Acadia Part 5 - Beauty, Wonder, and Changes (Welcomed and Not)

While we were in Acadia, my camera imaged 3,375 photographs total.  Of those 3,375 photos, some were groupings of photos that were blended into single photos (panoramas or HDRs) while others just didn’t come out as I had hoped.  I ended up keeping 643 photos from my DSLR from our time in Acadia.  This morning, I tried to narrow those 643 photos down to one that speaks most deeply to me.  And it actually wasn’t too difficult.  It was this one.

This was the second morning we were there and is from a place called Seawall.  It is a similar place to where I would be the next morning that led to the first Acadia reflection about the tree growing out of the crack in the rock.  The morning of this photo was also one where I was frustrated with myself because I hadn’t brought my big zoom lens and I saw several seals splashing around in the water not far from shore but too far away to resolve in a decent photograph with the lens I had.  But this moment...this moment speaks so much to me.

What it speaks is wonder.

Awe.

Beauty.

And also sadness and frustration.

It speaks wonder and awe because of everything in this photo.  This photo shows a tiny part of an ocean that covers the majority of our planet that one estimate  says contains over 352,670,000,000,000,000,000 gallons of water.  That ocean is filled with life some of which we have seen and much we still have not.  Some of that life was just out of the frame of this photo of those seals that I mentioned earlier.  The ocean is a wondrous and dangerous and mysterious place.

There’s a star rising above the horizon that is 93,000,000 miles away from us that is essential to the life that is all over this beautiful world.  That same star put out emissions a few days before that lit up the night sky as they interacted with our atmosphere creating the incredible sight of the aurora borealis.  That star gives us light and warmth and provides the point of gravity around which our planet orbits.

There are people standing and sitting out on that small peninsula of rock taking in the same scene.  Each of them has their own stories and their own histories and their own hopes and dreams.  I don’t know who they are but I do know one thing - each of them shares the same image of God as me and as Jon Batiste says on one of his albums, “I love you even if I don’t know you yet.”

There are trees that have been growing in that place for decades, weathering storms and seasons and whose roots are dug down deep in the earth.  These are just a few of the estimated 3 trillion trees¹  on the planet that we are learning more and more about of how they function, communicate, and manage the air that is vital to life on earth.

There is one bird silhouetted below the rising sun.  But that bird is one of countless others we saw during the last week in Acadia.  Those birds lived alongside the many deer we saw, the seals and fish that were swimming, and the many other animals that we saw and then many many others we did not see.   

And all this brought together in a single photo that is somehow able to imaged by a piece of technology that did its job perfectly over 3,300 times in the week we were in Acadia with a shutter exposing the photo sensor for tenths of a second, an aperture changing precisely by the millimeter to regulate the light, and all of it being written to a tiny 1”x1” memory card in digital code of 1s and 0s that result in this image.

But this image only reflects on part of the experience.  It isn’t just the visual.  In a photo, you cannot reflect the sounds, the smells, the feels, and as much as it is a visual medium, you cannot reflect the fullness of the visual.  The whole of it together brings the awe and the wonder and the beauty.

But there is also sadness and frustration for me and it is rooted in this sign that we saw on our last day in Acadia that echoed what we had seen in many other places.

In Acadia, the average temperature is 3 degrees warmer than it was 100 years ago.  More rain falls in bigger storms but there is less snow.  Eight inches of sea level rise since 1950 with a warmer and more acidic ocean.  And this echoes what we are seeing not just in Acadia but all over.  Our climate is changing rapidly and these changes are not a natural cycle type of change but are changes due to what we have been doing to our climate since the Industrial Revolution.  The science and evidence is clear - we are changing our climate and not changing it for the good.

This morning, I was on a walk in Boston and saw a sign outside a Unitarian Universalist congregation with a quote from Dostoyevsky...”Beauty will save the world.”While I love the sentiment, I have really struggled with it all day.  I agree that beauty can save the world, but that quote can also be read as taking the responsibility away from us and putting it on something external of us.

Well over 100 years ago, John Muir wrote, “The battle for conservation must go on endlessly. It is part of the universal warfare between right and wrong.”  He saw even then what was happening and what was ahead.  While I resonate with what Dostoyevsky wrote, beauty can only save us if we see the beauty, honor the beauty, and protect the beauty.  While Psalm 104 shares beautifully of the natural world, we cannot simply take in that ancient poetic song but we need to let the wonder of it soak into the fullness of our lives and come out in our actions.

My son, my wife and I cast our ballots for the upcoming election in the United States the first day we could in Ohio.  Since that time, one daughter has voted and the other will be filling out her absentee ballot tonight.  This is one of the ways that we can try to stem the tide of what is happening and what is still to come.  While I support the viewpoints of much of one of our political parties, one of the primary reasons I vote as I do is because I am voting not just for myself and my immediate life, but I am voting for the world my children and those who will come after them will inherit.  I am voting for those trees that I saw in the above photograph.  I am voting for those silhouetted people in the photograph and the planet they and their descendants will inherit.  I am voting for places like Acadia and my own neighborhood and the islands in the Pacific that are already facing realities of sea level rise that are threatening their livelihoods.  I am voting honoring the science that is showing this reality over and over about the need for significant changes to protect and heal our climate.

I want the generations that follow to be able to experience the awe, wonder, and beauty that exists all around us.  When we protect this beautiful planet, then beauty can indeed save us.

Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy,
Ed

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1. Half as many as used to be on the earth in the same estimate