Last week I had a date with Nature, but my gaze wandered, attracted elsewhere.
Was I unfaithful, or simply unfocused? Wasn’t this actually a chance for yes/and? That capricious, complicated embrace of natural and human forces – wasn’t there beauty there, too?
Behold, Human/Nature.
Imagine an eye unruled by man-made laws of perspective, an eye unprejudiced by compositional logic, an eye which does not respond to the name of everything but which must know each object encountered in life through an adventure of perception. ~ Stan Brakhage
Fellow blogger Sky Blue Daze recently shared a way of looking — and seeing — that has been tickling my brain ever since. She wrote, “I had a photo instructor who taught me to see everything and make the background something that you want in the photo so the eye looks at the focus but boings back & forth to something unforgettable also in the frame.”
It’s all the same pursuit — an adventure of perception, a journey to seeing everything. An odyssey across the ordinary, discovering within it the unforgettable.
What a gift life is, this unrelenting opportunity for fresh perspective.
Listening to the Universe 
I love the way you show nature and talk about perspective. I’m thinking it’s not just what or how the eye sees, but our individual experiences and point of view we bring to the image, how it affects us. Thanks for using my quote, I’m flattered. I am a woman so you might edit the “he” part. I love your posts!
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Ah – wonder what assumptions I had going there?!? Consider the update done, with apologies and thanks. And, yes, it is all in the seeing. My father likes to say “if you change your point of view, you will see something new.” Never truer words spoke.
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Another lesson from the same photo instructor: “Take a step to the left and look at it again.”
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When I spent some time last year modeling for a painter friend, she told me their mantra was “step back and squint.” Another great reminder that we have fresh perspectives always at our disposal…
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