On Saturday, I took my camera with me to March for Life in downtown Raleigh. After the walk, I wandered downtown, and here are a few of my favorite pictures from the day.
photography
Autumn Woods
Where sky ripples on the paths and light ribbons play on lacy color…
Some have carved their names on a moment
Where knot holes might be gnome windows and twisted roots stairs to somewhere secret…
Where leaves fall together like the sound of pattering hands…
From a stained-glass canopy…
Where grasses might be harp strings singing in the light
And golden warmth is striated with bare reminders of a frosty winter…
When I will remember wandering through these woods.
An October Afternoon in Pictures
Gracie’s Favorite Hobby
No explanation needed.
More Than the Sand
How precious to me are your thoughts, O God!
How vast is the sum of them!
If I would count them, they are more than the sand.
When I awake, I am still with you…
~ Psalm 139: 17-18
Adorable Ava
This weekend I had the privilege of taking some pictures for a cherished friend whom I’ve known since 3rd grade. I’ve been blessed to grow up with her, see her married to a wonderful and godly man, and now to watch her as a glowing new mother. Here are some of my favorite pictures from the weekend. Also, I may or may not have pretended that Ava was mine when her parents were ordering coffee. Ok – I didn’t do that, but it was tempting!
Season of Singing
“Flowers appear on the earth; the season of singing has come…” Song of Solomon 2:12
Wandering through JC Raulston Arboretum with a lovely friend on a hot – HOT! – afternoon…
Macro Lens
“The eye is the lamp of the body. So, if your eye is healthy, your whole body with be full of light, but if your eye is bad, your whole body will be full of darkness.” Matthew 6:22-23
The macro setting is my favorite camera feature. It focuses minutely. It ushers me inside the tulip, it shrinks me to the size of gritty sand grains on the beach, it turns raindrops on lily pads into silver mercury. Ironic, isn’t it? That though my camera is merely a technological copy of the human eye, and my eye has all the “settings” (with a few exceptions) of a camera, I rarely use my eyes to see outside myself.
No, it usually takes a CanonA620 lens to reflect my inverted focus out onto the beauty, the people, even the suffering, around me. Photography completely removes me from my murky internalizations. I literally lose myself in the color, the light, the composition. It’s not the camera, really, though. The camera is merely a filter, a tool, a messenger between the world and my eyes. In fact, I don’t need the camera to see outside myself – I only think I do.
I recently read in The Age of Wonder about a man named Mungo Park who, in addition to being someone with a really awesome name, was an 18th Century Scottish doctor-turned-explorer who ventured twice into Africa to trace the Niger River. A young man in his 20s, he left London at the behest of the Africa Association on a primitive quest, passionate and prepared to die if necessary.
Park’s travel journals, eventually published as Travels in the Interior of Africa, describe an incident on his second journey in which Moorish bandits strip him, rob him of everything including his horse, and abandon him in the woods to die:
“After they were gone, I sat for some time looking around me with amazement and terror. Which ever way I turned,
nothing appeared but danger and difficulty. I saw myself in the midst of a vast wilderness in the depth of the rainy season, naked and alone, surrounded by savage animals, and men still more savage. I was five hundred miles from the nearest European settlement. All these circumstances crowded at once on my recollection, and I confess that my spirits began to fail me. I considered my fate as certain, and that I had no alternative but to lie down and perish.”
Thankfully I’ve never been near death in an African wood. But I have known the temptation to despair, give up; felt myself lonely, helpless, weak, beaten, exposed. Allowed circumstances to trump what I know about God. That’s why I love what Park writes next:
“At this moment, painful as my reflections were, the extraordinary beauty of a small moss, in fructification, irresistibly caught my eye, I
mention this to show from what trifling circumstances the mind will sometimes derive consolation; for though the whole plant was not larger than the top of one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves, and capsula, without iration. Can that Being (thought I,) who planted, watered, and brought to perfection,in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and sufferings of creatures formed after his own image?–Surely not? Reflections like these would not allow me to despair. I started up, and disregarding both hunger and fatigue, travelled forwards, assured that relief was at hand; and I was not disappointed.”
At this point in The Age of Wonder, author Richard Holmes writes that “it was Park’s scientific curiosity that saved him,” though “a theologian might convincingly describe this moment as an example of the power of the Argument by Design.” Really? Well, I didn’t wrestle my way through all those journalism classes to allow myself to be spoon fed that kind of…well… Anyway, I looked up the full text of Park’s work online and found that between the two highlighted quotes above, there is another which Mr. Holmes conveniently forgot to include in his book:
“The influence of religion, however, aided and supported me. I reflected that no human prudence or foresight could possibly have averted my present sufferings. I was indeed a stranger in a strange land, yet I was still under the protecting eye of that Providence who has condescended to call himself the stranger’s friend.”
In reality, Mungo Park himself describes with certainty his revelatory moment as evidence of God (a.k.a. “Argument by Design”). His savior is not “scientific curiosity” alone; he writes of the created eye being directed by the Creator to evidence of Himself. The beauty of the infinitesimal reminded Park of the Big Picture. He didn’t need a macro setting – and he didn’t even need a camera.
A Girl, a Dog and a Blog 