It is early morning and I am sitting alone on a log beside the river watching and waiting for the first glimpse of light that will illuminate what,  for now,  I can only hear.   As the water releases its warmth into the cool air that covers it like a blanket,  the resulting mist is wet on my skin.   Taking its time,  the rising sun coaxes the world to life until its wings are spread full and wide.   As the sun warms the air,  the mist recedes and a bright scene begins to take shape.   Like an artist that started with only a roughly sketched shape,  the colors and details are painted in, from every feather of a bird to the textures of the bark on a tree and the ripples on the water.    

What was striking about this scene as it unfolded, and I didn’t realize this at the time,  was the shear mundane nature of it.  It sounds almost blasphemous to utter those words.  The birds had no awareness of being observed - they were not aware of my presence.  I only realized what I had witnessed after contemplating the final prints.   I saw prehistoric-like birds with wings spread wide like giant parachutes.  I  saw their breeding colors and shapes bright and inviting.  Male egrets with their lace-like breeding plumes were begging to be noticed by a willing mate.  I watched as these creatures performed their daily ablutions, preening and bathing then intensely stalking fish to satisfy a growing hunger.  I saw diamonds in the rough on the back of a heron and a “pony” tail as a heron gazed calmly ahead.  It was life happening in its most basic form.  There was no performance - no actors playing a part trying to please me.   This was everyday river life for a bird, nothing more.  At the time I saw nothing but the majestic displays and took great pleasure in watching and taking image after image.  But seeing the ordinary, the supposed mundane, embodied in those displays as they appeared in the final print was even more profound.

This is what I see when I contemplate these photos.  Everyday life - just like my everyday life.  Showering, fixing my hair, eating, walking my dogs - all part of an ordinary somewhat predictable existence in my own familiar environment.  I saw routine.  I am reminded of the extraordinary when I look at the beautiful displays in nature but it is the ordinary and mundane that is cloaked by those displays that brings them to life;  they are the drivers.  That is very freeing, there is trust in the predictability and stability that is the common thread in all things.  That is remarkable when I think about it.  Searching for the ordinary - who would have thought?  G.K. Chesterton wrote in an essay entitled Defense that pessimism appeals to our weakest character,  but it is the optimist that is the rebel who is trying to appeal to our higher selves.   The pessimist sees the ordinary and tries to jolt us from the mundane.  The optimists appeal to what we have forgotten, that there is good in everything and they plead with us to remember.

The beauty of a photograph is that images have the capacity to remind us of what we always knew and have forgotten.  They tap into the deeper part of our nature.  Like seeing shapes and images in the clouds, the memory and experience is different for each of us.  That is what makes images we love special - they embody the ordinary that is the driver of our amazing lives and that is quite extraordinary.  I would not change it.

                 “And this our life, exempt from the public haunt, 

                Finds tongues in trees, books in the running brooks, 

                    Sermons in the stones, and good in everything.   

                                     I would not change it.”         As You Like It,   William Shakespeare