furniture so you don't just travel, you deploy.   And then you can always do something stupid, like let’s say, realize the moment the boat leaves the dock that you have forgotten your keys and you have to take a cab with everything and your two dogs and find a hotel for the night so that keys can be sent over in the morning.

Because the island is out in open ocean, if the wind is high enough the boats do not run, and in winter that happens about once a week, usually for one day, but sometimes for two or on rare occasions, for more.   So it is not in your control.  I actually like that… being back in a relationship with nature that is more like what people have lived in forever… but ask me how I like it if I am teaching on the mainland and have to leave four days early to be sure I get there.  Also ask me how I liked it the day the boat almost cancelled and the weather was bad but I really wanted to get home and I decided to go anyway.  Old seafaring salt that I am, I stayed in the car to keep the dogs from being afraid.  We had 6-8 foot seas but the bow reaches up and out beyond the waves, and that is where I was so it was more than that.  I can't even say.  We were rising and falling 10 feet?  12 feet?  It was too late to get out, as I could not have navigated the deck in those conditions.  So I was stuck, with nothing to do but pray for death as the bow lurched up, held and swung for a moment, and then fell and slammed into the water, hitting hard.  Cars bounced on their tires, straining against their emergency brakes.  Spray and green water came over the bow.  The steel hull boomed like a drum. 

You can imagine under those conditions what coming to a safe harbor feels like.  The boat turns and in bad weather that turn is something.  There is the last high swell and you ride it down and sometimes it feels like you’ve got to hit bottom and then you pass the breakwater.  The sea calms.  The boat stops slamming. 

When I came home last week the weather was snotty.  There were waves but nothing like that other time.  I unloaded the car, put the groceries away, cooked, and settled in.   My life is different here than it has ever been anywhere else.  I go out and take pictures with many open spaces, trails and fields and beaches open to everyone.  I feel safe out walking (after accounting for hunters) day or night, wherever I go. 

The sea changes quickly... waves one day and calm the next.  I took this picture the evening after coming home.  I worried about those ducks resting on the water at feeding time, wondered about the big fish looking up at all those tasty feet, but I told myself that like all things in nature, those ducks must know what they are doing.

It’s strange how I forget when I go away.  It’s like the mainland is different from here, and it’s changed in the fourteen years I’ve been on the island.  So I really do feel like I’m in another country.  So many cars, so many people.  (Sometimes I wave by mistake at the people in the other cars, like we do on the island.)  Stores are open all the time and filled with everything.   There is amazing fresh produce, amazing choices.   I go into a mall and it sparkles and my mouth hangs open.   I have to switch channels and the island and my life here disappears.  And then I have to switch channels to come back so it has taken a few days but my life has reassembled and it feels very good. 

I was out taking photos with a friend the other night, and we both took a series of long exposure pictures.  This is a 30 second exposure taken in the "early" dark, the waves blurring into smoke.

Home is a place of course, but there is also a way to come home to yourself, to define and protect your life like the ocean defines the boundaries of this island, and maybe deciding you can do that and then learning how is a most important journey.  And guess what?  I’m leaving again on Monday.  Bill is arriving after four weeks working in Southeast Asia and we’re going to see our children.   So I’ll be changing channels again, but I’ll be taking my cameras with me.  I’m hoping to go with my family to take some pictures of fine old trees and Bill will be with me and we’ll all be together and that will be home also.

I took this picture the same night I took all those sitting ducks.