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see-through

I have been looking through some of the pictures I took on our road trip to the East Coast this past weekend. The scenery through northern Maine was beautiful, as was the foggy, rugged landscape of New Brunswick. We didn't have a lot of time to trek around outside, so many of the pictures I took were through the windshield of a moving car. Now that I take a closer look at the the photographs, I can see all the bug guts splayed on the windshield, distracting from magnificent sunsets and lush greenery. I also notice all too many blurred images that indicate we were rushing past some amazing scene at high speed, and all I could do was capture an indistinct representation of its uniqueness. Sigh. Such is life. We see indistinctly and we hurry through.

I often view the beauty of this world through the bug-spatter of my life's idiosyncratic paradoxes. Incredible scenes play out before my eyes even while small deaths are happening all around me. And if I am not attentive, brief moments of touching poignancy which whiz past me without any fanfare, can be lost. I do not always see clearly. Life is messy and my eyes are often drawn to the mess instead of the beauty behind it. Sometimes I get tired of constant change and the speed of life and can miss the fleeting moments of unexpected, simple splashes of colourful inspiration along the way.
Two things I do know: my myopic eyes can never diminish the beauty that is always present, and my undisciplined attention span cannot negate a moment of divine synchronism. Beauty and defining moments will follow me all the days of my life. Will I choose to dwell with them?
Pictures along the way:
1. Sun going down in rural Quebec. Rain splashes and bug guts in the foreground.
2. Two bikers that we followed for many miles through small towns in Maine. They, no doubt, got more acquainted with the bugs than I ever did.
3. One of the bright, quaint, homey houses we passed along the trip. I just barely managed to capture part of it.
4. I never did get my camera out in time to snap a photo of the small herd of deer nor of the moose at the side of the road that we saw one morning in New Brunswick. Fortunately, not everything needs a picture to remember it by.
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