October 5, 2015
All photos are mine unless otherwise noted.
To see images full screen click on any photo.
Something new for these posts, I will include one image at the end of each offering just before the cartoon of what has become of great interest to me, an abstract photo. Abstraction seems to come from a desire to reveal something of what or how my inner life may view the world. I can offer no more of an explanation than that as too many words are a distraction to the things that arise from the heart.
Lee and I took a walk last weekend around Jordan Pond in Acadia which is significant for me and my recovery from heart surgery - I managed without effort to cover 2 1/2 to 3 miles, a great improvement to a return to normal life after such a huge intrusion into my body by the surgeons. I have only grattitude for the skill of all those who were involved in the process which saved my life.
Jordan Pond seems to be a must stop for visitors to Acadia, perhaps because it has the only restaurant in the park along with a huge gift shop, both of which we ignore by walking around the throngs who come with great regularity. Yet, once the tourist season is over the road to the pond is left open by the Park Service and, without too much snow it has become a favorite set of walks taking us not only around the pond as we are given access to Jordan Stream, and we can take the carriage road up the mountain where we have some of the finest views in Acadia - all without too many people. We have on occasion been completely alone on some of our excursions.
After the cartoon I included a article about one person's need to be with her cell phone without respite from the urges to "connect." Worth a read.
The next ten images were taken last weekend.
The path at Jordan Pond.
Fall begins slowly,
hardly anxious to release summer's life too easily.
Since nature takes Her time in these matters,
we as well, can take all the time we need
to observe things old, but ever new.
A view from the pond.
The mountains in the distance were named "The Bubbles."
(Naked Nature?)
One can walk to the top of the mountain on the right which affords great views along with a huge boulder some twenty feet in length lying on its side in a precarious position by the glacier that was here some 18,000 years ago.
Another view from the pond.
Sun and water,
Wondrous things happen as cooperation
between the elements arrives
allowing us to set our eyes on living art.
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"Abstract," existing as a thought or an idea but not having a physical or concrete existence.
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This week's cartoon was sent to me yesterday - thank you Ines.
A worthwhile article:
Motherhood, Screened Off
My mother’s address book is one of the small
visual details of my childhood that I can perfectly conjure, although I am sure
no photograph of it exists. Fake-leather-bound, filled with her formal, spidery
script, it was, to me, barely legible, with addresses crossed out and replaced
with new ones as friends’ lives shifted. I often was dispatched to grab it for
her from a kitchen drawer. I knew when she was looking for someone’s phone
number, which seems unremarkable, except that my own children do not know when
I am searching for a phone number, because all they see is me, on my iPhone,
intently focused on something mysterious and decidedly not them.
It is that loss of transparency, more than
anything, that makes me nostalgic for the pre-iPhone life. When my mother was
curious about the weather, I saw her pick up the front page of the newspaper
and scan for the information. The same, of course, could be said of how she
apprised herself of the news. I always knew to whom she was talking because,
before caller ID, all conversations started with what now seems like elaborate explicitness
(“Hi, Toby, this is Flora”). And when my mother spent her obligatory 20 minutes
a day on the phone with her own aging mother, it played out, always, in the
kitchen, where I was usually half-listening as I did my homework, waiting
impatiently for her to finish. All was overt: There was much shared experience
and little uncertainty. Now, by contrast, among our closest friends and family
members, we operate furtively without even trying to, for no reason other than
that we are using a nearly omnipresent, highly convenient tool, the specific
use of which is almost never apparent.
I thought about this for the first time a few
months ago, when I was waiting out my twin sons’ soccer practice, reading
“Binocular Vision,” a collection of short stories by Edith Pearlman, on my
iPhone. The boys were dribbling their way around cones; I was in the gym
bleachers, moved by Pearlman’s meditations on mortality, having a bit of a
moment in an unlikely place. None of this was obvious to an observer, which
didn’t strike me as important until a woman a few feet away turned to me. “Look
at us,” she said, with a sheepish smile, gesturing at a row of parents hunched
over their devices. “Our kids are out there practicing, and we’re all on our
phones.”
I flushed. I was guilty as charged! But I was
almost as quickly indignant: I was wrongly accused! True, I was on my phone,
and if my kids looked up they would have seen the same thing the woman did:
someone slightly bored, distracting herself with some mindless electronic pursuit.
That would describe me accurately in many instances, but it just so happened
this was not one of them. At the moment of accusation, I was a lover of great
writing who happened to be reveling in some of it on a hand-held screen. With
my choice of e-book over hardcover, I had unwittingly cast myself as a
familiar, much-maligned character: the mom who is blind to the daily pleasures
of parenting, focused instead on some diversion which, by virtue of its taking
place on that phone, is inherently trivial. The phone cruelly reduces even the
worthiest of escapes to one more bit of busywork.
It is challenging enough to manage to be in
touch with people, to remember to pick up the thing and drop off the other
thing, to show up on time, to show up at all, to squeeze in time to read, to
respond to a friend’s question. Worse, for me, is to try to accomplish all that
under a vague cloud of suspicion; to strive to do useful or meaningful things
while feeling that I look as if I am likely watching clips of Justin Bieber
from the V.M.A.s.
Parents today are often chastised for being
distracted by their devices, for devoting more attention to their phones than
to their children. I concede that Twitter provides, at times, a more witty
conversation than the one I might have with a 6-year-old; that there is, in
fact, always some excuse to turn to the device and tune out a small child’s
rant about the problem with peanut butter; that the feeling of productivity the
phone engenders is as addictive as it is false.
But it seems safe to say that our own parents
probably gave more attention to their myriad daily tasks than they did to their
children, too, and even did so in their children’s presence. I see my mother,
circa 1982, the bills spread out on the kitchen table, her checkbook in front
of her; I hear her on the phone as she is writing down directions to someone’s
house. The difference is that those tasks, by virtue of not all transpiring on
one opaque device, were tangible and thus felt legitimate.
I was impatient when my mother’s attention
was occupied elsewhere. But my 9-year-old children, when they see me on my
phone, feel something more intense, something closer to indignation. They are
shut out twice over: They see that I am otherwise occupied, but with what, they
have no idea. This is what makes the smartphone such a rich source of paradoxical
guilt for the current generation of parents. We are considered at once
overbearing and totally oblivious, so besotted by our own children that it’s
unseemly, yet so absorbed by our phones, so unaware as precious moments of
childhood slip by, that it’s shameful.
I have started to narrate my use of the phone
when I am around my kids. “I’m emailing your teacher back,” I tell them, or,
“I’m now sending that text you asked me to send about that sleepover,” in the
hopes that I can defang the device’s bad reputation, its inherent whiff of
self-absorption.
My husband thinks no amount of narration will
change the way our kids feel about the phone. The problem, he says, is that
whenever I grab it, they know that I am also holding a portal, as magical as
the one in Narnia’s wardrobe and with the same potential to transport me to
another world or to infinite worlds. I am always milliseconds away from news of
a horrific mass stampede near Mecca or images of great medieval art or a
Twitter dissection of the pope’s visit. How far am I going, they might
reasonably worry, and how soon will I be back? Perhaps they sense how vast the
reach of the device is and how little they know of what that vastness contains;
at any moment, the size of the gap between them and me is unknowable.
Recently, one of my sons has had trouble
falling asleep. I turn on the light in his closet, thoroughly check for
burglars and aliens, but he still can’t shake the vague sense that there’s an
intruder in the house, that something menacing from the outside has made its
way in, or might, while he lies sleeping. And so I lie in the dark next to him,
as patiently as I can, willing myself to breathe deeply so that he will do the
same. All the while I am fighting the ever-swelling urge to locate my phone, so
that I can do something productive, feel that feeling of getting somewhere, at
last, while my children sleep, wholly guilt free.
Peace until next post,
Bill Lagerstrom
