See Reality, Choose, and Do
Twice I saw the same sun set.
Twice I lost all time before it rose.
All days fresh, the wind wafts soft.
The new white floats quiet to hush history to a new start.
Ends are starts are either hope or exhausting.
Sleep
Through
To new light.
Snow fell soft to cover all tracks
and warm wind blows.
Will the light shine deep and wide today?
Full Life – Full Moon
The way to full life is not any simple procedure or simple idea.
One cannot simply wait 28 days and it will appear.
The process of participating in life to the fullest is just as complex as life always is –
After one comprehends enough of the complexity of life one finds the kernel that inspires and fills life as never before,
Full life waxes and wanes as real life carries one forward through whatever will come.
One can simply wait 28 days for anther full moon, and complain how people are owl-ly those nights. Yet if you are out in the wilderness the full moon is real and advantageous, or not.
In the dark of night the moon shines this night full against cold, snow and dark.
Always the light comes at long last to reveal the way forward.
Out in the trees the moon shine is so bright that the shadows lay distinct lines, black on the white fallen from heaven.
This track gives evidence of life fully lived, of skiing in the romantic light of the night.
Before it gets so dark, at sunset the snow shines
Drifts and rolls of white hang on the shore under a sky getting darker by the minute.
Simple blues, and drifts and rolls of snow.
There is blue and gold and snow and dark ….
And this is a moment of the fullness of life, when one sees the light.
How do you measure the fullness of your life?
Find beauty this side of life, the daisies will soon enough hold themselves against the sky.
Dark Lake Ice
The wonder of the world is simple
Not something silly simply, simplistic
But that simple beyond the complexities that confuse and confound
Simple and profound
Simple and true
Simple with integrity.
The wonder of the world is that one can find another simply loving, worth devotion and desirable as one’s companion.
The wonder of the world is to hope when all evidence is to the contrary that anything good can come of what is happened, what lies are told, what deceptions are played, what truth is shredded by greed and fear of discovery, fear of being alone.
The wonder of the world is faith that is not stupid or ignorant, not thoughtless nor doubtless, but a faith that God’s grace and love will prevail, even in the face of continuous evidence that evil will win and destroy fathers and children and even mothers who lie in the midst of dreadful fear of source unknown but focused now on destroying so much, also me. A faith that encounters the infinite in the finite, the immortal in the mortal, the universe divine in the mundane of the world, the light even when it is only dark.
Here the ice is in solid enough to fish through, but at night it is dark, very dark but for the light reflected to the clouds by oil processing plants. The ice is dark, the light just enough not to get lost, the ice just cold enough to hold one walking on water. And who said miracles are not possible everyday in the winter?
or any other season for that matter?
The light will come as sure as sunrise, brilliant, bedazzling, searing through every darkness in its path. All will be known.
The light will make us all see and know the truth. And the truth like a double edge sword will not only give light to our footsteps through the cold snow with biting ice wind and through the heat teaming with mosquitoes and black flies, the light will make the evil present visible and known for what it is and as searing laser it will cut it out of us, cleansing us of all the evil.
And those born and raised without unconditional love will know they have been unconditionally loved and forgiven and loved as only an evil enemy can be.
Are you ready for the light?
Are you gracious enough to welcome the light and its freedom as gift freely given or
Do you hide in the darkness because you cannot face the evil in light within, because you have never seen the light bring not only Evil to light, but freedom to be enslaved to forgiving others, always, without end.
Grace like light is both particle and wave, sword and embrace, freedom and slavery, gift and free and opportunity to take on obligations otherwise scorned.
Hold the light high, it will shine and make us all free. Hold the light high for you are the light,
The sinner made saint yet simultaneously always yet the sinner, freed to be servant.
Money will not make you free. It will enslave you to life that is dead.
Power will not make you free. It sill enslave you to die while you still walk and breathe.
Winning at all costs will not set you free; it will only rob your soul and mind from you as you continue to lose even when others tell you you win.
Come light of the world, light up my days, your days, and set us free.
Brace us for the sword’s work in us.
Brace yourself for the light that knocks you silly and wakes you smiling for real.
Smile, it is the beginning of Peace.
We walk on water, and there are all sorts of other miracles we forget to see each day.
Breathe.
Smile.
Be the source of Peace.
The Lake Sings
When I woke this morning the cold night reaching its deepest minus C degrees the view out the door was still, quiet and refreshing (if one had on a good jacket, boots and gloves), or bleeping cold if one had no protected space to sleep under down with a wool hat, and no proper protection from what can simply take away one’s breath, molecule by molecule, as saline becomes solid.
Yesterday
on the beaver pond,
literally on the edge of the pond on frozen ice five feet away from open water flowing into the pond,
I was surprised to hear a melodious tone ring out as if the timpani were set as high as possible and drummed once giving the sweet tone of an oboe.
For a short moment it all did not compute …
Until the echoes began beneath the ice and I realized the lake was singing as the ice shifted.
I thought at first it was like the deep tone of a lake ice shifting, but higher since there was only a rim of ice to generate the tone.
Last night the lake sang again and again, sweet and melodic.
It dawned on me before I slept that the existing ice was not likely shifting,
But that the water freezing and becoming ice, shifting and taking up more space, expanding, was ringing out as new ice snapped out of its previous liquid state into the larger solids.
Whether physics are correctly portrayed, it made sense to my quieted synapses as sleep took hold and the moon light continued to press magnetic force on the just-enough-cooled liquid to randomly move it out of liquid to the solid of ice.
The morning light confirmed what I had suspected, that most if not all the water surface was now insulated from the cold by a sheer cap of solid ice. Great for skating if one could weigh in at an ounce and no more.
All around the shores were solid through to the shallow sands, and out there where due to my weight I certainly could not walk on even this solidified water, the sheen did not waver in the wind, the water did not rise to greet the sun, as the solid and simple sheen held the barrier from liquid below to bleeping cold freezing air above in reflective repose.
The reeds fully encased in ice, an ice decoration left inches above the root as the last of the waves stuck frozen before the water below succumbed to the inevitable solidification.
Between the reeds in the trace of snow an animal’s track survives.
Singing sweetly the lake has become the winter home of fish below and soon fishers above.
And always, the photographer’s wonderland.
More than We can Imagine
Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of who do the things that no one can imagine. Alan Turing
On the deep side of the ice forming with wind shaking the water just as it freezes into patches and cracks, there stands a person never seen nor geachtet.
The morning is barely underway, with light sending the darkness back, but the bright light of day not yet having taken away the reach of darkness. The shadows not yet formed. The moon still perched in the west above the clouds. The beaver pond creek still flowing fast enough to keep the water from freezing hard.
There is more to this than we can imagine.
Where just a bit of light can be confusing, leaving one to wonder if night would persist or if light would arrive after all to make things more than clear.
Is there more to this than we can imagine?
Across the pond the trees stand tall, the bush not relenting, and the pussy willows the only colour amid the black and the white. Let there be more light so that colour can be better known, the withers and whethers, the downs and ups, the dreams and the realities made more obviously clear.
Can we imagine more?
There were white giants once standing, now broken and stripped clean. The wisps of fluff, standing stout, bending yet firmly staunch against the outrageous rages of whether or not.
What is it that we can imagine that we do not know.
One short and angled against the bronze reeds above the silver white snow of age still vibrant.
Imagine that.
It is the silent light disguised by the flowing water so close to freezing that will set the fires of recognition and revelation ablaze, warming the hearts that will choose either Grace or Retribution and DESTRUCTION.
Can anyone really not imagine such choices of life and death so close to the everyday, to the simplest ways, and for which so many things are perverted and converted through deception as if reality never were a thing at all?
Sometimes it is the people who seem to think they can know they can get away with everything who cannot imagine, who cannot imagine that other people do not play the zero sum game.
Every day there are choices that we each and all make,
To be the means of Grace
Or
To be the instruments of retribution.
Light will shine and make the darkness visible and clear to all.
How will you,
How will we,
How will they,
Find the light?
By surprise or predictably knowing:
Caught or Free.
Sometimes it is the people no one imagines anything of
who do the things that no one can imagine.
Little to say …
Much to see and enjoy
there is something to be said with a few words
wow.
Morning Seeing Dimly
Morning on the Lake with hardly a clue where the rest of the world is.
The view from the door, promising a wonderful photographic morning
The ‘home’ birch.
Wiffs and Waffs.
A small hint of something out there.
The sun begins to give a clue it exists.
Is that blue sky there?
The sun is there.
Or is it there?
Or there?
The trees start to appear.
Ducks flying into the fog.
A birch wood of years gone by.
Birch and Reeds with Nuttin’ Else.
The point out the door, after the return, and the fog is lifted – ing.
There will always come a time when we will see clearly, as the light shines
and the truth will be known and the truth will makes us free.
What’s Left?
Yesterday’s birch.
Sky spread.
Silky Water
Cloud Frame
Shore nice
Bye and Bye
Fall Red, Water Reed
Golden Light Golden Night
The woods to … who knows
And that’s it. Sunset. Darkness.
Waiting for the light to make clear what is true.
What is worth showing, yet alone keeping?
I wake to the rain at 5 am. It was forecast to start at 8, an hour after sunrise, so there go my plans for a canoe outing to take sunrise photos. I’m not up for working the camera in the rain on the lake in a canoe, without the equipment to protect the equipment that I do still have.
So at 6 I’m up, doing maintenance things, and the rain has stopped, so I still head out, still in bathrobe, to catch just a few photos as the sunrises. There is little spectacular light large, but there are all sorts of images in the light to be taken and considered. But what is worth even looking at, yet alone keeping.
Well here are representatives of what are the results, just the jpg’s. The raw files are too large to post. And each photo is shot in a shutterspeed bracket set of 3. The camera’s correct exposure guess. 2 stops darker (faster shutter speed, same aperture as set, same ISO) and 2 stops lighter (slower shutter speed, same aperture as set, same ISO). Not all the bracketing results in three usable images, yet alone good images, as you can see from some of the selections.
Representatives of all the shots (27 of 164):
The first three are a complete set of bracketed shots:
One had an interesting effect, though, but not worth much more than curiosity as I moved the zoom during the shot.
Then the question is what really is good enough of these to keep, to share, to show?
And that is as much of photography as working the camera to the light and the dance of life.
Here are the keepers, already seen above.
Regrowth after the chainsaw’s work.
The morning invitation: go out and see.
Reeds, Reflected, Resting
Autumn is coming
Clear to the bottom
Using a zoom
The forest floor, freshly rained on
All the view
A little red goes a long way
Bend in the wind like grass, or break in the wind like trees.
But in the end the mortality rate is 100%.
And then there is the possibility of using software to improve the photos, or to make HDR images from the bracketed shots. But that for another time.
On to the grind.
Morning Mist and Mystics
The wonders of pristine nature are fodder for a photographer, and in that there are rare and not so rare events that a photographer salivates in anticipation of encountering. We go to great ends to create our best chances of encountering light, special light in special places.
One of those is to find fog in the early sunrise light draped across our landscape.
This morning I woke a good hour plus before sunrise and prepped well for a morning outing in the canoe. As I stepped out the door to see the lake not 20 feet distant flowing with fog in the dawning light I gave up on the physical benefits of an early strenuous paddle about the lake and prepped tripod and camera, first shooting from land and then (of course without the tripod) from the canoe.
Wonders appeared and unfolded for a few seconds before melting away as something else emerged to exist only fleetingly. And that is a favoured series of circumstance to encounter, possible only by dedication, planning, preparation and persistence, hoping and wishing … and good luck.
This the mystic knows well and in truth: the infinite can be encountered like light particles waving at you in the fog. You know what you’ve seen and it makes the world a marvelous work of creation, touched and blessed by our creator and made visible, with dedication, planning, preparation and persistence, hoping and wishing … and good luck. Profound truth is never easily discovered, but only by wading through the labyrinths of confusion, betrayal and misdirection can one see and know truth, the truth of the infinite. And that truth is simple not simplistic, profound not faked, graceful not vengeful, creative not destructive or dismissive.
This was the misty view out the front door.
The view from the boat launch site.
Looking down, clear as a bell.
Reeds reflected.
The point of it all.
Reflection Induction
White birch over and under the fog.
Or standing the tall way.
The vehicle that took me to the sunrise and the sundogs in summer.
Back Behind
Sundogs in full force.
A few ripples.
The birch of another campsite on the shore.
The kitchen sink on wheels against the birch long standing yet pretty young.
Out of these mists rose the mystics of many makes, all connecting through the fog of our limited perceptions to the light still bright on the other side.
This mysticism of Grace gives life to all who encounter it, and guides one to give life to all others.
There is no room in these misty mystical moments or at any time for anything other than forgiveness of the other, and of oneself fully forgiven already.