Pixelating
I understand the hierarchy of communications. It starts with the written word and moves to the spoken work (as in recorded). At the same time, the written word gives way to pictures, which then give way to video, which eventually gives way to live, real time video and audio interaction. It’s all very logical and its clear that involving more senses in the communicating process is almost always an improvement. The expression that a picture is worth a thousand words depends on the person doing the writing, but I generally get the sentiment that one visualization can speak volumes. But sometimes communication is intended to be more narrowly channeled of focused that a photograph or even video can be. And the beauty of the written word is that it can describe all of the senses and more, only some of which might get included in a photograph. There is something about the turn of a phrase that excites me and perhaps even holds more meaning than something more visual might. The tyranny of the visual arts is such that everyone assumes that they get more out of photos and videos. The result is the progression from email and text to Facebook to Instagram to TikTok and beyond.
When I started my current blog, I made a decision that I would not use convenient photos to highlight, sell or explain my stories. I had used them in a prior blog and I found that it became a bit of a crutch that I could lean on when the words didn’t always flow. I chose to avoid that prosthetic and kept my blog pure as one of the written word. As the past four years have evolved, a lot of my blog stories have entailed my gardening exploits and my wondrous musings about my property and its beauty. That has caused questions from some of my blog readers as to what my property is looking like these days. Some of those readers have not been to our hillside, others have been but have not been recently enough to have seen all the improvements. So, yesterday I broke with my own rules by posting 42 photos, some old ones and a raft of new ones from every angle I could imagine of my gardens.
I am personally very proud of these gardens as I have put in many hours of work to get them where they are today. We are both very happy to be living on this hilltop and amidst all of this natural beauty and we remind ourselves of that every day. But there is somehow more to it than that. I think it is fair to say that our lives have changed in the past four years and I am certain it is for the better. It all makes me think about the cycles of life.
I know that I got my first real introduction to outdoor work when I was in my early adolescence in Maine. We had moved to the state from Wisconsin, where we had lived a mostly suburban lifestyle to a place where we were about as rurally remote as one can get in the Northeastern United States. Maine is a rugged state most known for its rocky coastline. That coast was an easy day trip for us, but the lakes and hills were more our regular haunts and given that we lived on the eighteenth hole of a famous old golf course, I spent most of my spare time on that course, working and playing. The work ranged from caddying to locker room maintenance to grounds work. The course was the oldest 18 hole golf course in America (supposedly, but I can’t confirm that) and it is also home to a natural spring where people from the Northeast came in summer to “take the waters”. That spring became the source and brand that is the well-known Poland Spring Water that is found on the shelves of every bodega in New York. So, the place was a vortex of natural wonders with the famous fourth hole being the best recognized golf hole in the Northeast since it looked down a lane of pines to a green set amidst the foliage-covered lakes as the backdrop.
I was imprinted with a sense of nature’s wonder from that three year stay in Maine. My next serious interaction with nature was in Ithaca during college. Those were the days when summer jobs were about earning money and getting a break from schoolwork, not so much yet about experiencing the professional working world or gaining valuable resume-filling internships that helped pave a road to future full-time employment. The goal was to get a job that paid well and gave you some good healthy outdoor work. I got such a job after Junior year at the Cornell Plantations, the agriculture school’s well-respected arboretum. Since then, political correctness has caused the arboretum to be renamed as Cornell Botanic Gardens and the F.R. Newman Arboretum. The only thing more important than political correctness in higher education is fundraising through naming opportunities. I spent the next two summers and some of the spring and fall part-time, doing hard manual labor on those grounds. We cleared deadfall from the gorges surrounding campus, we mowed acre after acre of grass, we moved vast quantities of peat moss and mulch from one place to another, we planted every variety of plant or bush you can name, we trimmed trees and pruned bushes and cleared and policed miles of walking trails throughout the 175 acres that our domain covered. It was hard and continuous, repetitive work that we did for 8 or 12 hour shifts, depending on the demands of nature and the arboretum director’s whims. And it all gave me a reasonable foundation in hard physical work and the general ways of gardening.
As I think about my times in Maine and Ithaca, learning to commune with nature, other than that one postcard shot of the fourth hole, I don’t recall the need to photograph any of what surrounded me. Its not that I was unimpressed by my surroundings, but rather that I found absorbing nature through my senses was what I was supposed to do rather than becoming an Ansel Adams that captured it all for others and posterity. I was neither into photography as an art form nor did I feel the need to chronicle my surroundings. I don’t recall feeling that what I was experiencing was supposed to be shared or even pondered, it was just where I was and what I was a part of.
So, what has changed? Why am I constantly gob-struck by the natural beauty that surrounds me? I find myself thinking about the movie The Last Samurai where Tom Cruise and Ken Watanabe spend a winter in the hills of Japan contemplating their cultural differences. Where Cruise is plagued by his warrior’s memories, Watanabe (Katsumoto) spends hours contemplating the mysteries of nature and the perfection of the cherry blossoms. Where the vagaries of human nature are left unresolved, the absolute perfection of nature is reconciled with Katsumoto’s dying breath by the observation that all cherry blossoms are perfect. I have travelled down the same path and it has led me to this hilltop garden and very similar conclusions. Capturing nature in pixelated fashion may be more convenient to do, but understanding and internalizing its perfection remains the challenge we all must achieve in our own time.