Unlock the Secrets of the Universe

they're all around you!

I’m so glad you’re here! Moments is a place to explore connecting with nature, appreciating the wonders unfolding in the world all around us all the time. I hope my photography + stories will inspire you to be curious, be amazed, and then do it again!

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One of my favorite things about photography is the way that it’s changed the way that I look at the world. It’s not the photography, itself, that’s the key. It’s the noticing that does it!

It’s looking, and looking again. And then, looking closer. Looking from another angle. Because you keep noticing another detail. About the light. About the background. About the feeling, the connection, the implied story. Noticing. Contemplating. Understanding.

It is, as you can imagine, an infinitely useful habit, far beyond the reaches of photography!

A feather on the beach is just the practical effect of a bird shedding, the equivalent of a dust bunny on earth’s living room floor before someone runs the vacuum, a stray scrap of the activities of life and hygiene. But it’s beautiful in the sunshine!

And when I look more closely, every fiber interconnects in the most delicately fascinating ways. And when I look even more closely, I feel my world dissolving into shimmery droplets of sunshine and salt spray as echoes of bird calls fade over distant horizons.

Wild lupines are Maine’s iconic wildflowers, tall and waving and vibrant. They blanket hills and fields in wide expanses, painting the landscape in broad strokes, for a few precious summer weeks.

And when I look more closely, I find that each tall flower is made up of dozens of tiny blossoms, each unfolding its own rhythm into the choreographed unison of a floral ballet. And if I stand on my tiptoes and stare straight down, I find a spiral of understudies, tucked in tightly, waiting for the curtain to rise on their piece of the performance.

I am a fungi-fan. I can’t help it. They’re like the little wildflowers of the forest floor, delightfully unexpected in variety of color and shape and situation.

I once shared an image of a beautiful white fungus sprouting from a pale, silvery birch, like a jewel adorning royal robes. And I received a comment:

It can’t be a beautiful jewel, it’s a sign of decay and death!

It’s a bit true, of course. Fungi are decomposers. Wherever you find them, there is certainly death and decay. But that’s the poignant beauty, isn’t it? Life is always in process towards death. And death is always in process towards new life. And fungi bridge a touchingly lovely transformation between.

It’s human nature to take one quick look and be fairly certain we’ve got it all figured out. But if we just look again. Look closer. Look from another angle. We may find ourselves noticing. Contemplating. Perhaps arriving at a new level of understanding.

My daughter took a series of photos one morning at the beach.

I like them for a lot of reasons, but most of all because I see her appreciating all kinds of non-traditional perspectives on the beauty of the shore. She likes a low angle. She likes the way the light sparkles and the waves tumble. She’s fascinated by pebbles. And bubbles. She’s just noticing. And contemplating. And growing in understanding.

I’m not saying I’ve got it all figured out, by any means. It’s not that I perfected parenting by gazing into a feather. Not that I solved midlife anxiety by staring down the spiral infinity of a flower. Not that I’ve made peace with mortality by considering fungi.

But I am saying that noticing, contemplating, and understanding more about nature helps me notice, contemplate, and understand more about life! It’s as simple as that :)

There’s a reason why we tend to grow in wisdom over a lifetime, as more experiences from more perspectives yield greater understanding. There’s a reason why those in isolation grow narrow-minded, as funneling experiences into limited perspectives yields diminished understanding.

There’s a reason it’s called tunnel vision. There’s a reason it’s called narrow-minded. There’s a reason they’re called blinders. And the obvious antidote is all around us! In a world in constant motion in all directions, nature invites us to take a moment, anytime, to notice and to contemplate so that we may better understand.

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