SLOWING DOWN AND SEEING

I live in a beautiful place and enjoy the forty five minute drive to and from work (twenty five outside of rush hour). The light is constantly changing and I often yearn to spend the day photographing instead of teaching in a darkened studio, lecture theatre or darkroom. As I am also a mother, am always a student: of psychotherapy, of philosophy, shamanism, Tai Chi and Chi Kung; of writing and entrepreneurship, and, first and foremost, of my own spiritual journey, I can often miss the entrancing details of that almost daily car journey.

The other evening as I drove towards the orange and mauve streaked glow of the Western sky, my attention was drawn upwards to the birds perched on their nests in the tall bare branches of the winter trees. Every now and then the silhouette of a lone bird caught my eye as it's dark shape traversed the sky in front of me, now carrying a twig, then carrying a tuft of lambswool or dried grass. The age old movement of the bird population signaling Springs arrival and the portent of new birth, in a visual synthesis with the natural environment of budding blossom and spring lambs. Something about the beauty and depth of the changing scene, as each bird made a different shape swooping poetically across my path carrying its building material, enriched me with the prompt, You and I are One in Life and Nature.

Later, slowing down behind a trailer, packed high with organic matter whose pungent aroma filled my car, I spied an almost angular pocket of mist, hanging spectral like, alone in the graceful dip of a large darkening field. Wondering at its presence, I traced its source, barely discernible; a thin trail of smoke wafted silently across some fields, river, and road, towards the chimney of a large farmhouse quite a distance away. Somehow, this quiet scene, of smoke and landscape in the twilight palpated with the pure elegant presence of Being....

The tractor and trailer turned off and I pressed on the accelerator, my thoughts gathering apace and projecting into the future once more, towards dinner and further list of the demanding To Do's of the everyday.