Dear Friends,

I’d like to look closely at a photograph that I took in late November while walking in the meadow across the road at the North Branch Nature Center, a place I’ve visited nearly everyday for as long as I’ve lived in Montpelier. It’s a place I’ve come to know quite well and  apprehended with all five of my senses in all seasons. A great many of the observations and poems I’ve shared in these letters in some way reference this meadow. I have taken dozens of photos in this meadow, sometimes capturing the same view or phenomenon repeatedly without realizing it. Which is a testament to pattern and habit and the cycles of life that order and enrich our experience of this world’s gifts. This photo of raindrops dangling from a woody plant in muted tones points the way to my meditation.

Have you ever noticed how drops of water have slightly different qualities depending on where you find them? Some drops may appear viscous, almost thick, like they have a membrane. Others seem sticky, clinging inexplicably to materials and surfaces. And other drops look fragile, brittle perhaps, easily dispersed and shed from their temporary resting places. Robin Wall Kimmerer, who works at the intersection of ecological science and indigenous knowledge (she’s an enrolled member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation), noticed this difference among drops of rainwater, and wrote about it in her glorious book, Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teaching of Plants. During an excursion to a rainforest in the Pacific Northwest, she observes a striking difference in size between the raindrops hanging off her drenched hair and those collecting on a curtain of moss nearby. Later, still wondering about why this might be, she has the opportunity and materials to conduct an experiment:

I find two strands of lichen, equal in size and length, and blot them on my flannel shirt inside my raincoat. One strand I place in the leaf cup of red alder tea, the other I soak in a pool of pure rainwater. Slowly I lift them both up, side by side, and watch the droplets form at the ends of the strands. Sure enough, they are different. The plain water forms small, rapid drops that seem in a hurry to let go. But the droplets steeped in alder water grow large and heavy, and then hang for a long moment before gravity pulls them away. I feel the grin spreading over my face with the aha! moment. There are different kinds of drops, depending on the relationship between the water and the plant. If tannin-rich alder water increases the size of the drops, might not water seeping through a long curtain of moss also pick up tannins, making the big strong drops I thought I was seeing? One thing I’ve learned in the woods is that there is no such thing as random. Everything is steeped in meaning, colored by relationships, one thing with another.

In my photograph, I think the raindrops dotting the twigs like autumn jewels must be exhibiting similar properties as what Kimmerer observed: tannin steeped raindrops bulging lazily on the ends of thin branches, holding on.

That glistening drop in the center of the composition invites me to look closely for other relationships and meanings, as Kimmerer suggests. Each raindrop, cohered together by molecular attraction into spheres, functions as a lens through which to view the world – or, rather, worlds. Each raindrop captures refracted, inverted worlds, many worlds bounded and delicate and expansive. Consider: the force of gravity tugs the drops, working to bring down these upside down worlds as well. A ground above a sky cannot last for long; the natural laws of the universe conspire against such inversions. And if you were to stand opposite me, looking at upside down me in an upside down raindrop world, eventually I would drop too and disintegrate into oblivion.

What of the eye/I implied in this photo? (The “eye” and “I” refer both to the perceptual and subjective point of view of the image.) The eye/I is me, being the person who captured the image on Friday, November 27 at 10:22AM while standing at 44°17'04.8"N, 72°34'19.5"W. But the eye/I is also you, the viewer, as the person looking at the picture now, your point of view always at the exact position where I was relative to the image when I reached into my pocket, pulled out my phone, stooped over, and carefully touched the screen (cue digital shutter sound cha-chick). I’m curious about what we share when we look at this photograph asynchronously together. Some of you reading this (hi neighbors!) have passed this precise location on your walks along the meadow trail and maybe even saw the same phenomena there over the years. Most of you reading, however, have not but perhaps know me well, and so have some insight into past experiences and investigations of mine which add a greater depth of context. Regardless of our varied relationships and what we may or may not share, I like to imagine our convergence in the act of looking at this photograph. It’s a way to feel closer to you, which is something I really need to feel these days.

Be well and be together (however we may),

Jeremy

Ps. I owe a sloppy intellectual debt to the French theorist Roland Barthes, whose attitude and book, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, I had in mind as I started writing about my photograph. Or, rather, I had in mind my twenty-year-old memory of reading the book, which is not so rigorous a reference to rely on. 😄