Tag: Nature

Categories
Nature

The Authentic Self

A snail crawls across wet Queen Anne's Lace in early morning light.
Snail on Queen Anne's Lace in Toronto's Evergreen Brick Works

Ron had to run some errands. There was the post office to send a parcel, then the bank to deposit donations he’d collected for a charity, then the convenience store for groceries. However, it took him longer to move from one location to the next, and when he checked his watch, he realized that at his current pace the entire morning would be gone by the time he had finished at the convenience store.

He couldn’t explain why he was moving so slowly. It felt as if there was more resistance from the sidewalk. Maybe the city had sprayed a special coat on the sidewalk to make it less slippery. With winter coming, a non-slip surface would be useful.

At the corner, where a huge billboard overlooks the parking lot, two workers were putting up a new ad. Ron paused to watch them unfurl rolled up sheets of paper then smooth them into place with glorified squeegees. The ads featured young people, physically exceptional, like everyone in the world of advertising. They smiled with gleaming perfect teeth and wore brightly coloured clothes. Each held a smart phone, some, texting, others, talking. The workers hadn’t unfurled all the words yet. Something about living your most authentic life. Sharing your true self with your true friends. Sentimental goop. Ron didn’t wait for them to finish, but moved on.

As Ron was arriving at the post office, his cousin Andrew approached from the opposite direction and seeing Ron, his stony face came alive. He shouted Ron’s name and asked how he was doing. It was an animated exchange until Andrew glanced over Ron’s shoulder to the sidewalk behind him and his lively face turned to stone again. He excused himself. Said it was great to see Ron. Would love to shoot the shit but he was late for a dental appointment.

On his way to the bank, something similar happened. He saw an old friend named Marty who was drinking coffee while sitting on the edge of a concrete planter, so he stopped to say hi. At first, Marty seemed happy to see him. All smiles and sunshine. But after looking past Ron, on down the sidewalk behind him, Marty’s expression clouded. Unlike Andrew, who tended to be contained, Marty was more inclined to let everything out.

Geez, Ronny boy, you having bladder control issues?

Christ, Marty, what a thing to ask.

Despite the insult, Ron checked the crotch area of his trousers to be sure he didn’t have any leakage and found that all was dry. He pointed emphatically at his crotch and told Marty to check it out. In turn, Marty pointed to the sidewalk behind Ron and told him to check it out. Ron turned and saw a wide line of moisture trailing from the place where he stood and extending all the way back to the intersection. The moisture gleamed in the morning light.

Christ, Marty, what’s happening to me?

Not your bladder?

No.

Ron knelt beside the trail of moisture and dabbed it with an index finger. The fluid was clear and felt viscous, like the gooey trailings of a slug. It was clear to Ron that this was coming from him, this leakage, but he had no way to account for it. He raised his gaze from the sidewalk to the workers in the distance who were putting away their tools and climbing down from the billboard. Why was it, he wondered, that in the world of advertising, the authentic self was so neat and so pleasing to look at while here on the ground it was such a messy proposition?

Categories
Nature

Photo Accessibility

A black and white photograph of reeds extending from the water while their warped reflections appear on the surface of the water.
Mckay’s Harbour, Lion’s Head Provincial Park

Several years ago, in another context, I lamented the rise of what I described as photographic literalism. It’s a problem produced by search engines which rely on tagging to index photographs. In order to for photographs to rank well in Google searches, the associated tags have to accurately describe what appears in the photograph. We see the same thing on photo sites like Instagram and Flickr where often the photos that get the most attention are those with the best configuration of hashtags.

People have become fixated on the thingness of an image. This is a picture of X. This thing called X is a Platonic X that has about it an ideal quality of Xness. We can name it and classify it and slot it into its proper cubbyhole. Taxonomy is king! Long live the well-named!

While hashtags have their place, it’s important to recognize their shortcomings, too. Hashtags have no way to note ambivalence or vagueness, meanings that teeter on a fulcrum, feelings, the numinous experience, intimations of a spiritual life, visual poetry. And they have no way to register fleeting sensations: I looked here and suddenly I was taken back to my childhood. Instead, hashtags presume that a thing is a thing is a thing for all time.

Accessibility has given new life to the issue of photographic literalism. I’m quite happy to describe my photographs in alt tags for the benefit of those who are visually impaired. It’s a helpful measure for people who chance upon my web pages and want to understand how I have integrated visual media with my words. But, as with hashtags, it’s important to acknowledge the limitations of these tools.

A photograph is more than a representation of a thing. It may also be a provocation or an evocation. If it’s any good at all, it makes the viewer feel something. It is not so much the thing as it is the feeling that is the point of a photograph.

I think, in addition to the alt tag, there should be a poetry tag: a short ekphrastic statement about the feelings a photograph evokes. In the image above, for example, the alt tag reads: “A black and white photograph of reeds extending from the water while their warped reflections appear on the surface of the water.” Yes, but I might also write: “I was filled with a sense of calm as a gentle breeze rippled the shallow waters and, for a brief moment, I felt a sense of surrender.” Nothing overly flowery, something simple to suggest a state of mind.

Categories
Wildlife

Outside Time

A buck appears on the rise of a hill with a thicket in the background.
A Buck Appears in the Don Valley Brick Works Park, Toronto

Whether I mean it or not, much of what I shoot ends up being a meditation on the ephemeral nature of life. This becomes especially apparent when I revisit images years after the fact. The building has been demolished. The flower has wilted. The subject has grown old or has died. These photographs remind me of the way things were and, depending on my relationship to their subjects, they fill me with feelings of regret or wistfulness or happiness.

But not always.

Every once in a while, I have an encounter that sets me outside time. I share today’s photo not because it’s a wonderful photo (it’s not) but because it reminds me of such an encounter outside time. I was out for an early morning walk along the abandoned rail line above Toronto’s Evergreen Brick Works Park when I heard a rustling along a path that tracks alongside the rail line. Looking up the slope to the path, I saw a buck staring down at me. It was an unexpected sight in the middle of a major metropolitan city. I raised my camera and took a few shots as it continued to stare down at me. When I lowered my camera, it held still. We simply stood and stared at one another.

What I take from this encounter is the memory of a feeling, the sensation that this moment had been bracketed. It was almost a mystical feeling. Something had pulled the moment out of the morning, out of the day, out of my existence. I hesitate to call it “my existence” as if I can legitimately apply a possessive pronoun to something as numinous as my presence in the universe.

Perhaps other pronouns are more fitting for this encounter. I’m mindful of Martin Buber’s I/Thou dyad. In that moment, I ceased to see the buck as an “It” and saw it, instead, as “Thou”. Or maybe I have things backward. Maybe I saw the buck as “Thou” and for that reason entered into a state that placed the two of us outside time. I lowered my camera and ceased to concern myself with capturing the buck as an “It” on a memory card.

I’m mindful, too, of William Blake’s Auguries of Innocence:

The wild deer, wandring here & there 
Keeps the Human Soul from Care

The same poem calls us to hold “Eternity in an hour.” Writing more than two centuries ago, Blake recognized how Britain’s nascent industrialization was regimenting time. No less than the coal-fired mills and the newly invented engines, our strictures on the passage of time were doing violence to the natural world. Given our current trajectory, an encounter with a buck in the middle of a large city strikes me as nothing short of a miracle.

Categories
Country Life

Frost on Old Maple Leaf

Frost on Maple Leaf Stem, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON

During the past couple months, culminating with the “Freedom” Convoy and successive marches that use the pandemic as cover to promote extremist ideologies, I’ve witnessed regular displays of the Canadian flag co-opted in the service of hateful speech. The red and white, the maple leaf. People wrap themselves bodily in the flag and call themselves patriots, all the while turning the flag into yet another dog whistle for white supremacist tropes. I find it personally insulting that anyone should try to pass off this hate-mongering as patriotism.

To my way of thinking, patriotism grounds itself in gratitude. Like my dog whistling friends, I enjoy certain rights and freedoms, and for those I am grateful. But I’m more grateful for the fact that I am surrounded by people who, through their sense of duty, service, and social responsibility, safeguard my rights and freedoms. I express my gratitude by doing my part in turn to safeguard the rights and freedoms of those around me, including and perhaps most especially those who annoy me by wrapping themselves in the flag and saying things I contest.

The curious thing about the maple leaf that appears on the Canadian flag is that, of all the species of maple we could have chosen, we opted for the sugar maple. The leaf on the flag is a stylized representation of the sugar maple leaf. It calls to mind a practice—boiling sap to make syrup—that started on this land thousands of years ago. It reminds us of a gift—the gift of a specific knowledge—that Indigenous peoples freely shared with white settlers. And it points to something we have here in abundance, this sweetness that invariably brings us joy. Like our freedoms, it comes to us as a gift and needs to be acknowledged with gratitude.

One of the things that troubles me about these conversations is the way that patriotism gets passed off as a marker of personal identity. I am a white, cisgendered male who happens also to be … Canadian. However, history teaches us that what it means to be Canadian is tightly bound to the exercise of colonial power. It is contingent and rooted in stories of oppression. What’s more, as millions of refugees flee Ukraine, the rest of the world looks on and sees how nationality as a marker of personal identity can be snatched away in the blink of an eye.

The Ukraine people can console themselves with the certain knowledge that all powers fall and finally crumble to dust. Here in Canada, we deceive ourselves when we intimate that we are somehow exceptional. Like the maple leaf consumed by the morning frost, our cherished symbols lose their potency and their meanings fade. It may well be that of all possible markers of personal identity, national affiliation is the least stable.

There is an antidote to the feelings of instability that arise when we lose our grip on a shallow patriotism. The antidote is to acknowledge that, all along, we were asking the wrong question. We don’t invoke patriotism to answer the question: who am I? We invoke patriotism to answer the question: whose am I?

Frost forms on blades of grass.
Frost on Grass, Williams Farm, Wybridge, ON
Categories
Landscape Photography

Christmas Tree

Snow-Covered Tree, Yellow Creek (Vale of Avoca), Toronto

Merry Christmas!

This is a photograph of a Christmas tree.

How, you may ask, is this a Christmas tree? Isn’t a Christmas tree supposed to be an evergreen tree covered in tinsel and lights?

I’m glad you asked. This is a Christmas tree because, taken with its reflection in the river, it forms an X. In Koine Greek, X is the letter Chi which is the first letter of the word, Christ, and is often used as shorthand for it.

If we wait long enough, it may also end up being the name of a coronavirus variant. We’re at omicron right now. We have only seven more letters to go. Yippee!

Categories
Nature

Porn sprouts like mushrooms on Twitter

Mushrooms on Log

In my previous post, I mentioned that pornography has sprouted like mushrooms on Twitter. At the same time, Twitter has announced that it will remove photographs if the subject hasn’t consented. The multi-billion dollar corporation will make exceptions for any photograph that “adds value to the public discourse, is being shared in the public interest, or is relevant to the community”. I guess porn doesn’t get caught up in this discussion because it’s consensual. At least we’re supposed to think it’s consensual. Consensual in the same way that exploited workers have always consented to their wages and working conditions.

Ah, says Twitter, that woman giving a blow job isn’t exploited; she works for a fun guy.

Fungi.

See how I made that segue? Because, really, I wanted this post to be about mushrooms. In particular, I wanted to show off this beautiful bunch of mushrooms I found on a log when I was walking along a country road in Haliburton. An overcast sky softened the shadows and made the colours more saturated. Perfect conditions for shooting with a macro lens.

Just so we understand one another: the fungi gave their consent to appear in my photo.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Milarrochy Bay on Loch Lomond

Tree on Milarrochy Bay, Loch Lomond, Scotland

Any photographer who has visited the eastern shore of Loch Lomond in the Trossachs has taken a shot of this tree sitting all by its lonesome. It’s an obvious shot that cries out to virtually everyone who wields a camera. The unfortunate consequence is that this scene has become a bit of a cliché. Just go to google images and do a search for “milarrochy bay tree” and you’ll see what I mean. That’s one of the hazards of the craft, I guess.

Speaking of clichés… We’ve all heard the song. I’m sure you’ve heard it. The chorus goes like this:

O ye'll tak' the high road, and I'll tak' the low road,
And I'll be in Scotland a'fore ye,
But me and my true love will never meet again,
On the bonnie, bonnie banks o' Loch Lomond.

Thanks to that song, Loch Lomond is one of the most famous lakes in the world. And yet, to stand on its banks and gaze across the water is something of a disappointment. What can I say? I come from a place that has shoreline on four of the Great Lakes, including Superior which, according to my calculations, has a surface area that is 1,156 times the surface area of the fabled Loch.

The closest we’ve got to “The Bonnie Banks o’ Loch Lomond” is Gordon Lightfoot’s “The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald”. With all due respect to Mr. Lightfoot, if I want a song to lift my spirits, I’d sooner take the high road.

Categories
Bugs

Bee on Teasel

Bee on teasel, shot on Lower Don Trail north of the Bloor Viaduct.

Living in the heart of the city, it’s only natural that a lot of my photos are unnatural: traffic, buildings, people rushing through urban spaces. Even a lot of my nature photos happen in the heart of the city. For example, I shot this bee on a teasel flower in the Lower Don Trail just north of the Bloor Viaduct. It required a macro lens, a tripod, and patience.

Categories
Landscape Photography

Barnum Creek Nature Reserve, Haliburton, Ontario

Forest scene overlooking Barnum Creek in the Barnum Creek Nature Reserve, Haliburton, Ontario

This is an appropriately autumnal photo I shot at the Barnum Creek Nature Reserve just weeks after it opened to the public in 2020. Presumably, the water in this image is Barnum Creek. It is located in the Haliburton Highlands of Ontario in the prosaically named township of Dysart et al. Yes, Dysart et al. The et al appears on all the official signs.

If I were a philosopher (I’m not, but if I were) I might wonder about what it is that makes a creek a creek. When I talk about Barnum Creek, what defining feature gives it its distinctive creekiness? It can’t be the water. In a variation on a theme by Heraclitus (you can’t step in the same river twice), the water in a creek is never the same from one instant to the next. This photo captures an instant in time, but if I released the shutter again a few minutes later, most of the water in the photo would have been replaced by fresh water flowing from upstream. Some of the water in this photo might go on to Kashagawigamog Lake then into Lake Ontario, St. Lawrence River, and the Atlantic Ocean. Some of it might evaporate and quickly recirculate through the hydrologic cycle. And some of it might sink down to the water table and lurk in deep aquifers for hundreds of years. I can’t say for certain what would happen to any given water molecule, but I can say for certain that none of it would stick around to pose for another photograph.

What is true of the water is true, too, for the leaves, the soil, the trees, even the rocks. Like the water, it all flows, but on a different time scale. Whatever we call Barnum Creek and fix with pins to our map is only a provisional naming. I’m certain indigenous people living here named it something else. And people yet to come will name it something else again. And then it will vanish.