Hello fellow Earthlings,
I love taking photos on my walks. Sometimes I'm so overwhelmed with joy and delight in what I am seeing and witnessing that I want to capture it all, but it's too enormous.
While I can Zoom in on a tree's branches covered with white snow and capture how things look up close, I realize that this tree also holds many different kinds of birds in its branches. There are small berries and leaves and a big wide trunk with roots that go deep down into several layers of earth and then there's an entire underworld happening there that I can't capture or even begin to know about. So I'm just getting one small perspective of this tree.
Whatever I see is only part of the bigger picture.
When I step outside into nature, I'm also part of this picture. I'm part of the bay with the tide receding, the bright sun overhead, the snow melting on the rocks, the razor clam shells, the bright green seaweed.
I'm every little tiny grain of sand.
I'm that sun that lights up the entire sky. The same one that sinks below the horizon like a huge, orange liquid ball of fire.
From the micro to the macro, I'm part of it.
When I zoom my lens out far, I get the entire scene, but it still doesn't do justice to what I'm seeing, smelling, hearing, tasting, touching and feeling.
I can't capture the sound of the waves or the taste of salt on my lips or the frozen feeling of my feet walking through soft snow or the smell of cedar burning in wood stoves in houses on the bluff.
These are all pieces of the picture.
Out here on Cape Cod, the weather can change in an instant. We can go from a sunny 55 degree day in the winter to a frozen 28 degree day with wind gusts up to 70 miles per hour. You just never know out here.
My emotions and feelings are a bit like the weather. Something can set me off and I feel myself reeling for a while. The funny thing is that when I witness the shift in weather on my walks, I'm able to recognize it simply as a change in weather.
Somehow emotions are bit trickier. It seems that everyone's emotions are on high these days. One little bit of information from a friend or loved one or a snippet of news from social media can set me off down a rabbit hole of confusion, anger or disbelief.
Have you ever found yourself looking at one thing online and then next thing you know you've followed the information trail down into a hole that is a bottomless pit of information, opinions, ideas, thoughts, angry words or convincing arguments? It's pretty easy to do these days.
Most of the information out there feels like it's meant to distract and divide people.
These days, when I feel that chaotic feeling creeping in from online information overload, I literally shut off every single device in the middle of whatever I'm doing and head out into nature. I'm able to walk away and leave my work for an hour or so because I work from home and I set the hours. This is one of the silver linings of my online job.
The other silver lining is being able to live out here on Cape Cod, out in the middle of the ocean, where nature literally calls me outside constantly.
The bigger perspective is right out my front door right now. We don't have street lights out here, so millions of stars and the Milky Way are often visible on a clear night. Sometimes, while working, I hear an owl or a coyote and go up to the upper deck to listen. Sometimes the moon lights up our entire master bedroom on the second floor or the wind howls and shakes the windows in their frames or we wake up to snow gently falling all around us.
The bigger perspective is always right there and it's not an accident that I've put myself smack dab in the middle of Nature, where it's hard not to see it.
The information highway comes to me through a tiny screen on either my phone or computer. It comes in pixels that join together to create this virtual reality.
Outside, the lens is wide. With each step I take outside my front door, I feel a release of all the heavy baggage that has somehow taken up space in my being.
All of it leaves me instantly when I step outside. It's the one thing that is keeping me sane these days. A call and response conversation with a bright red cardinal high up on a tree branch is more real for me than talking into a computer with tiny squares of pixeled people.
I miss deep connections with people out here. I really do. I have my boyfriend and a few friends, but I miss face to face conversations and looking directly into people's eyes. I miss hugs and body language and laughter and sitting in the same room with people breathing.
I get a sense of that when I walk outside amongst people, but it's not the same as sitting in a live circle with like-minded souls.
Inside millions of rooms around the world people communicate with each other virtually. This is both amazing and disturbing at the same time. These quick, short words we type to each other don't tell the full story. The lens is too close. I can't see the full picture.
I can't hear the inflection in your voice,
Or see your eyes,
Or feel your touch,
Or really know what's going on inside.
For now, nature will have to do until I can really experience YOU.
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