REFLECTED GLORY: A Photo/Poetry Essay

Sometimes you see things from a different angle, and its like you never saw anything clearly before… and you wonder where the new view might take you…

For most of my life I have been both astonished and troubled by the natural world. I believe the trouble has to do with the awareness in me of what C.S. Lewis calls “the inconsolable secret” in each one of us. The intricate beauty I behold in the natural world around me provokes this longing for something just beyond it, “to be reunited with something in the universe from which we now feel cut off…” C.S. Lewis, The Weight of Glory

Writing poetry has always kept me in touch with that longing. The practical part of my brain needs to control and understand, do what is needed, tidy things up. When I let my brain wander off from these necessary occupations, I happen upon unexpected images and feelings that are invitations to go deeper into what feels like a homesickness pointing to a connection I crave, a deeper understanding of myself and my place in the order of things.

I spent a season (it started with Covid) wandering off from, but also, as it turns out, into, my life, simply by sitting on my dock with my camera and my notebook. As I learned to sit and watch the creek and the wide marsh beyond it, I actually felt summoned simply to pay attention. I saw as if for the first time the complex, sometimes companionable, often violent civilization of the birds on the creek. I gave my looking a name - praying with my eyes wide open.

Just in the short expanse of salt creek that I could see from my dock, I discovered a universe before me always recreating itself, full of life and death and brokenness and hope. The tide always falling, but then rising, attended to by the birds and their shadow companions. Over time, what caught my attention was the reflections of those birds. It felt like I was joining God to see what he sees when he beholds his unbelievably beautiful creation, and its diminishing. He loves every drifting, shattered piece of it. The pictures I took, the words that drifted to the surface, joined in me the inconsolable secret of disconnection to a gift, a longing for heaven.

God made us humans in his image: creators. I believe the creative process in me is always about what I believe it is to God: making and restoring connections. Now, as I put words and pictures together, it seems like one more way God is putting things back together in me. I am attempting to combine poetry and photography in essays that intimate the spiritual nostalgia (inconsolable secret) that God has placed in us to draw us to himself. Nowadays, every where I look (not just on the creek) I see hints, clues, invitations to wonder about God’s good purposes.

In my first photo/poetry essay, Reflected Glory, the pictures are reflections of birds rather than the birds themselves. They suggest to me the creation God spoke into existence, then watched dissipate, and purposes to restore in the fullness of time. I hope the reflections of the birds might create in those who see them, the same wondering I experience, of what it means to be created lovely and then frayed, but still lovely. For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror; then we shall see face to face. Now I know in part; then I shall know fully, even as I am fully known. (1 Corinthians 13:12)

It all started on the creek, watching the birds. Who knows where it will lead? This world is so full of beauty. I intend to pay attention.

Louise Gwathmey Weld

The Birds that Started it All

Poetry and Reflections

Reflected Glory

On the fifth day, God breathed
out a substance of wings and webbed feet, feathers
of every hue, birds of every calling and disposition,
an extravagance of joy, including
a sense of the absurd (so testify the pelican and the spoonbill).
These days, it is not the birds themselves, but the birds
which are not birds which call to mind for me
their maker’s breath still lingering in the washed and fading lines,
even in their blurring. Shattered and lovely in their shattering,
out of focus, upside down, blur of light, wind, fish scatter,
wrinkled, their true shapes just perceptible on the
creek that is sometimes not a creek,
itself beset with ambiguities:
every emptying crevice wistful, a hollowing,
every filling a mercy refracting to a new view.
The little blue sees himself floating as he searches
for food, his own reflection a hunger itself.
The fact of his hunger skitters the fish,
breaks his image into shivers of bright light,
hope substantial, dissolving, perceptible…

For now we see only a reflection as in a mirror;
then we shall see face to face.
1 Corinthians 13: 12

feather

hope is the thing with feathers - Emily Dickinson

lovely
as the day it came to be
called feather
a sun struck wisp
snagged in a tangle of cordgrass
anchored to its own reflection
in the nonchalant creek
solitary, though designed for community
useless now, though created for flight
and for what purpose does it
retain its unsinkable beauty
cast off, frayed?
rising tide will unpin it
release it to a new direction
to drift aimless on the unheeding creek
catch the eye of the beholder
evoke a certain intimacy
an impression of companionship
of lament and loveliness
to make for a wondering
where it has been
and where now still is
and is being taken
lovely

behold

behold, my colors blur
i have slid off the shape of myself
broken and breaking are all my bones
my intentions trail after me
I have lost my beginnings and endings
my shadow body is a haze
my wings askew in the creases of the creek
are a fade, disappearing

Behold, I am making all things new. Revelation 21: 5

grace notes

pallid creek
birds streaking down, wings sun flashed
quiver surface of creek
splash shapes motion
all along its edges
color stirs the water
swims the creek.

now the tricolored heron strikes the water
scurries its own image:
it tiptoes along, streamers of leg trail behind it.
you watch the bird: its feathers so intricately arranged
its precise beak and claws, its blinking eyes scan the water
for fish and then
you see suggestions of bird
body bent and blurred
neck sliced into latticework
the bird so attentive to its prey
the reflection so attentive to the bird
sun and water dissolving precision into impression
vague, suggestive
but always there:
self contained, the bird itself and the business at hand
and its unconfined reflection, which chases or sidesteps or leads but
cannot escape the presence of its image maker
nor can it prevent its own dissolving

the bird does not notice its clinging beauty fading
in and out of focus with every fleck of motion
and you feel in yourself your own intentions and scatterings
you see what the water presents as bird
and its constant shadow companion
mocker of precision
how creek and bird together, without conscious intention, paint this patchy theology
of what has come to be, what can come of it, and how the heart is
stirred by loss and longing
these are a singing