The Light

Twelve years ago I was applying to medical school.  I was three months pregnant with Evelyn.  At my interview the Stanford director of admissions said it would take something radical for him to accept me, a 28 year old Russian literature PhD program drop out (he didn't know I was pregnant).

"Some guy would be pumping out blood in the ER and you'd be trying to figure out what happened instead of acting.  You," he said, "are an observer and an analyst.  You're not a doer."

Twelve years later I am still stung by this and pained by the way I handled it.  My brain froze.  I was unable to remember anything I had done.  I became the person he said I was, not the person who jumped out of an An-2 airplane over Leningrad without any training.  Three times.  Hey, I'm a doer.  A stupid doer, maybe.  But a doer.

I tried to reason with the guy, analyze his opinion.   Probably I should have climbed up on his desk, or taken him by the collar and said, "I've worked too hard for this to have some jerk turn me away because I think too much and don't act on impulse enough."

But I didn't.  And I didn't get accepted.  And really, wasn't he pretty much right?  The reason I like blogging...photography and writing...is that I like to observe and analyze.

The last few months my posts have gone from every four or five days to every ten.  Too much to do.  And a lack of thoughts.  No desire to observe.  I stopped toting my camera.

The Sunday before we set off for our camping trip I saw the light.  We were at the car grabbing jackets and water for a short hike.  And I saw the light--through the trees.  Perfect light.  The camera was at home.  But wait...there was the little point 'n' shoot water camera.  I grabbed it.

As we came into a clearing deeper in the woods I snapped the photo above.

Clementine turned to me and said, all breathy with excitement, "Look at the light hanging through the trees...it seems like you could just part it like a lace curtain."

And isn't it true, don't I have to admit, that one of the reasons I wanted to go to medical school was for material?  To be a doctor turned writer like Bulgakov, like Chekhov, heck, even like Crichton.

We went on another hike this weekend and I took my camera and all my lenses.  There was a lot to observe.  The girls looked under our favorite rocks.

I kept thinking of the book Girls Who Looked Under Rocks: The Lives of Six Pioneering Naturalists.  It's a nice book if you haven't come across it.

With the macro we observed:
Dozens of mushrooms,

two scorpions,

two slender salamanders,

and a jerusalem cricket.

Turn over a rock in California and you may see these unusual insects or their telltale holes.

While Mike and the girls scrambled among the cave rocks

I switched to a telephoto lens and went after birds.

Don't the bushes look lovely against the sky?  All bare and innocent.  They're poison oak.  Can you believe birds eat poison oak berries?

I switched to the plain ol' lens the camera came with for a landscape.

I have a little bit of sorrow for that life that didn't happen, but among my regrets is not that my life now lacks material.  It's just a question of focus, angle, light.  Everything is material in the right light.