Giving Thanks

The bio I include with prints for people who buy my photography poses this question: How many ways are there to give thanks, to give honor? Giving Thanks gets a formal nod this coming week, with gatherings of family and friends. Some will recall earlier holidays when more chairs rounded the table. It can be difficult to muster gratitude when grief seems to have the louder, more insistent voice.

One way I overcame my own soul's season of sorrow years ago was to stretch the practice of gratitude far beyond the fourth Thursday in November. A daily journaling practice of writing ten small somethings I was grateful for, every day, reawakened my senses to all the good and joyous and beautiful in the world that was only waiting for me to notice, and give a nod of recognition.

Photography, mindful photography, has become for me a kind of walking meditation, a practice that attempts to answer the question of my bio: one way, the photographer's way, is to be deliberately present. I tell my photography students, notice what you notice. What catches not only your eye, but your breath?

Increasingly I am drawn to expansive scenes that evoke the emotions of serenity, peacefulness, calm and receptivity.  For many, me included, giving thanks is an act of reverence, of worship. 

How do you give thanks? What seemingly small somethings would make a daily gratitude list for you?

Here are a few of mine, gleaned from the past couple of weeks:

I am grateful that the torn disc in my lower back is healing slowly and that I can once again drive and walk and photograph at a gentle pace.

I am grateful for the play of waning light on still water.

I am grateful that our little cove in Duck is beginning to fill with late autumn arrivals. 

I am grateful to once again have the chance to teach Mindful Nature Photography at After Dark, a community outreach program of winter evening classes offered at All Saints Episcopal Church. (Fees collected for the classes, which are given by volunteers, are donated in entirety to local charities such as our food bank, an outreach for which I am also grateful.)

Here are those same thoughts, expressed visually:

The last couple of days have dawned overcast. When I start to spend many days in a row inside, one of the ways I invite beauty into my world is to look through past portfolios. Sometimes I find a treasure I had overlooked previously. Pete and I are hoping to take a winter interlude and travel to Florida for some R&R which for me includes bird photography. This afternoon I browsed through some folders from our last trip two years ago. Here are a few favorites from late afternoon, at Sanibel's Ding Darling NWR that I rediscovered this afternoon.

This Snowy Egret was much more intent on lunch than on me. Florida's birds are much tamer around humans than their North Carolina counterparts are. I was using a long lens here.

I find such humor sometimes in the natural world. I named this Grand Exit. 

Roseate Spoonbills are a darling of the Ding Darling refuge.

This was the first time we had actually stayed on Sanibel Island, so we could be in the Refuge for sunset. The color intensified after the sun slipped behind the trees.

Eventually there were hundreds of wading birds that flew in at dusk. I enjoyed the challenge of finding small groups for pleasing compositions.

Preparing to leave the refuge near closing time, I could make a last series of images 

showing the scale and grandeur of the scene as a whole.

Recordation or Revelation?

I began my career back in 1980 as a journalist. Living on the coast, that role meant documenting storm damage when it occurred as well as covering key events in our growing community. I believe the role of journalist is a crucial one, but I have exchanged that identity for someone who needs beauty. If I cannot easily see it, I need to sculpt it out of light and shadow, feathers and fur.

The poet Keats used "truth" and "beauty" synonymously. In my emotional and photographic lexicon, beauty is etymologic cousin to hope, to serenity, and to joy. Beyond picture postcards, images of beauty evoke in me an emotional response of purpose, of possibility, of abundance, and of connection. These are the photographs I seek, the visual love letters worth a thousand words.

I recently climbed Jockey's Ridge, the highest sand dune east of the Mississippi, what passes for elevation in these coastal flatlands. I thought I was headed out to photograph "Jockey's Lake" -- a rain-filled depression that currently holds more water than I have ever seen there, thanks to record rainfall between storms Hermine and Matthew. I was on the lookout for itsy-bitsy frogs, no bigger than my fingernail, that emerge in wet spells. I made passable images, overlapping panoramic documentary photos of the lake. I saw no frogs. Instead, what intrigued me was the play of fire on sand in the waning light of the afternoon -- the same visual metaphor that caught my heart and eye on a recent visit to a fishing pier here.  

What is beauty to you? What do you seek? Good questions, and not merely for photographers.

                                       I see the dance of flame, here, the kiss of sun on earth.

How often have I asked for my path, my way, to be illuminated?

Recordation or revelation? What do I see? What do I feel?