I sat in the grass to watch the sunset today. I’ve been doing this a lot lately. I think about how beauty exists in hidden spaces, angles, accidents of light, shifting between shadows, continually present in everything—even the mundane, even the grass, even the common asters. I’ve been trying to be more mindful of these spaces lately, to meditate through observation and wholehearted absorption—as if in prayer, in an act of devotion, awe, and wonder. It is calming. I sit very still and look for the light. It feels good simply to sit, feel the breeze, and watch the world swaying.

I look for openings in the leaves, vines, grasses, and trees—to glimpse the secret nonchalance of the world which occasionally breathes something absolutely exquisite. I feel as though I witness miracles all the time. I feel as though I’ve never seen so many colors, or smelled everything growing around me—that the world has reappeared to me as spectacle in watercolors and fragments. I can sit in a single place and it is as though all the variables of my environment (the wind, the light, the flowers, the insects, the temperature, the time of day, and the interconnectedness of these variables—what flowers open and close and at what time, the hour at which the insects feed or rest, the local vegetation and the wildlife it attracts, the temperature and light that affects flight activity or the way wings rest, the wind cascading through leaves and moving the light) oscillate through a kaleidoscope—all of which I have become more aware of from taking pictures. I feel as though holding a camera has allowed me to witness the world in an entirely new way—it has allowed me to pause, to have patience, and to feel grateful.

Several years ago, I once walked through this very same neighborhood scouting for beauty. I had come to hold this place in my mind as bleak and barren—I wanted to try and find something good in it, something that would allow me to reflect upon it fondly, with hope. I found nothing.

I’m not entirely sure what the difference is between then and now except that my observations have become far more passive—a yielding. I’m not attempting to impose any preconceived form of beauty upon my environment. The world creates far more beautiful scenes than I could ever manufacture. I appreciate the accidental nature of the things I see and the images I capture—that they aren’t repeatable, that they’re fleeting, that they’re hopelessly imperfect both tangentially and as a result of my status as a beginner, and that I must be patient and quiet to witness them. I have always felt that to witness someone, or to witness the world, is an act of love or even worship. When you devote yourself to noticing details and nuance, when you observe and delight in what is casually overlooked, as though otherwise lost in distraction, and when you feel this gratitude for it, for simply having the opportunity to hold glimpses of it—that witnessing, that gratitude, is love, is a gift.

The things I’m seeing are entirely new to me—like gifts. When I go for walks, or when I sit in the grass, always with my camera in hand, it feels meditative; I feel absorbed in what I’m seeing. Annie Dillard wrote that “there is another kind of seeing that involves a letting go.” When I go outside, I do not feel myself; I feel the world. And where I previously saw nothing, I now see everything. Potential seems evident everywhere—even in the most mundane and common. I try not to overlook anything. I look at the asters, I look at the bark on trees, I look through the gravel, through weeds, through swamps, and the more I look, the more I see. Things that at first appear ordinary, dull, or even morbid transform through angle and light.

Lately I have felt scared—I have felt that there is so little truth to be found, so few hard pillars of fact, and between them this vast space of interpretation and misunderstanding. Everything has felt so nebulous and ambiguous. This isn’t a particularly revolutionary fear—the unknown is a constant, lurking in both minutiae and the infinite, but I have felt that I have lost confidence in the previous patterns I had naturally adapted to confront this dilemma. I have felt that I need to re-habituate myself to the world, relearn its signs, symbols, and subtleties and that from my current position, I know and can trust nothing—including my own perceptions, including my own methods of filling the gaps. That uncertain space has felt threatening and dark. I’ve thought about the way that each individual holds his or her own narrative, or narratives, and wondered how frequently our narratives actually overlap and communicate with each other. I’ve wondered if it is even truly possible to occupy the same moment with someone—or if we are too isolated, separated by worlds, to actually collapse that distance. I have suffered and struggled, feeling that truth is fragile, fickle, and unreliable—or that, instead, nonexistent, and the moments I have shared with others have been meaningless, more indicative of alienation than intimacy.

“Life is not only full of sound and fury. It also has butterflies, flowers, art.” —Claude Simon

But when I sit like this, I feel less scared, and it seems possible to fill that space with beauty rather than fear. I watch the waltz between light and shadow, the movement, the secrets, the accidents, the miracles, and I see the metaphor between this spectacle and my own fears, the way in which emptiness and space are in fact required for beauty to exist at all. The trees and leaves are my pillars, casting light and bending shadow, the intrigue between ratio and proportion, balance and asymmetry, truth and lies, fact and imagination, all moving, all dancing. I tend to think of time and movement as forms of beauty and imperfection and that without imbalance or some degree of poverty, there is no room for variance, fluctuation, potential, or life. Socrates said that “the comic and the tragic lie inseparably close, like light and shadow.” What terror and awe, but what wonder, what beauty, what possibility lay latent, unearthed through devotion, patience, and cultivation. I let go. I let the world show me.