“Weather means more when you have a garden. There’s nothing like listening to a shower and thinking how it is soaking in around your green beans.”
~Marcelene Cox
I am so grateful for the rain. This week, we’ve had at least a little sprinkle every single day.
Yesterday afternoon, we had the most delicious sunshower. In fact, “sunshower” is my new vocabulary word for the week, a serendipitous discovery I made when trying to look up a quote from a George MacDonald novel.
Well, it might be from George MacDonald, and it might not. I’m no longer so sure. Something about the sun shining on the rain, and the rain falling on the sun. A little girl character says it. Of that I’m almost sure. Does that sound familiar to you? (If you can place that quote, I’d be in alt if you’d drop me a line.)
Anyway, that’s what was happening here. The sun was shining on the raindrops, and the rain was pouring down on the sunbeams. No cache of diamonds could ever compete with the sparkle. I was transfixed by the beauty, especially just after the rain stopped, and the eaves continued to drip steadily, forming a shimmering, gold-beaded curtain.
Just beneath the beaded curtain, puddles formed, and the droplets spread their perfect ripples over and over, each circle of influence running into another’s circle until the whole thing became a work of modern art: geometry and light.
Why didn’t I get out my camera, you ask.
Well, I did. But the light was already fading by then. And I am always a little bit happy when I forget to photograph something, or only remember too late. Experience should be immediate and true, or I’ll lose the fire of inspiration and the artistic and creative connection with Nature, with life, that I crave. It saddens me when I come across a blogger who has lost sight of that in her determination to photograph every detail of her life. Reflection and documentation and creation should be, in my opinion, byproducts of the original interaction with the moment.
I also wonder if that mania for documenting every lovely moment is merely a display of our doubt of the natural abundance of our lives. Last Christmas, I fell prey to this insidious mistrust. Looking back, I know now that I was afraid, with my garden photography days “behind me” for the season, my little vegetable garden dormant, that I wouldn’t have anything left to blog about — and so I took picture after picture of our family gatherings, the food, the table arrangements, the torn giftwrapping sprawled inelegantly across my parents’ wood floors.
At one point, my mother pulled me aside and asked me, gently, to come out from behind the lens. She pointed out that photographs were no substitute for being part of the action.
Of course she was right.
It is my experience that there are always more opportunities for photos than we can possibly use. I find myself in exactly this posture with regard to my story ideas. If I were to live for 500 years, I’d never get to all the good ones in my notebooks. That’s just the way it is. The world is bursting with creative energy. That’s no reason to get in a hurry, to become anxious and afraid to miss something great.
As Minor White said, “Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer it has chosen.” In this instance, the sun’s rays lingered on the upper curves of the cherry tomatoes just long enough for me to capture a bit of that leftover glow. The dark clouds were rolling in after the rainstorm, just to increase my sense of being in some Alice-in-Wonderland-type space, or in an unannounced game of cosmic Opposite Day.
I wonder if that strange sequence of events was meant to remind me that nothing is really impossible. Maybe – probably — it’s not really important to know.
Namasté y’all.
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