Come January, what you've got to work with here is a snowy quilt, occasional azure up above, dusky grasses the color of buffalo calves, and almost horrifying bare-naked trees thrown up center stage. If you didn't know that line of trees are in a seasonal dormancy, they'd appear as bolts of sable lightening shooting up from a demonic storm deep in the earth.
What I'm saying is that, right now, for someone who packs a camera and takes home landscapes, this time of year where I live doesn't offer much to shoot--and things only get worse as we stumble into "Farch," that disappointing hobgoblin of a time when weather makes landscapes either sad or bad. That picture up there is the best I can do mid-winter, and it'll be Easter before any gift of green arises to spell the boredom. That time will come--it always does. Still, it's a heckuva long way off, so right now you shoot what you can because you gotta work with what you got.
There's no real subject in that picture, no immediacy, only a composition of broad elements that don't compete for a resolution. But I can't help but think--and hope you agree--that something beautiful abides even here in the mundane cold. The snow over the grasses isn't fresh; it's humped by its own poky melting. Still, there's movement: the ground seems to flow toward the center of the picture, as if there's something there to honor, or even worship.
Behind the tree line, a huge Nike swoosh sweeps over all that lovely blue sky, and its delicacy awakens something lively within, despite winter all around.
Against that lava-like snow and the almost worshipful penmanship of the sky you've got that thorny stand of trees, alive enough to shake a bit in the wind, but generally dead to the world, even though down there beneath the surface, you just know there's enough life to start anew in a matter of months.
Sometimes I hear a melody when I walk out to the river--"Everything is beautiful in it's own way"--a silly hippie lyric, or so I tell myself when I'm on a walk, even though there's some truth in it. For a Calvinist like me, the rerun is a stretch, especially after a rash of untimely deaths we've suffered as of late--a funeral Monday, as a matter of fact, others too.
"Everything is beautiful in its own way?"
Really? Give me a break--after all, she's left her husband alone. Nothing winsome about that. But their story is unique--still is, despite her passing. Forty-six years ago he asked her to marry him and she said he didn't know what he was saying--he was just a kid. He insisted. She consented, and they had all those gloriously happy years together. She's gone now. He sat alone in the front bench at her funeral.
But her passing doesn't negate the precious life they had together, not for a moment. All you had to do was listen to his testimony of their loving years together. It was a joy. And more, what he said was uplifting.
Everything--even a prairie landscape in January--or Farch, for that matter--is beautiful "in its own way."
I don't deliberately sing that song when I'm out there along the river on a Sabbath walk. I don't choose that tune from some in-my-mind hymnal; dang thing just plays, whether or not I pull it up, even and maybe especially in January with a pallet of just three colors amid a storm of funerals.
Some tape player in me simply insists that even when I'm out there in a cold, in an almost colorless world, there's some truth to that old hippie ditty--everything is beautiful in its own way.
That line keeps keeps playing somehow, as does another persistent line, this one from none other than John Calvin: "There is not one little blade of grass, there is no color in this world that is not intended to make us rejoice."
Tough sledding though sometimes, no matter what time of year.
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