Monday, December 15, 2014

Relax Into the Mystery of Not Knowing...


  Henry David Thoreau inspired me to find my own Walden here at Little Clemons' Pond.  I visited it often, as Henry did Walden, but that is where our commonality ends.  Henry was a brilliant and astute naturalist...a scientist of the first degree.  I am not.

   Henry would probably be able to tell me what made these random holes in the ice.  There were at least a dozen of them randomly peppering the newly frozen surface of the pond.  Henry would have puzzled this out and found the answer...I, on the other hand, enjoy the mystery of not knowing.

   I guess that is one of the things that separates a contemplative photographer from a scientist.  Henry had to know the whys and the wherefores, I don't.  I can sit in wonder on the pond's edge and just breath in the mystery of the place, content with just being present.  I think Henry also appreciated the beauty of mystery in his own way but his inquiring mind always searched for answers and he recorded them diligently in his many journals.

   Before this project at the pond, I was much more an "inquiring mind".  Something here has allowed me to put that aside and settle into pure experience.  There is a time to know and a time to experience without knowing...this was one of those days.

The true mystery of the world is the visible,
 not the invisible.

- Oscar Wilde




No comments: