A pause to look deep

By JoAnne Young

Being at home for weeks, without the constant demands of work or regimen, can allow a person a deeper look at the world, even while that world’s inhabitants are being stalked by a confounding illness. 

I have always been attracted to those things that don’t dwell habitually on the surface: hidden meanings, rangy conversations, dusky colors, and people who rank lower on life’s depth chart.

But in the pace that is our more common routine, there’s not always time for the weightier. 

You know how it goes -- get in, get it done, get out. 

It feeds the beast, but not the soul.  

Two years ago, in my effort to reach at least a part of that soul, I joined a photography class at Southeast Community College. In that class, and others I continued to take, the unexpected happened. I learned to look at things in a different way, those things that lie silent while many of us tramp past, ignoring all but our own thoughts. 

I began to see the beauty that is not so obvious in our quick looks. Those things that with a different perspective give us access to the unexpected. Like knowing the path you start out on will not be the one on which you will complete the journey. 

We can stop for a moment and turn the camera to the view behind us.

I don’t know what your slow turn and different picture might show. Mine allowed me to sit for an hour last fall and watch striped shore crabs in a La Jolla tide pool, as they warily looked back at me, ready at a barely discernible move on my part to dive and hide in the crevice of wet rocks. 

It showed me the reflection closer to home of bare trees rippling in silvery first-light water. And the beauty of flowers, past their soft blooms, now wilted, drying and faded. 

A single leaf hit by the sun in just the right way became a work of art. A paw print sunk deep into the edge of a muddy trail told a story of night wanderings I could not witness. 

There were times I was lucky to have the last light of an evening guide my way home, with a cast of colors only seen between the sunlit afternoon and the ink of night. 

Those moments only speak to us when they are coaxed out by quiet watching, something that doesn’t happen in crowds of people, or even the six feet of social distancing. 

This pause gives us permission to take a short walk beyond this fear of the unknown, and see how those in the natural world – and now we – can accept living every day in a state of alertness to anything that might happen. 

We can be easily fooled, usually because we are willing to be. And we definitely are being tested as we hold the world more than at arm’s length. 

But that has given us a little time to see past the usual, to pause for those meanings and conversations, and to gaze at that last light of evening that will never look the same tomorrow.