I look at this enormous moon and nothing can describe its vastness and the reality of it. Today's date and the moon's symbology for me is profound: the 13th, 13 representing ascended masters, particularly the feminine; the full moon representing the feminine.It is minus 10 degrees Fahrenheit, so cold that even the frigid river water warms the air, letting go of its steam.
I step out of the car expecting to be assaulted by the Arctic temperature, but the air and cloudless sky reveal a dry cold that poses a greater risk of my face becoming a poster child for Oil of Olay than my fingers freezing to my camera.
Warm in my downy jacket, I boldly move to a better position across the parking lot to take pictures of the moon.
I shoot, look at the viewer. That can't be right. Shoot again, look at the viewer. Hm...the largest the moon has appeared in years, closer to Earth than it has been in years, brighter to the human eye than it has been in years, and yet it looks so small in the viewer. I look up, it is enormous. I look down...tiny. I zoom, shoot again, zoom, shoot again. And again, observing whether the reality of the viewer has changed. It has not.
It occurs to me that a "master photographer" could possess the right lens, filters, or camera to shoot the exactness of what I see - but I know in my heart that this is not true. No matter what camera, lens or filter I have, no matter who the photographer is, only variations of this beautiful specter can be created as it moves so slowly across the morning sky that it seems to hang on the frozen atmo
sphere.
It also occurs to me that to believe I might replicate it in a physical medium such as photography, has a misunderstanding at its core. For every physcial thing that we see before us has an energetic element too. This is why our breath is taken away when we "see" the beauty of nature. We are not just seeing with physical eyes. What makes a site so beautiful is not about what the "naked eye" sees, but the what the soul sees, too.
I look at this enormous moon. It is larger than life. Yet it is so small I can barely conceive of its role in the cosmos. It is humorous that a little physical being such as myself is attempting to reflect in the format of photography what the universe has created in its profound power and vastness. Luckily, being a part of the univer
se makes me a part of that joke, and I smile at my smallness, and at my vastness.
I step out of the car expecting to be assaulted by the Arctic temperature, but the air and cloudless sky reveal a dry cold that poses a greater risk of my face becoming a poster child for Oil of Olay than my fingers freezing to my camera.
Warm in my downy jacket, I boldly move to a better position across the parking lot to take pictures of the moon.
I shoot, look at the viewer. That can't be right. Shoot again, look at the viewer. Hm...the largest the moon has appeared in years, closer to Earth than it has been in years, brighter to the human eye than it has been in years, and yet it looks so small in the viewer. I look up, it is enormous. I look down...tiny. I zoom, shoot again, zoom, shoot again. And again, observing whether the reality of the viewer has changed. It has not.
It occurs to me that a "master photographer" could possess the right lens, filters, or camera to shoot the exactness of what I see - but I know in my heart that this is not true. No matter what camera, lens or filter I have, no matter who the photographer is, only variations of this beautiful specter can be created as it moves so slowly across the morning sky that it seems to hang on the frozen atmo
sphere.It also occurs to me that to believe I might replicate it in a physical medium such as photography, has a misunderstanding at its core. For every physcial thing that we see before us has an energetic element too. This is why our breath is taken away when we "see" the beauty of nature. We are not just seeing with physical eyes. What makes a site so beautiful is not about what the "naked eye" sees, but the what the soul sees, too.
I look at this enormous moon. It is larger than life. Yet it is so small I can barely conceive of its role in the cosmos. It is humorous that a little physical being such as myself is attempting to reflect in the format of photography what the universe has created in its profound power and vastness. Luckily, being a part of the univer
se makes me a part of that joke, and I smile at my smallness, and at my vastness. Photography is my way of honoring and loving the very beauty of the power that created us.
Life shines through us like the light of the sun reflecting off the moon, reflecting off of the Talkeetna Mountains. We are never doing, we are never thinking, we are never breathing. We are beign breathed, being thought, being done.
So this morning I released the need to capture the essense of the moon, and
just allowed the moon to shine through my photos as it would; allowed myself to be thought and breathed, allowed the doing to flow through me.That is as close as I can come to honoring the vastness and reality of the moon and my life.
And now, here comes the sun.
