My love of the earth is one of the things that first motivated me to try my hand at photography. My parents bought me my first camera when I was in middle school. It was a fairly nice Vivitar film camera, but not an SLR. I took rolls and rolls of film on it. I spent my allowance developing photographs of the sunset and gorgeous clouds with light streaming through them. Sometimes I think my family thought I was crazy, spending all of that money taking pictures of the sky. But a beautiful sunset or other quiet moment in nature felt to me much like other aesthetic experiences: listening to a chord line up in a favorite Palestrina piece, or better yet, listening to the first movement of Brahms's Fourth, or maybe the entire 17+ minutes of Vaughan William's Fantasia on a Theme by Thomas Tallis. In those moments, it is like that tiny space in the atmosphere that separates us from the Divine is suddenly open, and we can glimpse what lies beyond and above human experience.
It might seem crazy to compare leaves and open skies to Brahms, but it is how I feel.
I convinced my hubby to accompany me into the late evening for a little photo hike the other night, and here are a few of the moments I wanted to hold onto in my heart:
I am so thankful for the endless beauty of the world.
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