Image: Beauty and it’s underbelly
That’s the question that I’m often asked. What’s it like to live at the lake where the sea and sky and earth meet? Where beauty and its underbelly reside along the rock wall where wildflowers and wild birds live and sandbags make a white line along the grasses. Squirrels show up along with fowl and fish.
In the words of Barry Lopez,
This community of creatures, including all those invisible in the water, constitutes a unique overlap of land, water and air. This is a special meeting ground, like that of a forest’s edge with a clearing: or where the fresh waters of an estuary meet the saline tides of the sea; or at a river’s riparian edge. The mingling of animals from different ecosystems charges such border zones with evolutionary potential.
The edges of any landscape—horizons, lip of a valley, the bend of a river around a canyon wall—quicken an observer’s expectations. That attraction to borders, to the earth’s twilight places, is part of human curiosity. And the edges that cause excitement are like these where I now walk, sensing the birds toying with gravity: is like the quantum mechanics where what is critical straddles a border between being a wave and being a particle’ between being what is and becoming something else, occupying an edge of time that defeats our geometrics. In biology these transitional areas between different communities are called ecotones.
This is what it’s like to live at the lake– to be among a community of creatures on the water’s edge along the rocky border of land under the ever-changing sky. This is “where I now walk” or sit, or stand, do yoga, sleep, meditate, cry, laugh, love, listen to the sound of wind, wave, warbling. It is the place where the rainbow crests over the sandbags laid down to prevent flooding. Where the beauty of the sky created by the quantum mechanics of light particle/wave passing through water’s prism makes visible the beauty of color. All the while reminding me that what is now displayed in the photographic image is only a glimpse of what was, what is now and becoming something else as the water, earth, and sky “occupy an edge of time” that defeats the notion of beauty, excites curiosity, and challenges transformational expectations. Where water rises to flood stage, changing the landscape and reforming places of curiosity where caring for the ecotone of my home-on-the-lake is a daily gift.