The other morning, as a full moon lit my way as I walked down to my office, I stopped and stared at how it villainized the trees. The trees around my driveway which normally look welcoming and warm, took on a sinister feel and if it any moment a headless horseman came riding up my driveway, it would have looked perfectly normal.
Well, OK…. that’s a slight exaggeration. I would have probably ran screaming like a little girl if I had witnessed such a happening.
In any event, it wasn’t scary enough to stop me grabbing my camera. That seems to be my normal response these days to almost everything.
I think the camera has created a “wow factor” within my soul that has heightened my sense of appreciation for the beautiful environment that I am lucky enough to live in.
I took a few pics and have attached them at the end of this blog. Hope you like!
You might notice that I altered these images, which is very unlike me for a nature setting. All I really did was change what is called the temperature of the images. In one case leaning it slightly towards the violet end and in the other two, I cooled them off into the blue.
While the purists among us will not agree, I wanted to alter the cameras version of what I was experiencing. I don’t know if you have experienced this before but cameras invariably see scenes different to the way our eyes do.
They might mute a color, darken a scene, or sometimes lose the whole feeling of what we have personally perceived.
Technology is a pale substitute for our own vision, although maybe one day it will actually get there. But if it does get better than our vision, will we ever even know?
So the whole thing got me thinking along the lines of what my eyes might see versus the next person’s. If there is a group of ten of us standing by a shoreline watching the sun come up, do we all see the exact same colors? Almost definitely not, I suspect.
There are few things that are absolute in this world. And our perception is definitely not such a thing.
And yet for most people their perception is their reality and god forbid you try to sway them away from it, most will refuse to go.
Sometimes mass hysteria will cause a common perception. It’s why a dotard in the office can tell us we didn’t really just hear him coerce a foreign president into an illegal act…. and millions of sheep will agree.
Relying on someone else to tell us what we see is a genuine abdication of our own intelligence and while common place in today’s politics, it should never be allowed to rule our personal lives.
It is why the old phrase “beauty is in the eye of the beholder” is unerringly true. When we look at something and find an appeal, then that thing is indeed beautiful.
Conversely, just because someone else finds something beautiful, that does not mean we have to.
Just because some twit a number of years ago marveled at the Mona Lisa smile … I’m sorry, but it looks more like a weak grin to me. Normally if I am shooting someone and they give me that kind of a look, I shoot again.
So when we project beauty onto something, let’s understand that this is our beauty. Not everyone else’s. We own it because we feel it. Others might feel it too but it is not a given that they will.
And yet we go through life continually coercing others to our taste and trying desperately to bend their minds to our will. It might be students that we teach. It might be employees in our company. Or it might be children in our homes.
In almost all instances, we try to exert this control over those who are vulnerable to us, which is a shame. Because we end up stifling their own sense of originality and taste.
For example children don’t emerge from the womb afraid of spiders and snakes, yet there are millions of them out there who now recoil at these little creatures. Where did that come from?
For me, beauty lies in almost everything. Certainly everything that is natural and if my eyes can’t appreciate it then I endeavor to understand where the beauty is.
Because I think this is actually the point I was trying to get to … everything is actually beautiful. If we fail to see that, then our focus is too narrow and the flaw is actually within us.
