One late afternoon recently I was working at my computer and
happened to glance up at the window nearby. Though the shade was pulled down
half way, the sun was streaming through the panes, and my stained glass
butterfly was fully lit by the filtered rays. I’d never noticed this before, as
usually the shade is all the way up or it’s dark and no light is coming in. The
butterfly was glowing so beautifully in the gentle light that I had to stop my
work and simply stare.
After a few
moments, I decided to take a picture. I felt some internal struggle about this,
because I was in the middle of writing an article and it occurred to me that I
should finish first and then fetch my camera. But a little voice inside seemed
to call to me, “Do it now!” So I
spent the next few minutes fiddling with angles and settings until I got a shot
I liked. I stared at the butterfly for a short time after that and then went
back to work.
A bit
later, after I’d finished writing, I glanced back up at the window and noticed
that the light had passed, and the butterfly wasn’t glowing any more. In
photography, they call what had just happened “the decisive moment,” the moment
when you click the perfect shot, when everything in your subject’s expression
and form lines up perfectly, and you are able to capture the essence of the
moment on film. The French photographer Henri Cartier-Bresson, who is
considered the father of photojournalism, coined the phrase. Of course, I
had more than an instant to capture the image of my butterfly above, but had I
not put down my work when I did I'd have missed the opportunity entirely.
I often think about how easy it is to miss
those “decisive” moments during an average day…about how often we’re looking up
when just at our feet is an extraordinary flower, or how when we’re looking down we
may miss a gorgeous heron soaring through the sky. I know we can’t be looking
everywhere at once, but it certainly seems that too much time is spent staring
at cell phones and computer screens these days, and while we’re preoccupied
with our little worlds we may be missing so many things…sunlight streaming
through the wings of glass butterflies, for instance.
I’m going
to make an effort to be more aware of the beauty all around me (even as I typed
this last sentence a woodpecker flew into the treetop nearby, a yellow leaf
fell from my pear tree onto its pine neighbor in a most graceful manner and a
bee began buzzing from flower to flower on my Rose of Sharon). Perhaps it would
be more productive to move my workspace away from the windows, but I think not.
There is so much to see, and we don’t need to have a camera in our hands to
register those exquisite images in our hearts.
