Same Path, Different Light

“A camera is a tool for learning how to see without a camera.” – Dorothea Lange

I heard this quote about a month or so ago on NPR during a great feature on Dorothea Lange, the influential American documentary photographer and photojournalist best known for her Depression-era work for the Farm Security Administration (FSA).  Google her and look at some of her images – they are simply amazing and you will no doubt recognize one or two of them from history textbooks and documentaries about the Depression. But her quote about “learning to see” is what stuck with me most after I finally turned the radio off (it was one of those “driveway moments” that NPR brags about).

I am no Dorothea Lange, to be sure, but I’ve been spending more and more time behind the camera lately, so her words of wisdom hit home. As I have written several times now, I’ve been walking several wooded paths near my home and, thanks to an Eagle Scout project by some Boy Scouts and neighbors, a new path opened last weekend just beyond my backyard. It is on these paths that I am learning to really see the world around me. It’s not as easy as it sounds, of course. There’s so much to take in, and our minds are crammed with so many other images and worries that it’s simple to walk right by wonders of nature without seeing them.  When I walked the new trail last weekend with a neighbor who helped build it, he literally kept me from stepping on a baby blue jay that had fallen from its nest. I didn’t see it because I was looking elsewhere.

The truth is, there’s just no way to see everything, which is why I find it so easy and rewarding to walk these same paths over and over. For it is never the same experience twice. The camera helps me to see and remember (and to share with others what I have seen), but mostly it has taught me to slow down, to focus, to pay attention to movement and color and light.  More than anything, to light.

As a person of faith who believes in a Creator, I am reminded over and over as I walk and try to see that behind every image and every fleeting angle of light there is a God who makes it all possible. And I recall the words of the Dutch theologian, humanist and priest Desiderius Erasmus, who wrote in Latin: “Vocatus Atque Non Vocatus Deus Aderit.” In English: “Bidden or not bidden, God is present.”

After finding a collection of the poet Mary Oliver’s poems at the St. Louis Book Fair a few weeks ago, I’ve been reading a couple of her poems every day, so no doubt (if you know her poetry anyway) you’ll see a little of her in this poem I’ve been working on over the past few weeks. She’s a treasure and an inspiration.

Same Path, Different Light

Through changing seasons
I have walked this circle
through the woods
Close to home
Clock-wise, always clock-wise
Looping to the left
Beside the high prairie grasses
Plunging into the darkness
Of the mature, oaken canopy
A steady descending
Deeper into deeper green
and darker shadow
A well-tread path
That snakes me
Into silence and stillness
And back out again.

Like the same proverbial river
Into which you can never step twice
The passage alters and shifts
Changing, always changing
Even when all else seems
equal to the past
Same turns and fallen trees
Same view of the same distant river.
Until from high above falls transforming light,
Streaming through the tattered roof like flickers of tiny silver fish
Fashioning islets of sun and shadow
Brilliance and cloud
Making all new, different, realigned
To the unmoving center
The unchanging changer.