The artic storm reached all the way down to us this morning and we dipped below freezing overnight.
I worry about wildlife and how they cope with such an extreme weather event and feel guilty that we humans have exacerbated such events on them with our unnecessary climate change.
I managed to get all the cats locked in overnight except for Ruben who is a stray that I have been feeding for a short few weeks. I am hoping he is ok.
The house struggled to maintain a good temperature but I still managed to get out from under the warm blankets at four and deliver breakfast to all the babies.
I opened the office door to the six little guys that were there overnight and while a couple ran off into the cold darkness, others looked at me as if to say “are you fucking kidding?”
But once the early morning chores were complete, I grabbed a camera and headed off to Lake Parker. Cold as it was, the air felt super-clear and I wanted to see how that would translate into twilight colors on the horizon.
Mother nature didn’t let me down and the colors were quite breathtaking.
My fingers got so cold, it got to the point where I honestly couldn’t feel the function button on the camera when I wanted to change settings and it gave me a stark reminder of how us folks in Florida typically don’t own gloves.
There were a couple of guys putting a boat out on the water as I left and we all agreed that the color-show was worth losing a few finger-tips for.
Anyway, I have added a few shots at the end of the blog and you can see the nice progression as the horizon lit up for me. Hope you enjoy!
As I drove away, I was thinking about how much I love still photography as opposed to video. Video has some wonderful advantages such as movement and sound but still images take a moment and freeze it in time.
I then began to think about how memories are much the same yet very different.
We build memories when we encounter something in a moment and our brain captures it just like a camera for us. We can often retrieve the memory at will and if it is a good one, we can use it to warm our soul when we need it.
But unlike a photograph, our memories get altered over time. We might enhance something or even alter a perspective that betrays the original capture, often times without even knowing.
We develop an obsession with the “good ol’ days” that likely were never as good as we remember them. I’ve said it before that old photographs in particular where everyone was smiling, disproportionately alter our view of the times we were living in. We were all told to smile for the camera and we dutifully did.
Similarly we will alter a memory of an argument or disagreement that was already distorted by our perception of what happened. Over time, that same memory is additionally subjected to reflection and possibly even our own change of perspective.
As righteous as we may feel in any memory we have, it is quite likely to have been colored over time and therefore trusting our own memory of something is very likely a flawed position.
Throughout life this is just another example of how little of our journey plays out in simple black or white, right or wrong, good or bad.
It plays out in shades of grey and shadows of innuendo and perception.
And that is ok. Our life journey should never be about absolute and our path should be fluid, as we impact and are impacted by those we are lucky enough to encounter along the way.
Nothing in life is ever really frozen, other than an occasional finger-tip on a Christmas Eve down by the lake.
… just a thought.
