“We need to find God, and he cannot be found in noise and restlessness. God is the friend of silence. See how nature – trees, flowers, grass- grows in silence; see the stars, the moon and the sun, how they move in silence… We need silence to be able to touch souls.”
(Mother Teresa)

 

There are those who seek their god inside a building each Sunday morning; sharing pomp, circumstance, and ritual with those of like mind.  Me?  I prefer to go straight to the source for my spiritual solace, and of late it’s been a visit to a local nature preserve.

Being out in open, wild space as the day dawns, with a bit of old forest wrapping around like a cloak soon to be opened by the growing light to reveal secrets both feathered and furred, is a deeply satisfying experience.  Even if it’s hard to tear my Self away from the warm bed and much-needed sleep, and even, like this past Sunday morning, if the temperature hovers near the freezing point.

Most such mornings bring a plethora of joys to my eyes and camera.  Nature’s alarm clock rings with the cries of the geese as they lift off loudly in concert with the first rays of the sun, and we often see the deer as they cautiously make their way to bed down away from the prying eyes of other, disrespectful humans and their barking, running-loose dogs.  There are the occasional mornings, though, when all remains strangely silent.  This time there was only one lone and enormous owl that glided silently past the meadow-edge trees and headed into the deep woods; it appeared and then disappeared so fast there was no time to aim the camera and shoot, only to marvel at such a first-ever sight.

We soon ended up in our favorite spot, at the top of the meadow near the edge of the woods, marked by one enormous, old fallen tree.  It is a favorite resting spot for most of the preserve’s feathered denizens and affords a clear view of the deer paths.  On quiet summer mornings, it is enough to just be there; the smells and sounds are a soothing comfort that bring balance back to this city-weary soul.  At mid-fall, however, there isn’t enough long underwear or warm enough boots to make up for a lack of activity and after only an hour I was quite ready to call it quits and head back to our cozy home in the ‘hood. 

And though I tried mightily, I was able to come up with only one shot:

 

It didn’t seem fair, especially since our last visit found us smack in the middle of a whole flock of cedar waxwings taking advantage of the final fall feast of berries:

 

As is par for the course, shortly after arriving back home the usual suspects in fur coats were all over the backyard and I took advantage of it to capture a portrait of Titan, one of the orphans raised here last spring, now on his own:

 

“Evermore in the world is this marvelous balance of beauty and disgust, magnificence and rats.”
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

 

When asked, I can readily name the three things I love best in this world.  In alphabetical order they are:  photography, squirrels, and writing.  (My love for the humans in my life occupies its own, singular space.)  The three combine into one of the most satisfying uses of my time; to share the stories of the furballs in my life, illustrated with photographs, is more or less how both my writing and my photography came to fruition.  It’s how I found my own little niche, so to speak.

Most days, it’s an easy, comfortable balance.  I feed the wilds and my educational animals, I sit quietly and observe while wielding a camera, process the photographs, and then sit down and let the experiences flow out in words.  But come “baby season”, once in spring and again in middle-to-late summer, I find that balance goes askew and there are far too many days when it’s all I can do to get everyone fed and work the long hours of my day job, let alone even feed my own Self.

It’s been a whirlwind since Labor Day weekend when we took in 3 grown squirrels with closed-head injuries, and in the following 2 weeks took in 6 individually-orphaned babies.  I also squirrelnapped two teeny-tiny “mini foxers” when my subpermittee left them here to go on a long-planned vacation, and then took in one of our yearling yard pals who showed up gravely ill with a horrible, deep-seated facial abscess.   When I’m not working 60-80 hours a week, I can handle far more than this with one hand tied behind my back, even though each one is a unique case and more than one required critical care.  Now, when at last everyone is relatively stable, it occurs to me that while my cameras have accumulated photographs, there has been little to no time to process them.  Not to mention that it is high time to finish the 2009 calendar for A Squirrel’s Tale; one of the ways my photography helps raise funds for my non-profit wildlife rehabilitation organization.

Ouch.

Writing, however, has not been so neglected.  With our state wildlife rehabilitation organization’s conference looming and the recent finding of a deer with Chronic Wasting Disease in Michigan, my fingers have been busy preparing presentations and writing proposals; this particular always-fatal deer disease such an extremely serious matter that as president of our state wildlife rehabilitation organization it has taken up dozens of my own hours spent in conversations, even arguments, and trips to meetings and symposiums in order to gain the greatest understanding of all the issues that surround it in order to help our DNR meet this threat with all due reasonableness where the both the public and the wildlife rehabilitation community is concerned. 

Being one who marks such things by the natural cycle, Friday night’s haunting realization that it is now another new year adds a sneaky, small portion of crankiness to a disposition whose patience has already been stretched to the breaking point by even more than those things already mentioned.  And so I carve out the small sliver of space and time in which to write this piece.  Though certainly nothing that will ever earn a Pulitzer prize in literature, at the same time it does win me back some semblance of my Self.   For, like my little friend here, one must sometimes just hang on and remain observant.

 

 

“The Path that leadeth on is lighted by one fire – the light of daring burning in the heart.  The more one dares, the more he shall obtain. ”
(Helena Petrova Blavatsky)

   

It’s always about the learning for me, and participating in this last photo challenge was no exception.  Despite limited time, I found my Self becoming rather obsessed with my “grotto” idea and I think when it was all over I’d snapped off well over 1,000 shots over the course of the actual week of shooting.

The biggest hurdle was properly adding the element of fire.  My very wet little grotto, carefully balanced on the birdbath, turned out to be quite a lovely “set” and one photo taken at sunset during the 3rd session was particularly and quietly poignant:

 

For the purposes of the contest, however, it was too quiet.  Though all done in miniature, I really needed more fire than just a single candle flame – but how?

It was time to break out some serious combustibles.  Lighter fluid was the most immediate one at hand, and after Bob ever-so-kindly moved the whole birdbath to a spot in the yard where the sunset light comes piercing through the trees, the better to illuminate the falling water, I rebuilt the tiny grotto, soaked it down, placed the candle deep inside, and positioned the camera.

With Bob acting as the flame thrower, the results were nothing short of amazing!  At least to my eyes. 

 

 

Now the trick was to get exactly the right balance between wet and hot.  This is much easier said than done, however, since every shot of flammable fluid creates a big burst of light and then burns down very quickly.  If I started shooting as Bob started squirting, even with the correct exposure the result was just too hot:

 

While rather spectacular, Dante’s Inferno wasn’t really what I had in mind.

As an experiment, we tried using charcoal lighter fluid, thinking it would perhaps burn a little longer than plain lighter fluid.  It was an interesting effect, both in terms of the flame and its color:

 

But even though I liked it, there was only wetness and I really, really wanted to capture falling water.

So we went back to using lighter fluid.  Lots of lighter fluid.  Lots of candles, too, since they had to be very small and ended up getting very wet as each round of shooting progressed. 

In all, there were at least 10 different sessions, each held at various times of the day (and once in the dead of night; a rather memorable failure despite the use of spot lighting), finally settling on using late afternoon light that was uncannily clear and very, very bright; as if even the weather concurred with the idea.  And after each session I would carry Matilda upstairs, plug her into the desktop computer, and painstakingly sort through the results.  Hundreds of them.  All in search of the One that best told the story.

The deadline was Monday morning at 8 a.m. EDT.  But I wanted to post my entry before going to bed on Sunday.  And when at last Sunday night rolled around I was, frankly, weary of the effort and seemingly suddenly there were no further opportunities to do more.  But as is so often the case, in the end it was the element of “beginner’s luck” that held sway.  We narrowed down the choices to a mere handful and I then solicited the opinion of some friends who could look at them with fresh eyes.

And I had my entry, taken during session #4.  It was titled “Primordial”:

 

I think that I am most pleased that this is a single image.  It required only minimal post-processing in the “digital darkroom”, always a sign for me that I’ve done everything right. 

It placed 9th in the competition.  It is not my intention to dismiss the efforts of those who scored more points in the judging, however, by definition the images that were seen as more effective were really graphic illustrations, not photographs.  The majority of entries were stitched-together composites to create something seen only with the mind’s eye, not something seen with the physical eye, as is the standard definition of a photograph.  Even the winner, a quite beautiful landscape, was a layered product of multiple exposures (which is really just a standard technique so I don’t mind losing to it.)

After a week’s reflection, what I find is that I’m more than a little disappointed that Photoshop skills are apparently more valued than photographic skills – in a photography forum.  Yet the measure of that disappointment within the whole of my reality is very small.  Because I really am very, very pleased with the result of my efforts.  I was able to create and then capture my idea, my vision, and do so very well (if I say so my Self!)  It was a learning experience, above all, and though frustrating at times it made me think outside my box, it took me out of my usual element of shooting animals and nature.  It was more lessons in timing and that most important matter of light. 

And in the end, that is all and only goodness.