Rock and Water

I've been reading "Creative Nature & Outdoor Photography" by Brenda Tharp, which I can highly recommend.  One of the challenges she lays down at the start of the book is to ask yourself what you are trying to say when taking a photograph.  Does the picture have meaning?  What emotions does it evoke in the viewer?  What do they take away with them from the picture?  And so on.  For someone like me who tends to snap away without giving the pictures much thought until afterwards, this has been an exciting challenge, but one that I find difficult to achieve.  I see something that I like and I take a picture of it, but it is good to think about what I am trying to say even if it is mostly (for me at least) a subliminal process.



Ok, lets try it out on this picture.  It's a stream in the Great Langdale Valley (in Cumbria), taken a couple of weeks ago.  Now if I'm honest, when I look, I just see water rushing though rock (I used a slow shutter speed of 1/6 sec to emphasise the movement of the water).  To go beyond that description takes a little more effort on my part; I see hard solid granite, that is permanent, changing little over thousands of years.  I remember it being warm from the sun and like heavy-duty sandpaper to the touch.  That rock isn't going anywhere.  In contrast the water is anything but solid, anything but permanent, it is very cold, having come from further up the mountain.  It is constantly changing, in a hurry and always different in shape and depth and speed.

The rock and the water could hardly be more different.  As I force myself to think further, I think of a similarlity between God and people.  God is the rock, permanent, eternal, solid, strong, unchanging.  We on the other hand are fluid and fragile, passing through time in the blinking of an eye.  The rock guides the flow of the water, (hmm maybe that is like God and us).  One way the water differes from us and God though is that it (albeit very gradually) shapes and smoothes the rock.  We cannot change God in any way, but then we don't need to, it is rather us who need His help to change...  OK, that'll do for now :-)

Letting Go ... letting God

Church of the Ascension, Timoleague  

Have you ever been at your wits end?  Have you ever been in a situation that was completely desperate and you simply could not see any way out?  I suspect most of us have felt a bit like that at one time or another.  Maybe it was a health problem, or something to do with finances or to do with a relationship or some kind of depression.  We are at a total loss and so we do not know what to do.  And so what is often our very last resort?  That’s right, we call out to God to help us.  And what are our prayers like in these moments; are they gentle platitudes?  No they are from the very depths of our being, from (as the saying goes) ‘the bottom of our hearts’.  And so with our fists clenched and our stomach in knots and our teeth grinding we cry out to God…  And do you know what?  In these moments prayer seems to have a potency and a power way and above the norm, it is like when we are on our knees in our own personal Garden of Gethsemene that the heavens are torn open and we have direct access to the Throne of Grace.  We have at last made room for God and He is there before the first word has even been uttered from our trembling lips.  

It was THIS big!

Olympus OM-1, G.Zuiko 50mm, Ilford HP5 plus, 400 ISO

Of course I have no idea what the conversation was between this faraway couple, but it may have been something along the lines of the above title post.  In the picture they are dwarfed by the expanse of sky above them, the vastness of the sea on one side and the dark rocks on the other.  Without getting too existential about it all, it makes me think of the smallness of us people.  We have all been given a humble reminder these past few days by a certain volcano with an unpronouceable name of just how powerless and small we all are in the grand scheme of things.  But then I listen to our two-year-old singing "My God is so Big, so strong and so mighty, there's nothing that he cannot do!"  Yes we may be small, but we do matter to Someone, very much indeed...