Category: Back in the Real World

New Worlds

Jodhpur, India, Rajasthan

One of my children has coaxed me to parts of the world I never otherwise would have occupied. Even her father’s spirit of adventure and powers of persuasion had their limits, and I would happily have stayed home in New England if he had lived to be able to visit the countries to which her studies took her.

My new world , thanks to my daughter, has included desert adventures, peeking through stone windows from ancient forts on three continents, a pink city and a blue one, and paired pigeons atop a golden fort.

I spent a nearly sleepless sojourn with her in this planet’s oldest continuously inhabited city. There, I watched the sun rise into sopping August air over the Ganges, which had flooded the ghats–along with the first floor of the building we occupied. With her, I’ve circumnavigated an active volcano and an entire country, and bobbed in a blue lagoon under lime ribbons of northern light.

Bal Samand Lake Palace, Jodhpur, Bhojpur-Pervanchal

My early morning adventures have included a stint approximating a wedding photographer at the aptly named Peacock fountain in Jodhpur. At the Bal Samand Lake Palace, I snapped photos of a dazzling peacock and pea-hen. I have no doubt they would have answered to Romeo and Juliet, had I spoken their language.

Varanasi, Bhojpur-Pervanchal

I had never seen some of the glorious color combinations we found everywhere we looked. Silky brandied ruby water buffaloes against pure purple. Marigold and neon pink seeming to leap above neighboring baby blue. Vivid scarlet-beaked lemon-lime canaries glancing down from the world’s tallest minarets at Qutb Minar in Delhi.

I often have thought about parents’ roles in sheperding young children. But it is my children who have taught me, and taken me out into the greater world, time and time again.

Their father would be delighted.

Daybreak and morning in New Delhi

From Seacoast to Stratosphere

The stratosphere descended yesterday.

Heaven had moved closer to us, for awhile.

This morning the sea rose in crystallized wraiths which spun and danced together atop much warmer waves and out to the horizon and beyond.

A more practical account of the weather phenomenon is that fiercely cooling air atop comparatively warm seawater condenses into layered fog. Legions of New England photographers rise from the sleep of the just in their toasty beds, gather their gear, and head out in inky skies to shores and harbors whenever dawn air is predicted to cool to -10 degrees or below (and sometimes, as yesterday measured atop Mt. Washington, a wind chill of more than 100 degrees below zero).

I’ve since then seen places where heaven meets the earth and sea, but it is rare to see them intermingling so freely. Not only did the White Mountains “kiss high heaven” overnight (as Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote in “Love’s Philosophy“), but we mere mortals could have accomplished the same physical feat, in the heady space far above the air we breathe.

I first captured sea smoke on New Hampshire’s small slice of seacoast. On a January Sunday I often revisit, the rising sun turned the foggy layers to stunning singular hues. Lemon yellow. Day-Glo purple. Neon orange and pink.

As I marveled at the sight and coaxed my fingers to press the wee metal camera buttons to which I feared they might somehow remain ice-soldered, I did not know that–close to the White Mountains–another much-loved soul was then in the process of slipping from beneath a nubbly sea-blue wool blanket and sailing away to heaven.

There is something magical and rare about sea smoke and the way it transfigures and animates the elements. The accompanying, almost always painful cold, makes us feel something like the opposite of what Emily Dickinson described: we become zero at the skin, rather than at the bone.

And given sea smoke’s extraordinary pull on those who love to capture and preserve its images, I have found it is the one kind of weather in which I will always have companions, and never find myself deaf stone alone.

The Shadows Know

plumisland

And can shadows pleasure give?
Pleasures only shadows be
Cast by bodies we conceive
And are made the things we deem
In those figures which they seem.” 

–Samuel Daniel

A gathering Nor’easter announced itself in enveloping unsettling gray, a shadow that abruptly settled over the landscape. It swallowed the sun before it could emerge in a sliver on the horizon. It nullified the morning.

Winter’s dark forces can be powerful indeed.

Eventually light tiptoes back in, almost always defined by shadow.  Today dollops of sunlight made their way through tree cover and splashed on the icy blue-gray sheen atop a foot-and-a-half of fresh snow.  Bright oblong dots formed a jaunty path, as if to guide an unseen deer.

Away from the woods, among abiding dunes, high winds transformed snow into gentle waves cross-hatched with exquisite etchings of sea-grass shadows.

“Feed apace then, greedy eyes,
On the wonder you behold;
Take it sudden as it flies,
Though you take it not to hold.
When your eyes have done their part,
Thought must length it in the heart.”