Sometimes you just can't get the photo you want, and you have to settle for the photo you get! This small loch on the Dunecht Estate is home to various water fowl, including two nesting swans with cygnets imminent, moorhen and waterhen, mallards (like the two males in the photo, and even a cormorant touring inland and as nonchalant as you like, landing on a tree. I kid you not - see the second photo here.
But back to the photo you get. Two mallard ducks in full profile, reflected on deep blue water with luminescent head feathers. Too much to ask? Apparently so, because one of them, I think with deliberate intent to frustrate, swam slowly away from me, head turned.
The caption could be: "Keep swimming this way, don't looks back - or your face will be all over his Facebook page!"
I use my camera for fun and for faith. By which I mean the sheer pleasure of seeing something and taking a photo that enables you to look more closely. By which I also mean my camera is as important for my contemplative life as any book however spiritual. Walking slowly round a loch, sharing the space with such beautiful creatures in the business of getting on with their lives, I find that all those essays and chapters I've read on natural theology, confronted by the beauty of the moment, fall into a pattern as varied as a kaleidoscope and as persuasive as an argument.
The philosophical theology and defensive dogmatics that give shape to our intellectual constructs, are sometimes challenged not by an answering logic, but by that instant of perception between seeing and the heart singing. There is an exchange between the seer and the seen in which, for me at least, I sense the depth of things, and want to kneel in that deep place within and acknowledge a communion of creatureliness between this miracle of a world, and my own being, and being here.
On a blue sky day, the blue reflected on the water and the sunlight highlighting the ripples, I was walking and thinking about those ripples of memory about people we love and have loved, friendships that are amongst life's most durable relationships of mutual investment. The coincidence of thought and circumstance, the fusing of inner environment and immediate landscape, the coalescence of past memory and the present moment, brings on a sense of the fittingness of things, as if Someone had set the world up just this way.
God's voice is of the heart.
I do not therefore say all voices of the heart are God's;
and to discern his voice amid the voices
is that hard task to which we each are born.
Those moments, they don't come often. But that they come at all, for me is enough. I've learned to pay attention to this particular voice of the heart. Taking this photo I moved from frustration at a duck's intransigence, to amusement that I should ever think ducks should behave like stars on a photo shoot! At such moments of frustration, it may well be that the voice is indeed God's voice, the Creator communing with the creature, the summum bonum lovingly frustrating my desire to control, possess, impose my will on a world where I am a guest, not an owner.
Now, that second photo of a cormorant in a tree. There I was looking at swans, coots and ducks when this angular black seabird comes flying in like the bird equivalent of an Apache helicopter!
I knew cormorants could land on trees - there are masterpieces of Japanese prints showing precisely that image. But I'd never seen it till early in May, standing at this same spot, the cormorant circled the loch before a near vertical ascent to the high branches overlooking the water.
To call it an epiphany is pushing it - but it was another of the moments that provoked gladness. And we all need such provocations!
How's that for a description of God interrupting our inattentiveness - provocations of gladness? May there be many thereof!
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