Meditation on Green

It was too sunny to sit home and finish my comments on Pirsig’s Lila. so I went to Nisqually Wildlife refuge. It must be fall because I saw more birds today than I’ve seen in awhile.

But the high point of the day came while standing at the edge of a swamp trying to capture a shot of this dragon flying. While I’ve managed to get pretty good pictures of one when landed, I’ve never managed to get a picture of one flying before:

Dragonfly

In order to capture the shot, I spent nearly a half hour staring through my 400mm lens, trying to manually focus on the dragonfly because autofocus kept trying to focus on the background.

Most of the time I simply stared into the green blur that serves as the background of the above picture. It was a strange meditation, with me and the dragonfly strangely suspended in time.

When I accidentally focused on the bullrushes in the background, it felt strangely surreal as if I’d been transported to a land where blades of grass stand six foot tall:

Bulrushes

and even a single pair of blades seem strangely beautiful:

Two Blades

6 thoughts on “Meditation on Green”

  1. Wow! Perseverance furthers. For some reason, these photos made me think of the I Ching. Sure enough, the first hexagram, Ch’ien / The Creative, refers to “flying dragon in the heavens.” The pair of blades is sublime. What a splendid green meditation!

  2. Striking photos!
    The dragonfly photo is great – your patience definitely paid off. 🙂 The last photo is beautiful like you said. I never would have thought that “a single pair of blades” could produce such a wonderful shot. I think nature is always beautiful. It is just that we don’t pay enough attention to see the beauty in every day life because we are so busy with the mundane things in life. Thank you for sharing beautiful photos once again.

  3. How beautiful. Loren, I too have been watching dragon flies and reading ‘Lila’, here in London, in recent days. Yes, I have only managed to capture a dragonfly when it landed. Yours, with the blurry green background, is a fabulous capturing of the quality of light and damp in places where dragonflies gather

  4. My gosh, Loren–I turn my back for a couple of days and you come up with the most gorgeous photos I have ever seen. Dazzling!
    Mary

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