Categories
Country Life

Shoveling the Pond

A 13 second exposure on the evening of a full moon while the clouds scud overhead. My brother-in-law is shoveling the pond so the kids can go skating. He wears an LED head lamp and, when I ask him to hold still, miraculously manages to keep the head lamp still for the full 13 seconds. When he’s done shoveling, he’ll augur a hole in the ice and pump water from underneath to create a smooth glassy surface. This is how you do it when you don’t have a zamboni.

It strikes me that this is an entirely northern scene. I have cousins who grew up in Florida. I remember one of them telling me how she had never seen snow until she was in grade 5 or 6 and there was a cold snap and freak snowfall. Her school let the kids out so they could play in the snow. I don’t imagine there was any accumulation, but at least the kids could run in it and catch flakes on their tongues.

I’m amazed at how easy it is to take for granted my own view of things. That’s one of the reasons I like to follow other photographers on social media. They shake me out of my complacency and remind me that mine is not the only way to see the world.

Shoveling the pond at night
Shovelling the Pond, Williams Farm, Wyebridge, ON
Categories
Still Life

Life is but a dream

When I was a small child, my mother used to sing the well-known nursery rhyme to me:

Row, row, row your boat
Gently down the stream.
Merrily, merrily, merrily, merrily,
Life is but a dream.

According to the Wikipedia entry on this song, it made its first appearance in 1852.

Close on its coattails is the Lewis Carroll rhyme, an acrostic poem which spells Alice’s full name (Alice Pleasance Liddell) and ends with this stanza:

Ever drifting down the stream —
Lingering in the golden gleam —
Life, what is it but a dream?

The idea that life is indistinguishable from a dream is at least 2,500 years old, dating back to Plato’s Theaetetus, when early philosophers were first laying the groundwork for epistemology, the discipline that asks how it is possible to know anything for a certainty. (See the Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy’s entry on the Philosophy of Dreaming for more.)

Most recently, we have witnessed a blurring of the lines between philosophy and neurobiology to further elucidate (or obfuscate) the problem. See Anil Seth’s latest book, Being You: A New Science of Consciousness. While he doesn’t specifically address this philosophical problem, his basic claim—that our perception of reality is a shared hallucination—clearly shows us which way neurobiology points. To the extent that both waking and dreaming are perceptual states we all participate in, they share in the basic features of all human perceptual states. Waking or dreaming, it’s all the same. Collective hallucination all the way down. Life is indeed but a dream.