Communion + Collaboration
What a year of nature photography taught me about my place in this world.
During the first year of COVID, my son and I stayed with my parents. School had moved online, I was working remotely and seemed sensible to help them while also being able to spend real time in the quiet.
I often think about that time now, especially since my mom’s death. I’m grateful I have that year of everydayness to look back on, days and days of just being in one another’s lives, less as mother and child and more as adult friends worming their way through this world together, ordinary and extraordinary at once.
My parents’ house is on an acre of land, set back in a cul-de-sac just on the outskirts of a mid-sized Midwestern city. The front yard reaches out and out and out, building in some separation between them and the three other homes in the neighborhood.
One summer, I dug out the rock landscape the builders had lazily dumped around a wild cherry tree in the middle of the yard, shovelful by shovelful hauling wheelbarrow after wheelbarrow of river rock to the woods.
I worked for days, and by the end I thought my back would never be straight again.
My mom planted roses and native grasses, a few bushes, and every season peppered the space with birdhouses on shepherd’s hooks and baths, and spinners that would catch the wind.
Year after year, spring after spring, summer after summer, she would coax life from the soil, play host to birds and bees and butterflies, spiders and beetles.
That year, I also picked up my camera again. I’d purchased a mid-range digital camera years before and played at nature photography. I took a class. Followed photographers. Read about different settings, and, more than anything, took a lot of photos.
I got average, but I thoroughly enjoyed the hobby.
With my parents, my hobby was thrown into overdrive. I’d get up early and spend an hour or two out on their deck, walk their property during lunch or sit quietly at the border of my mom’s garden and watch nature carry on her rituals of living.
The time became a meditation, a communion, an honest collaboration and reaffirmation that I am united in ways both big and small with all living things.
I know. I know. That sentiment is sometimes so overused, and in some ways so commercialized, that describing anything in terms of connection with the natural world feels cheap and fabricated.
But in those moments, giving myself over, fully, to the present, blurred the boundaries.
We all, every sentient being, cycle through our lives in overlapping, returning seasons.
We are brand new, beginners more than once in our lives.
New experiences, new hardships and joys crack us open when we let them and soften what’s tightly bound, providing space for growth and renewal. We can reach for the light. We can settle in and let hardship do its work of nudging us toward something deeper, more fundamentally us. We can strip ourselves to what’s essential and then rebuild truer.
I have a very clear memory of watching a bumble bee get stuck in a spider’s web as I sat on a gardening stool in my mom’s flower bed out front, camera on my lap. I sat for a minute, thinking the bee would shake itself loose and fly off, clearly misunderstanding the genius of the web.
There would be no freedom without intervention.
My choice was going to have consequences for one of the players in this drama. Let the bee nourish the spider or save the bee but risk damaging the industrious architecture spun for just such a necessary and life-affirming occasion?
After a moment’s hesitation, I choose the option that didn’t require any immediate loss of life. A thin stick helped me carefully free the bee, whom I then placed in the lawn a short distance from my seat where it sat and sorted itself for a moment, eventually buzzing away into the woods.
Nature, interrupted.
But, I thought, how many times had my own life been interrupted. How many joys, how many disappointments, how many trials (and errors)? How many nights have I laid awake wondering if this was it, was I finally going to be pushed over, dumped fully into the darkness? Alone and messy and lost.
Then again, how often have I been plucked from misery? Picked up, pitted and bruised, maybe barely hanging on, but safe again, or safe enough, to mend myself.
Restart.
My neighbor’s cat is a wanderer. I don’t like indoor/outdoor cats. They are incredibly hard on bird populations. In Chicago, if you suggest outdoor cats are a nuisance, you’re met with instant and hostile feedback. “They keep rat populations in check!” (They don’t). “More birds are killed by window strikes!” (Wrong again).
Tiny cat is the worst kind of hunter. He kills and leaves his prey bloodied and dismembered for others to find. Nothing is taken for nourishment or to cull populations that are unsustainable in greater numbers.
Tiny cat, as many cats do, kills because he can.
I came around the corner toward my back stairs one morning to see a baby bunny frantically scratching at my building’s brick exterior like they were going to dig their way in. A reverse escape.
Tiny was crouched low a few feet away. “NOOO! NO, TINY CAT. NO!” I shooed him away and took my sweater off to scoop the bunny up.
After crossing the street and depositing the bunny in a patch of grass I was only about halfway up my back alley when I decided the spot was just as unsafe. I walked around my block, finally nestling it in some bushes by the schoolyard.
I’m reminded of how dependent we are on one another, how much I need the steadfastness of who and what supports me, the places I find solace, the ways in which I am integral, both in what I give and what I need.
I always shrunk, a lesson I subconsciously inherited and nurtured throughout childhood, like I was continually apologizing for existing, trying to just fill instead of take up space.
Age and lived experience opened me up, allowed me to recalibrate my understanding of myself and reconfigure my internal landscape.
What’s that they say? It’s all about perspective.
Small is not the same as powerless just as big cannot assume righteousness.
Death and loss more than anything has encouraged a nuance that forces me to reconcile that in this world very little we consider in opposition is truly antagonistic.
I can hold grief and joy, happiness and sadness, life and death, and in every one of those moments I can find multitudes, overlapping emotions that hint at the complexity of life, the ways in which living deeply engaged, wholly committed to both humanity and my own humanness, is rich with subtlety and mystery.
When I’m honest, I don’t always want to be here. I don’t always want to exist.
Put simply: I sometimes passively wish for death.
The sentence isn’t active: I want to die.
More like: I don’t want to live.
There is a difference, subtle but significant.
Often, though, I remember how elemental every mortal’s existence is in this world
Where everyone and everything anchors me, and I anchor everyone and everything.
Reciprocal, collective.