Out of the corner of my eye . . .

A few days ago, I took my morning constitutional (known in Colorado as a hike) with my faithful friend, Rusty. This dog loves to hit the trail almost as much as he loves to eat, and I never have to arrange a time and a meet location or hear a long list of reasons why on this particular day or that, he is just too busy. He is never too busy. I just lift my hiking pants off their hanger in my closet, and he appears, tail wagging, deep brown eyes sending forth their message of hope and willingness. The call of the wild is always in him, as it is in me.

Wildflowers are emerging along the front range. Not big ones like those that form the lush colors of spring in the San Juans near Silverton and Ouray. Those are the stars of the wildflower theater. They strut across the pages of calendars and books, they glow brilliantly on computer screens, and they adorn the walls of plush offices. In contrast, the wildflowers in the mountains around Colorado Springs, where I live, are more modest. They wear understated garments, and live closer to the ground. There is more space between them. Their more robust siblings in southwestern Colorado yell the arrival of spring. My wildflowers whisper.

Rusty and I left the car and walked into the foothills of Mount Blodgett. In a small open space I know (that is as precise as I care to be on location), the subdued colors of spring appear reliably each year. A bit of attention is required to find this color. One must stare into the distance and then get close to the ground and listen with the eyes. I bring my camera to make a record and sometimes to capture an essence. I may venture for hours. I am enthralled by simple things.

When I returned home on this day, I began the usual work of post processing my images. I came close to deleting the one you see here. I got caught up in the technicalities. I had caused the depth of field (how much of the image is in focus) to be quite narrow. This was deliberate. In this case, however, I thought I had gone too far. Only the lower front of the blossom is in focus. The rest of the blossom is out of focus and much of the rest of the image is what artists call negative space. Too much negative space, I said to myself, and even the petals are fuzzy.

But I did not delete. I moved on to other images, the more technically pure ones, and finished them. Then I came back to this imperfect one. But I could not delete. I tinkered a bit, cut off the right side of the blossom, stretched the empty space, and saw something out of the corner of my eye.

I saw as I always see the best things, out of the corner of my eye. It was partial, the product of a glance. Perhaps you will see in the photograph how transitory and partial is our experience. And yet how beautiful in its incompleteness.  There is no time to bring all things into perfect focus. To do so is to stagnate; we must move on from even the precious things.

This image breaks all the rules but one: It is true. There is a tiny area where things are clear; the rest is a passing blur. We move on. We must always move on.

I think that we are blessed when we find beauty in what is incomplete, partial, visible only as we pass by.

I saw this flower out of the corner of my eye.

Perhaps you will too.

Chuck Sale
June 12, 2010

February in Colorado

February is a cold month in Colorado Springs, and sometimes gray. But Colorado is not an enduringly gray place, even in winter. The clouds always threaten to part, and the sun always threatens to illuminate. Always there is change, variety, natural wonders coming and going.

Artist Friends

I am inspired by and sometimes collaborate with many other artists. Here are a few I am happy to introduce. I will introduce others in later posts.

Debbie Francis is an example of someone with a good eye (see above). She travels frequently as an IBM troubleshooter and takes along her little camera--nothing fancy, just a point-and-shoot. I do the post processing for her. Here is a street scene in Denmark, rendered as digital art.

Here is a slideshow of other images she got during her Denmark trip.

Check out the work of the others. My brother Greg is a skilled wildlife photographer.

 

For excellent instruction in art, particularly composition, visit Coni Grant's blog.

Chuck Sale || Colorado Springs, Colorado 

Winter Doldrums

Desperate Conditions

27 December 2oo8. At a remove, desperate conditions can be desperately beautiful. In this picture of Pikes Peak, dangerously high winds are ripping shingles of snow and ice off the ridges and sucking debris out of the canyons. These conditions are harsh indeed for any mountaineer caught in them.

But from a vacant lot in a windless residential neighborhood miles away, there is no harshness, no danger. There is only the distant beauty of light on atomized snow, of shadows, and of the golden glow of peaceful patches of stillness on the foreground ridge.

Who then has the true experience: The mountaineer struggling against forces that threaten to overpower him and rob him of his vital heat? Or the aesthete looking on from afar, adjusting the brightness, contrast, saturation and other things for which the mountain has no name and in which the threatened mountaineer has no interest.

A wise man once said that a human being is a star's way of knowing itself. But if the human being approaches too close, his wings prove wax and melt, like those of Icarus, and the star knows itself no more.

There is a part of me that wishes to be intimate with violent elements. I have approached these elements and pulled back from them in my past, wings warped and singed but not melted away.

In the end there will be no pulling back.

Storm

4 December 2008. Wind and snow pummel the little evergreen as it clings to its perch on the side of a sandstone cliff. The rock holds the tree in its cleft, gently, protectively, though with a restraint dictated by its rigidity. This is the rock's nature--to hold back, motionless, shaped slowly by wind and rain and time to a purpose it does not consider.

The tree will live a long life, but the rock will proceed at a pace that is glacial. The tree will come to an end long before the rock crumbles, but both will disappear in time, and appear again, elsewhere, in the twinkling of God's eye. We will, I think, be in both places, both times.

In the meantime, you and I look on, capture a moment like this, here and there, from time to time, and think much of ourselves. Foolish we are in a way that the tree and the rock are not. We struggle, while they obey. They do not strive uselessly. They do not rage against the darkness or press needlessly into the storm. They simply endure, according to their natures.

We do also, but with much opinion and manipulation, often lacking the dignity of a rock or a tree. Rocks and trees are not distracted by what we call a higher consciousness. We should consult them about our affliction. We might then learn something of our origin and our destination.

Old Tree

For years, I have hiked this trail (left) past this old scrub oak (right) on my way to my dogs' graves and beyond them, up a canyon, to a tiny catch basin where running water can be found in all seasons. This location is known to a few. It is probably best for it to remain so.

This tree is really a collection of scrub oaks growing so close together that they appear as one, and so I call it a tree. They don't mind. They must be good friends to have survived so long and grown so large together. This is another example of the familiar, the close by that can be overlooked.

It was quite cold, but I had my camera and the lighting was right, and the sky and the old tree standing patiently in the snow near the crest of a hill.