I could have written this in my socio-political newsletter, the newsletter dedicated to my father’s memory, or even made it an Alice diary entry; an image (like a song) can set the tone of how (and where) you share a thought or an idea, and this featured image informed my decision to publish it here. Just as it is true that the expression of something is shared with others through the perspective of one, it is also true that it is received through the perspective of the other.
The featured image here was taken as I looked out over an inland bay at sunset several years ago when I first took my oldest granddaughter to dinner at a locally famous seafood restaurant. My perspective when I took the picture was the simple love of its raw natural beauty, tightly bound by my joy and having the opportunity to give this Waterfront Sunset to my granddaughter that she will carry with her the rest of her life… Captured on film (unknowingly at the time) to be used again many times since.
Here is another picture, taken at sunrise, looking out over a bay in northeastern Maine, which looks very similar while being from a completely different perspective. My reasons for being at that spot at that moment couldn’t be any more different than what put me at that seafood restaurant, and as this picture was taken, I was facing completely opposite where I had stood years earlier. However, it is striking that nearly identical pictures can evoke nearly polar opposite memories and perspectives.
This whole notion of “perspectives” started swirling in my head over the last several days, out on the porch having coffee with Alice as I have been congratulating her on finally coming into the weather that she was specifically built for. Freaking cold.
Don’t get me wrong, I have all the necessary clothing for this weather and will do just fine until Spring. Further, it’s not the cold so much that brings some of us down during the winter as it is the damn lack of sunlight and the shorter days and longer nights, and general malaise that takes over the body and, if we’re being honest, beats the hell out of our brain.
We all know the old cliche about some of us seeing the glass half full and others seeing it half empty, but I’ve been a Hermit so long now that I see a glass that has stuff in it with little concern about the exact quantity of what it contains. It’s all about how you look at it, am I right? Taking this idea a step further, consider the two pictures above; they could have both been either sunrises or sunsets, but I didn’t tell you, or provide you the perspective in advance, that in the first image, I was looking West, and in the second I was looking East… I let you decide for yourself, from your own perspective.
It’s a funny thing, though, having been inspired to write this while sitting on the porch of my house watching the sunrise with Alice ) the sky in front of me brightening as the sun came up behind me while looking directly Westward) I wasn’t even thinking about the Sun… I was thinking about the temperature. Alexa had already told me what the weather was outside, and I had put on the necessary layers to enjoy the dark-to-light morning transition, watching our breath form small clouds of steam as I chuckled in her general direction that it was officially cold enough for long johns but not quite cold enough for gloves.
Mumbling to myself out loud as I typically do, I was mildly entertained by my own whining about my fingers being cold from the first knuckle down while the rest of me was quite balmy and content. It would have been easy to piss and moan that it was too early in the fall to be that cold already and Lament the idea that, if this was any indication of how this winter was going to unfold, it was probably going to be one hell of a dark and cold winter season. But that isn’t what I did… I celebrated the idea that the sun wasn’t setting on the warm season behind me and Dawning on a cold 6-month stretch.
I choose, instead, to take the perspective of seeing the sunrise on a dark, cold six-month stretch as an opportunity to look at things from a different perspective, consider the six months ahead, and see all the possibilities available to me (and all the rest of you) if I summon the courage in inspiration to take advantage of them.
Dude… I can buy gloves. But I have a nearly 10-month-old Landseer Newfoundland, built for the snow and the cold, who will have no part of staying indoors. There will be plenty of time to warm up, me with some hot cocoa(maybe spiked, maybe not) while she drip-dries in front of the heater and gives me that”I don’t like your no cocoa for dogs” look right before I hand her some of her favorite treats. Then, I will get busy sharing nature with her and teaching her about nature’s cycles of life and death. And rebirth. And then I’m going to ask her to help me write about it and pay no attention to shorter days and longer nights. I’ll be too busy.
