These have been difficult weeks here in the North East of Scotland. Like everyone else, we have lived with the public health restrictions, and Christmas and New Year have been diminished to the closest circle of friends and family, and even that has been severely selective. For ourselves, walking outdoors has been one of the daily routines to help us stay healthy, physically and mentally.
That was fine until the snow, which melted and re-frosted overnight (I know re-frosted seems a made up word). It being the holiday period, and local authorities short of staff and money, neither roads nor pavements have been gritted since the ice and snow took hold. The result is it is near impossible to walk safely out of doors for any but those who have ice grips on their shoes.
Our house sits at the top of our street, on a fairly definite gradient, which has been like an Olympic ski jump slope, except with a surface like an Olympic skating rink. So the car isn't a safe option to get from impossible walking to cautious walking. Except for one day. The road was made passable by myself and a couple of others using the salt grit in the wee yellow bin at the top of the road. So we escaped for part of a day and had a walk in the woods. That's where the photo was taken.
During these long months of lock down, then restrictions eased, then tightened again into winter until we are in lock down again, I have found solace in the woods, with a camera, and she who is my lifelong walking companion. Together we take time to look, pay attention, think, pray and enjoy this day while waiting for better days. Looking out through the trees this hanging twig of pine caught the sunlight, which caught my eye.
Haiku
The waters of life,
on a pine needle setting,
drop like diamonds.
I've often wondered about beauty. Is it always there waiting to be noticed, or does it become beautiful as we notice it, and appreciate the there-ness of that which calls into the depths of who we are? And does our ability to see something as beautiful depend on our own inner climate of emotion and disposition towards the world?
Would I have noticed this pine twig if I hadn't been so glad to get out and about again, hungry and thirsty for the smells, sounds, sights around, and the feel of mud paths, pine needle carpets, uneven ground requiring more than just putting one foot in front of the other? My answer? I don't know.
What I do know is that there are now countless occasions when I have stopped and seen beyond that which is there. Taking a photograph is much, much more than trying to capture a moment that cannot be digitised anyway.
Taking a photograph is:
a way of disciplining the way we look on the world;
a moment of intentional appreciation;
an acknowledgement of our connectedness to that which is not us;
a knowing smile as we recognise the signature of the Creator;
a gentle defiance of a culture that thrives on noise, possession and the enthroned ego;
an aide memoire of an encounter that has nourished, provoked and summoned us;
an act of trust in the worthwhileness of the ordinary, the daily and the routine;
a form of prayer which merges the contemplative, the active and the imaginative.
And for myself, that last definition " a form of prayer", holds together and affirms all the others. My camera, and the worlds it opens to me, has become a means of grace, and a means of recognising grace when it stares me in the face. So many other emotions and inner climate changes come into play when that happens, when we recognise the grace "that brought me safe thus far." Gladness, gratitude, thoughtfulness, wistfulness, longing, alertness; and yes, at times intimations of sadness, reflective moments of regret, memories nudged awake, and a sense of the incompleteness that is inherent in human finitude.
Such inarticulate feelings and responses are perhaps the deeper parts of prayer, whether the "burden of a sigh" or "the motion of a hidden fire, that trembles in the breast." That has become so for me over quite a number of years now, but more keenly felt, and more spiritually necessary over these past pandemic blighted months. Deprived of regular worship, absent the shared fellowship of prayer, and distanced from the physical communion of saints, other ways of relating to God have grown and strengthened. They have had to.
I still long for renewed and uncomplicated human encounters in the fellowship of all God's children. This most recent lock down postpones that even further. But eventually for each of us there will also be the important work of hanging on to what we have learned about ourselves, about God, and about this God-loved, and beautiful but broken world -through which grace still reaches out to us. The second photo was taken before I finished writing this post. It's the burn that runs through one of the forests we have come to love as a place of peace, companionship, interest, and yes, grace...
Thou flowing water, pure and clear,
make music for thy God to hear,
alleluia, alleluia!
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