Tag: photography

From Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram:

“To exist as a body is to be constrained from being everything, and so to be exposed and susceptible to all that is not oneself — able to be tripped up at any moment by the inscrutability of a pattern one cannot fathom….

“Whether sustained by a desire for spiritual transcendence or by the contrary wish for technological control and mastery, most of our contemporary convictions carefully shirk and shy away from the way the biosphere is directly experienced from our creaturely position in the thick of its unfolding. They deflect our attention away from a mystery that gleams and glints in the depths of the sensuous world itself, shining forth from within each presence that we see or hear or touch. They divert us from a felt sense that this wild-flowering earth is the primary source of itself, the very wellspring of its own ongoing regenesis. From a recognition that nature … is self-born…. And hence that matter is not just created but also creative, not a passive blend of chance happenings and mechanically determined events, but an unfolding creativity ever coming into being, ever bringing itself forth….”

From “In the Ground of Our Unknowing” by David Abram in Emergence Magazine:

“[While] this plague enforces a temporary distance from other humans, there is no reason not to lean in close to other beings, gazing and learning — for instance — the distinguishing patterns of the bark worn by each of the local tree species where you live. No reason not to step outside and pry open your ears, listening and learning by heart the characteristic songs and calls of the various local birds; no reason not to apprentice yourself to a spider as it weaves its intricate web in front of the porchlight. Or to practice recognizing and naming — as I have been — the different types of clouds that are conjured out of the blue by the scattered mountains in this region, the wispy brushstrokes and phantom ridges and clumped clusters that congregate and dissipate in the high desert sky….

“Estranged from direct human contact for a brief while, we’ve a chance to open a new intimacy with the wider world we’re a part of, with coyote and owl and aspen. Soon enough, if it’s not already happening where you are, spring will be exploding out of all those budded branches. And that is a goodness.”

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The first quotation above is from one of my favorite books by David Abram, Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology. It’s one of those books that shows how much meaning can be embedded in a few words; and while it’s written in a sometimes obtuse, slightly meandering style, every paragraph comes back to the book’s central themes about our relationship with nature, and how our connections with the natural world are critical to our existence as human beings — especially as creative beings for whom nature can be a source of inspiration and sensuous experience. You might read the quote more than once, to be rewarded by the challenge of absorbing it.

The second quotation popped into my inbox just yesterday, from my email subscription to Emergence Magazine — a recently launched web periodical that combines excellent writing and fascinating imagery to explore ecology, culture, science, and creativity. The article In the Ground of Our Unknowing, also by David Abram, prompts readers to extend their exploration of the natural world in these disconcerting times, to better understand our human world. Definitely worth reading, if these ideas interest you.

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I still have a few dozen photos to process and upload from trips to Oakland Cemetery’s gardens earlier this year, and below are four galleries from one of those trips. The first gallery shows a variety of plum tree, from which I removed all the yellow, orange, and green colors — mostly in the background — leaving only colors in the blooms to create this monochromatic look.

The second gallery shows a Japanese Kerria, a reedy shrub that produces clumps of long, thin branches that like to wave at you in a spring breeze. The tulip in the third gallery is likely either a Wild Tulip or Lady Tulip (or a Wild Lady Tulip … nah!) and in the last two of the four photos a tiny nectar-drinking bee hovered just long enough for me to take it’s picture. The final gallery is of course of an iris, one of the earliest blooms I found, though it’s difficult to identify the specific variation since I didn’t buy it myself and keep the little plant tag. 🙂

The previous posts in my April Color series are:

Spring 2020: April Colors 2 (Catawba Grapevine); and

Spring 2020: April Colors 1.

Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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From A Boy and His Dog at the End of the World by C. A. Fletcher:

“Does absence have a weight? I think it does, because I stood there feeling crushed by something I couldn’t see. It was a much stronger feeling than the one I had when looking at a landscape full of empty streets…. Like it had once been peopled — and very densely peopled — and now it just wasn’t. It was unpeopled, in the same way something can’t be undone unless it has first been done…. and it was a very different feeling to just being empty. It was more like loneliness, not mine from finding myself alone in this world, but this world’s loneliness without you….”

From The End of the World Running Club by Adrian Walker:

“We stood at the window and drank coffee while the morning light grew outside. We watched details of the landscape emerge slowly like drops of watercolor seeping across canvas — trees, fields, hills, and fences — all the features of a traditional, rolling landscape. In the gray shadows, it all looked normal and untouched, so much so that it might have been possible to trick ourselves into thinking that, maybe, the devastation ended here. Maybe, beyond these hills surrounding us, people lived normally, the sun still met the earth, flowers still grew, cities still prospered. Or even — just maybe — what had happened had never happened at all. But then the light grew a little more, and we saw dark blights appear…. I felt a nameless loss: a grief for something I had never known, a time and a country I could only hope to feel through osmosis, never firsthand.”

These two quotes are a bit dark, but the writing is good and they both capture the strange discomfort of observing an unrecognizable, untouchable world. A truck grumbles past as I write this — a sound of normal life that only takes hold for a few seconds, then fades away. I watch through the window: Bradford Pear tree branches wave in the wake left by the truck and clouds of yellow pollen dust blow from the hood of my car. I’ll hose the rest of it off lateron.

Back at the computer, I end out thinking that old concerns about spending too much time indoors poking at gadgets and staring at screens seem quaint now: we’ve swung to another extreme, where screens stand in for experiences we can’t have. With our eyes on the screen, our senses are reduced from six to one: sight dominates, the rest is memory.

Photography of course has always been in that position, as an art form that revolves around creating and presenting images detached from the events that produce them. The photographer is not in the picture in the same way the painter is not in the canvas — the presence of both is like the elephant that’s not in the room — yet both artists use their tools and skills to attempt to recreate and re-present something they experienced and impressions they felt. The camellia blossoms that I’ve included in the first gallery below struck me because their white petals glowed against rich dark greens, a glow that seemed even more intense in the shade than in the sun.

The flowers in the second gallery are from the Rosaceae family; the blooms stretched along leafy vines crawling through a magnolia tree, covering most of the tree’s trunk and hiding many of its lower branches. For the last gallery, I used variations of the six images and eliminated the backgrounds, shifting the perspective away from blooms among vines, to make them appear as if they were suspended in mid-air … since, in a way, they were.

I took the photos for these three galleries at Oakland Cemetery’s gardens — a place that so far remains open and safely underpopulated as the world stays paused — which is busting out with color as spring barrels forward, providing dozens of new subjects for me and the camera. As I’ve often done here, I’ll be separating and processing new photos in color clumps; purple, yellow, orange, red, and blue flowers are filling up my folder of images for posting soon — supplemented with some from my own gardens, where clematis, grapevines, and hostas, especially, seem to grow so fast I can see it happen.

Select any of the images in these galleries if you would like to see larger versions. Thanks for reading and taking a look!

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