Lens-Artist Photo Challenge – Love in the Spaces

Neither Done nor Dusted

Ephemera fades at warp speed during fall in New England. Sometimes one can see each phase of a life cycle within a single fallen leaf.

Photographs and photographers are keepers of otherwise ephemeral memory, both for the person behind the lens and whatever was captured.

I continue to seek out and hoard such images. They seem incomplete unless I can share them. I’m delighted when someone else sees something worth capturing in their unconventional beauty. A partially skeletonized leaf or a rainbow in an oil slick. An arthritic lavender leaf atop a bed of dessicated seagrass.

There’s beauty to be found in redolent colonies of late-season barnacles and in chipped shells and seaweed calligraphy on icy sand. The star shape within a tree trunk’s severed stump. Encrusted docks hauled out of the Atlantic for winter

And there’s a wonder and a comfort in the way such treasures fade and disappear but make their way back, in new generations, for however long anything that dances with light can stay.

Spirited Away

Spiritual sites abound in the great wide world. But we need not go far. Sometimes they are within our homes, or mere steps away. Occasionally they are only in our minds. They may be felt in the presence of the quotidian. A napping cow in Varanasi. A pair of pigeons in Casablanca. Painted panels in a college chapel in Maine.

Such sites and sights, for me, are portals to the past. A single gold flower in the wet heat of sunrise over the Ganges in an ancient city. Storks nesting atop ancient Berber-Roman columns’ capstones, open to the heavens after the structures they held have crumbled away. In Volubilis, a nesting parent appeared to bask in the perfection of her landing atop a now freestanding pillar near Meknes.

Although I have been known to suspect saints are underfoot, I tend to find more traditional spirits while looking up.

Sometimes, neck-craningly high….

My daughter took me to Qutb Minar, where brilliant lime parakeets looked down on us from a crown of carved bricks on a minaret taller than ten stacked Green Monsters. The view from the ground left me thunderstruck. I can only imagine the awe in surveying the earthbound from such heights.

Lowering my gaze to the horizon, I also regularly find spiritual sights and sensations. On gray and pastel mornings, and when an ordinary day catches fire–sometimes just for a few minutes–and on every day in between.

Picking up the Pieces

In the brief light between June storms in New Hampshire, lyrical liquid gold held four centuries’ reflected and refracted images. It was the Portsmouth Clipper Marching Band‘s 400th birthday. Alums from the past five decades–including some who had marched during the 350th band birthday celebration–played past colonial and Victorian and modern homes on Market Street.

Elongated fragments. Shards. Parts and particles of the past.

Pieces of our histories, our hopes, and our uncertain futures can filter into both our waking and sleeping selves.

And, as with most things, John Hiatt wrote (and sang) it best: “The missing pieces are everywhere.”

There are at least two very different ways of considering the sentiment. We perpetual pessimists see the fissures, the empty spaces from which parts have gone missing. The misshapen space that taunts us after that last errant jigsaw puzzle piece has somehow escaped its box. The sub-zero empty harbor after summer’s celebrants have hunkered down for another winter. Holes in our hearts and homes.

But there is another way to look at it: to see all around us the melifluous, misfit missing pieces. All the gold that stays.

Not to restore what was, but to reconfigure it, piece by piece, row by row. Kintsugi of sorts. Never the same, but with its own beauty, born of time and healing and adapting as best we can to whatever comes our way.

Light Up; Shine On

In the late 14th Century, enlumyen described written material decorated with gold, silver, and vivid colors. To illuminate, c. 1500, meant not only to light up, but to shine on.

The thing about glowing moments is that the light lingers as it changes. As with the best memories, there is an afterglow, shades lighter as time passes.

Sometimes the light transforms itself in waves and pockets, creating constellations seemingly within our reach. It is to be savored.

We linger and breathe in the sun’s serpentine rise as it gradually illuminates whatever cloud cover the day offers. A luminous sunrise forestalls our busy days and expands time as darkness awaits us.

Golden light seems as if it will never be extinguished. And sometimes it never is.