Last week I took my camera down to the millrace, part of an on-going attempt to get a photo of multiple turtles sunning themselves on a log in the middle of the race. So far this goal is proving elusive -- even when I'm using a telephoto lens, they seem to sense the attention and slide into the water for safety. I recorded a couple not-very-interesting views of turtle tails just before they vanished beneath the duckweed and was trotting back to my car, when the late afternoon sunshine and the colors on the nearby plants said, "Hey, what about noticing us?" So I took a deep breath, slowed down and beginning looking around -- and discovered a large healthy monarch caterpillar on the milkweed right in front of me. This isn't the first monarch I've seen in the wild this summer, but this time I decided to bring it home. I've been reading When the Heart Waits by Sue Monk Kidd, where she interweaves her mid-life depression and spiritual journey with the story of a chrysalis that she finds hanging from a dogwood branch one stormy day. As Sue explains, the Greek word for soul is psyche, and the soul/psyche has often been symbolized by a butterfly, since both go through transformations and metamorphosis. The caterpillar struck me as a good companion for that reading. Here's Sue, describing her encounter with the chrysalis: I was caught suddenly by a sweep of reverence, by a sensation that made me want to sink to my knees. For somehow I knew that I had stumbled upon an epiphany, a strange gracing of my darkness. I took my forefinger and touched the bottom tip of the tiny brown chrysalis and felt something like light move in me. In that moment God seemed to speak to me about transformation. About the descent and emergence of the soul. About hope. p. 12 I carried the caterpillar home and put it with a stalk of milkweed in a bushel basket on our back porch. For a day it feasted, munching so enthusiastically its antennae quivered. Then for a day it was quiet, resting on a stick. By evening, it was hanging in the familiar J-shape that comes just before the chrysalis stage. All evening it hung there. We checked just before bed. Still no chrysalis. I checked again, first thing in the morning, and discovered it just finishing the process of shedding the old stripped skin, wiggling around and settling into its new green shape. So now it is hanging on that twig, resting on my back porch. It takes about two weeks in the chrysalis before the butterfly emerges, I've been told.
Sue describes the months of her time of transformation, elaborating on the role of waiting in the obscurity and darkness of the unknown. Transformation takes time. There's work for us to do, and there is also the work of letting go, and letting God do the transforming work we need. Making a cocoon and the transformation that goes on inside it involves weaving an environment of prayer, but not the sort of prayer we usually think of. No, this is something mysteriously different. This prayer isn't about talking and doing and thinking. It's about postures. Postures of the spirit. It's turning oneself upside down so that everything is emptied out and God can flow in. It's curling up in the fogged spaces of the listening heart, sinking into solitude, wrapping the soul around some little flame of hope that God has ignited. It's sitting on the window sill of the heart, still and watching. Such interior postures are themselves the prayers that transform, heal, and yield the answers in our waiting. They're the shapes and contours that turn us into a cocoon. p. 126 And so we wait, and watch.
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I'm reading Marked for Life: Prayer in the Easter Christ, by Maria Boulding, a book about silent, contemplative prayer written with the conviction that anyone seriously committed to this kind of prayer finds themselves experiencing its repercussions in every area of life, and that "this pervasive experience is an experience of death and resurrection which draws us deeply into the Easter mystery of Christ." (p 1).
Her first chapter is on Letting Go -- letting go of the old to make way for new life, leaping with trust from the known to the unknown. She writes of the ways we are all familiar with this from what we see around us in nature -- leaves changing to humus that nurtures crops, acorns that fall to the ground, then sprout, eventually becoming tall trees, babies that give up efficient and speedy crawling for the precarious enterprise of walking upright. "Life springs and grows where the bearers of life do not clutch it to themselves, but hear the call to let it go in the interests of fuller life and action. The caterpillar consents to the cocoon, sensing its destiny." (p 2). Ah. Caterpillars. Does the caterpillar consent, or does it go grudgingly into the mystery of the cocoon or chrysalis? Or does it just munch its way along, surprised to discover one day that it is a beautiful butterfly? I've got images and text running through my head from numerous stories over the years -- The Very Hungry Caterpillar, Hope for the Flowers, a bedtime story tape the children used to listen to about a fearful caterpillar whose title I can't recall -- all with variations on what that caterpillar is thinking. It doesn't really matter, because of course Dame Maria and those other authors are really writing about us, and we come in many stripes. Some of us consent, some wail, some grumble, some are oblivious -- and all of us do all of these some of the time. A little further on Dame Maria writes, after a section on obedience and prayer, "...it is still difficult for us to let go of what we have or think we have, of the immediate tangible good which to our caterpillar's-eye-view seems to offer life here and now." (p 6) Caterpillars, all of us, whether we are praying, "Munch, thanks. Munch, thanks. Munch, thanks." or "Help. Help. Help." or "Into your hands." Early this morning I read Heidi's Caringbridge blog for the past two days, which held a mix of the hard times of radiation treatment and celebrating life in the moment. I headed out for my usual walk, carrying my camera, just as the sun was coming up. Here it is again, that combination of light and dark that so often appear together when I become aware of a spark of light, that moment which in some way causes my heart to sing. As I walked on, it occurred to me that those moments often cluster in transition times. Early morning and late afternoon light create more interesting photos than the full light of day; the change of seasons brings new color; life’s transitions often make us more acutely aware of the gifts of the present. A fall leaf is beautiful, and bittersweet, and precious because it is both. Returning home, I started noticing a scattering of diamond bright light sparking from the short green grass – morning sunlight hitting the dew on the grass blades. I didn’t bother pulling the camera out. I took delight in the light, but knew I didn’t have the photographic skills to capture it.
I came in to read today’s email and found this Word for the Day from gratefulness.org, a quote from Bengali poet and Nobel winner for literature, Rabindranath Tagore: For many years, at great cost, I traveled through many countries, saw the high mountains, the oceans. The only things I did not see were the sparkling dewdrops in the grass just outside my door. I had to go back out and commemorate my grass diamonds, whether or not the photo did justice to it. If you look closely below, you’ll find dewdrops, but the flashes of fire are missing. You’ll have to go out and look for them in the dewdrops in the grass outside your own door. What other sparks of light will you find as you look around your everyday life? |
My approach to contemplative photography --
"Pay attention. Be astonished. Tell about it." Mary Oliver in "Sometimes" Archives
August 2020
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