The night I took this photograph I was standing on the boardwalk at the Jersey Shore watching the full moon rise. A woman stood next to me, taking pictures with the exact same iPhone. But the images we captured were very different. Hers was as we saw it there in the night sky; mine was as you see in the photograph below. There was light shining on the waters in both, but the light reflected from the perfect sphere in the sky was very different.
It makes me wonder.
It really makes me wonder.
I have a similar experience photographing the sky in the daytime when I am out in nature in an expanded state of consciousness. I've got a picture from a trip to New Mexico on a glorious day up in the Enchanted Circle near Taos. The sun looks like a radiant being shining blessings from above. I have other photographs in which you can see the reach of the sun's rays into the canopy of the forest.
There may be a scientific explanation for these kinds of things, but I prefer to be in Mystery. I wrote a poem about that once. It remembers an experience I had with a friend. We were looking at the same thing but seeing something different. We were presented with something that seemed impossible. We could both see it. At first. Something changed when she tried to figure it out and came up with the answer, but she also lost something in the process. She decided in the end that she liked my magic better than her science.
The experience has always stayed with me. As have her words.
How we see is as important as what we see.
Beauty in the Night: Meditations in the Dark Time of the Year. I don't know if this will be a series, but if there is one in me, this is what I am drawn to thinking about and writing about these days.
Photo (c) 2015 Katherine Cartwright
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