During these days of drought I have found it difficult to motivate myself to be out in the heat. I admit that I can be a fair-weather friend preferring to stay home for one more episode of a British crime drama. I feel “obligated” to leave my sofa and air conditioning behind, thinking that walking in the woods is what I’m supposed to do: “It’s who I am.”
I’m embarrassed to admit that I employ sweepstakes parlance every day to pump myself up: “You have to be in it to win it! You have to be in it to win it!" It’s what I tell my students, too. This is my dumbed-down lotto version of a more thoughtful quote by Annie Dillard, “The answer must be, I think, that beauty and grace are performed whether or not we will or sense them. The least we can do is try to be there.”
And so, there it is: get up and go out. Like a dutiful servant, I load up the camera and the dogs into the Suburu and head off. Whatever it is that I will or will not “win” is brilliantly out of my hands and I will take whatever I get.
Whether I’m operating out of obligation or not, I have no illusions that I’m in control. I can’t predict what I’ll see let alone what I’ll manage to take a photograph of. I will take whatever I get.
And so I walk because that’s what I’m supposed to do. Uninspired, distracted, casting about for something camera-ready. I get bored, my mind wanders. I’m hot. I stop looking. I stop caring. Everything blends together into an ordinary smear of composted earth. Then lo and behold–because there is always a “lo and behold”–my mind blinks. What spectacular, exquisite, horrifying thing has breathed life into me, what has flashed up like shook aluminum foil before my eyes?
Knocked off my feet by the noisy sight of a red-winged blackbird riding on the back of a sandhill crane? Speechless before the brilliant red outlining of a painted turtle’s shell? Staring down at the carcass of a young rabbit that looks plucked from a Flemish painting? Rubbing my eyes with disbelief at the sudden exquisite sight of a yellow Lady’s Slipper that is truly the deepest, richest gold of the hard wood forest? Yes, I am suddenly brought into a bright present moment by “yellow” and I am unable to keep myself from jumping off the ground like an excited child.
All that is nature goes on whether I’m there to witness it or not. The least I can do is to try to show up.
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