I was going to write this morning about waking up and feeling a peace for the first time in weeks…first realizing that I hadn’t been woken up at 3a.m., as has become usual, with the sound of logging next door…then realizing that I still didn’t hear the machines and cutting and beeping through the open window. I went with a light heart to my east (and logging) facing studio and opened the door wide to the forsythia and butterflies and cloud-scattered sky. I stretched and did my exercises to the sound of Quiet for five minutes or so until the sound of logging abruptly started again, loud and close, and I shut the door and tried to shut it out of my mind…again.
  
Then I went into the kitchen and turned on the radio and discovered what had been going on in the world, and just up the coast in Boston, while I had been enjoying my period of peace and quiet. And then I thought that I might not write what I had intended…
But here are the tumbled thoughts in my mind and heart this morning…I took these photos yesterday in the space of five minutes, hanging around one of our little apple trees. Light is such an interesting thing, and it makes each of these images so different in feel and in what you pay attention to…the bee, the sky, the moon, the flowers, the warmth, the glimpse of a home. And each of these photographs are actually just a portion of what I saw in those five minutes with my eyes that the camera didn’t capture (or that I didn’t let it capture)…the trees on either side, the weeds at my feet, the rusty tractor covered with a fraying plastic tarp, the barn in need of painting, the neighbor’s field over my shoulder that I watched being sprayed with herbicides last week, the picture often in my mind these days of of what the woods next to our must look like now, the woods I always thought of as the place I saw a wild turkey’s nest full of brown-speckled eggs…
Last night I happened upon a documentary that both filled me with despair and reawakened me to focusing on living more and more lightly upon the earth, and to modeling it when I am able. Since watching it, I find myself wanting to throw myself into “saving the world”, as I have so many times in my life, but realizing quickly, as I have so many times in my life, that it will have to be in the small ways, the gentle ways to work for me. Hoping that approach will work for the earth, as well.
I don’t write about politics here, about current events, about the constant struggle between the dark and the light…but I am living it, as everyone is. As I photograph beauty and peace, I might be listening to a story of suffering in the world on the radio, or trying to understand the hearts of young men…my own or those in the news…or sending prayers and wrestling with concern for my friends and family in the midst of cancer and divorce.
And through it all, season unfolding after season, the apple trees blossom, the moon companions us, and I try to keep our patch of the earth and our home as much a refuge and haven as I am able…
As I sit here typing, I am listening to the stories unfolding on the radio…
hour after hour. I am also listening to the wind blowing…a storm seems to be approaching. The wind is loud enough now that I can’t tell if they are still logging. I see the apple tree boughs through the kitchen window, swaying and waving…dull pink today in the dim, grey light. If a storm does come, the apple blossom may soon be gone. Our mockingbird is singing and singing. And I am going to get up now and fill the sink with hot water and bubbles (from some earth-friendly soap) and wash the dishes…and listen to it all.