Week 48: Gazing Wonder

Week 48: Gazing Wonder comes from a fantastic gazing pool at the botanical gardens here in my beautiful city...It's even more amazing right now because all the roses surrounding the area have dropped thousands of petals all over the ground and into the gazing pool. It's extravagant. It's glorious. It's intoxicating. It's various states of life and death. It's birth and decay. It's vibrant and faded. It's luminous and transparent. It's tangible and ethereal. It's magnificent...And this is just a small sliver of the Gazing Wonder that I saw on my latest visit to the gardens.

Gazing Wonder brings so much bubbling up to the surface of my heart that I find it a challenge to accurately articulate all of the issues clamoring for attention. It's a great inspiration for me on a few fronts...One, I love the tandem polarities at play here; they're a great parallel to life. Two, I love how it flies in the face of our horribly commercialized and mercenary society; as I perceive it, this is great extravagance with no regard for the Great American measure of "productivity." Three, it made a quote about photography come to mind; it helps me define why I love photography with such entirety.

So, One: Tandem Polarities aka Balance aka Interplay aka Contradictory and Complimentary. This is seen all over our universe. Stars shine their brightest in the darkest of nights. Colors are most striking when opposites meet each other...think of juicy pink watermelons with their green skins, red sandstone cliffs against bright turquoise skies, and the surprisingly formal black and white penguin who battles his life out in the informal wilds of Antarctica, just to name a few. The sun's rays penetrate and warm on the coldest day. Rainbows come out of the sinking sun and the heaviest rains. And these gorgeous, dying rose petals of Gazing Wonder are still fragrant and stunningly beautiful all the way to their dying point: paper-thin, transparent lace glistening under the sun.

Two: Extravagance that flies in the face of "Productivity." This is an issue of great debate within my own heart. I do want to be a contributing member of society. I do take great pride in a job well done. I do place a high value on a sense of accomplishment and completion. Buut...how is that measured? Who measures it?

Is it the quality vs. quantity debate? Progress vs. prolific? On a light note the comedic poet Ogden Nash said: "Progress might have been all right once but it has gone on too long." I often struggle with feeling like the Productive Train of Progress passed me by. It's as if I'm standing at the rail station next to the empty train tracks with all hustle and bustle and whistle and cheer going everywhich direction but toward me...that or I feel like I was run over by the great train of Progress and I have zero energy to try to rally myself after such a blow.

Gazing Wonder is a great reminder to me that this world is brimming with breathtaking moments and divine beauty that just is. No dollar amount attached. Yes, there is rhyme and reason. Yes, there is pattern, design and plan in just about everything. But, roses could be just one color as opposed to the riotous profusion seen here. Size, texture, color, and fragrance could all be done away with...but they're there. It's a demonstration of going far beyond practical and necessary. It's really an example of life beyond the wildest of dreams. I'm so glad Gazing Wonder exists to encourage my heart...to enlarge my dreams...to make me chase after things like faith and love and hope...to keep me looking for the "more" in life.

Three: I remember why I love photography. And here I share a quote from Bill Jay's EndNotes in LensWork Issue #66. I was moved to tears when I first read this because I resonated with it so fully:

"There are some things you know but you don't know that you know them-and then you do.

An earnest psychologist friend, for years puzzled by my devotion to photography, recently asked: 'Why do you photograph?' The question held no trace of disapproval; it was a sincere desire to understand my motive for what to him seemed like an inconsequential act. I prattled on for some time, increasingly self-aware that my words were empty, not untruthful, merely similarly inconsequential. I felt uneasy.

Then I went out photographing. At the first sight of a potential picture my spirits lifted and I knew what I should/could have said if he had been with me.

'Look,' I would say, 'This is life. It is everywhere, and it is here for the taking. I am alive and I know this, now, in a more profound way than when I am doing anything else. These sights are ephemeral, fleeting treasures that have been offered to me and to me alone. No other person in the history of the world, anywhere in all of time and space, has been granted this gift to be here in my place. And I am privileged, through the camera, to take this moment away with me. That is why I photograph'."