A Walk in the Woods: "....to see what is there."

John Cage, the artist (musician, composer, writer, visual artist) was also an amateur mycologist, so he spent a lot of time in the woods. He wrote:

One shouldn't go to the woods looking for something, but rather to see what is there.

Seeing what is there, allowing the wonder of things––"I am here to wonder." J.W. Goethe––to penetrate my sometimes distracted, anxious, sad, self, turns my inward worrying out to the world. So seeing a dangling stem of ripening chokecherries as I entered the woods becomes a moment of joy.

Last week, on my return from a trip, I felt frazzled and overwhelmed; I didn't go for a walk, from busyness or bad weather, for several days. When I finally picked up my camera and walked the few steps into the woods, I entered another world, different enough from my home and yard that it brightened my attitude. This transition reminded me of the opening of Melville's Moby Dick, when after introducing himself, "Call me Ishmael.", the narrator goes on to write:

Whenever I find myself growing grim about the mouth; whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul; whenever I find myself involuntarily pausing before coffin warehouses, and bringing up the rear of every funeral I meet; and especially whenever my hypos get such an upper hand of me, that it requires a strong moral principle to prevent me from deliberately stepping into the street, and methodically knocking people's hats off––then, I account it high time to get to sea as soon as I can.

For me, it's high time to take a walk with my camera, to pay attention to whatever is there, perhaps the surprise of red leaves in the midst of green in mid-summer....

...or a scaly mushroom with a center of toothy protuberances that look like grabbing teeth, as though it might be a carnivore. I used to think that a camera was a barrier between a person and the world, a false way of seeing, but in the four years that I've been writing this blog, I've come to realize that the camera is an extension of a searching eye, and that it enables me to see much more than I would without it; it encourages me to notice everything. Here is a terrific quote from Henri Cartier-Bresson on taking photographs:

To take photographs means to recognize––simultaneously and within a fraction of a second––both the fact itself and the rigorous organization of visually perceived forms that give it meaning. It is a putting of one's head, one's eye, and one's heart on the same axis.

This compact mass of young green seeds on a cedar tree has a feeling of bound energy; the bright green against the cooler dark of the needles is festive.

Here was a mushroom, I believe it's a Crown-tipped coral mushroom, that to me looked like a cathedral, with flying buttresses arcing skyward. These are all quite ordinary things, but at the same time beautiful and not at all commonplace. It is so important to turn away from the internal churning wheels and face outward. From William James:

To be rapt with satisfied attention, like [Walt] Whitman, to the spectacle of the world's presence, is one way, and the most fundamental way, of confessing one's sense of its unfathomable significance and importance.