Thoreau was a bee and the beauty around him was his nectar. He would walk with a notebook in one hand and a pen in another, jotting down very brief notes about things he sees in his walks—a bird flying by, a small stream breaking the silence, a rainy summer afternoon. In the morning after his walks, he would expand these brief notes into long journal entries, written with so much beauty and care that they turned out to be his most important work.
A honeybee sucks nectar through a long tongue called a proboscis. Thoreau’s proboscis—the thing he uses to extract sweetness and comfort out of everything—is his attention guided by his eyes, which are supported by an external tool, a pen, and a notebook, where the nectar gathered were recorded.
I am currently going deep in photography, and I realized that in a lot of ways, photography makes for a very good proboscis. With mindfulness and a keen eye, a camera can be a powerful tool to capture the sweetness and comfort all around us. In one way, images can even be more powerful tools for this purpose compared to the words we write in a journal.
A camera simply captures light, but the quality and form of that light are informed by many things—the amount of light itself, the subjects in one’s surroundings, emotions present in those subjects, movement, etc. And all of these don’t just inform what is captured and recorded. They are all present in that recorded artifact. Words can’t easily do this. They are not as direct as images.
Through images, the simplest of all flowers—or streets—can be a rich source of beauty.