Joy in 1.3 Milliseconds

Plus some geeky goodness ahead

This photo.

This photo was from a few mornings ago and was one of those photos that came out so much better than I could have hoped.  It is one of the great blue herons that “lives” at Winton Lake.  This one took off as I got a bit too close.  There was a good bit of squawking at me and then it took off.  Within just a few seconds, it was in the air and well away from me across the lake.  But this photograph came from 1/800th of a second or simpler said, 1.3 milliseconds.  By comparison, a regular human eye blink is about 1/10th of a second or 100 milliseconds.  So, the shutter on my camera somehow opens and closes in that incredible amount of time to visualize this singular moment.

When I first downloaded this image, I saw something different.  What I imagined from this moment was a heron leaping for joy.  Legs straight out in mid-jump, wings outstretched and uplifted, and head pointed upward.  Obviously, this is not a heron jumping for joy, but that’s what I saw in this singular moment.

Yesterday morning there were several things that continued to speak into this for me.  First was my daily reading (I’ve now moved into the Psalms) and these words from Psalm 16:

You show me the path of life.
In your presence there is fullness of joy;
in your right hand are pleasures forevermore.

This was followed by my reading-ahead in Hope: A User’s Manual for the reflections I’m writing and I was re-reading the chapter of “Hope Enters the Body Through Joy” and there was this beauty of a paragraph...

Laughter and joy are often the first things to go when everything hits the fan. After the recent pandemic, a pastor friend commented that his congregation desperately needed to play together but seemed too wrung out to do so. He worried they had forgotten how.¹

And then finally, in one of her subscriber emails, Carrie Newcomer shared this in her essay “Picking Flowers on the Edge of the Abyss ”

But the one thing I do know is that I must continue to find courage, comfort and grounding in the things that make sense, things like; love, beauty, wonder, daily gratitude and awe, the natural world, our default inclination to be decent and kind to those we encounter. I must continue to lean into joy, for the goodness of life for the gift it is—joy being different than happiness and at its heart is its own kind of resistance to despair and the politics of rage. All I know to do, is to live as well as I can, with as much love as I know how to give, speak truth even when it’s uncomfortable but be kind as possible. Love the sweet moderate days of early June, love the bee balm, love the wild spiderwort coming up in my vegetable garden (and leave it there for the shear beauty of it), love my family and friends (including this Gathering of Spirits)….just keep loving and singing and picking flowers at the edge of the Great Turning.²

Beauty. Joy. Truth. Love. Yup.

So, this all comes back to this photo.  This heron.  This 1.3 millisecond moment that looks like this beautiful bird is leaping for joy from its place on the shore.

Here are a few more photos of herons from this week, the duck family, a beautiful spiderweb that was only visible because of the dew, and then a really beautiful moment from yesterday morning of the morning light dancing with the trees and a low hanging haze.

---

And moving away from all of this, I’m super excited about this weekend.  My family and I are going to the showings of the extended editions of all three Lord of the Rings movies on Saturday, Sunday, and then on Monday.  So that’s nearly 4 hrs on Saturday for Fellowship of the Ring, nearly 4 hrs on Sunday for The Two Towers, and then Monday night nearly 4 hrs and 30 minutes for The Return of the King.  Just to compare to the first time I mentioned in this post.  That photograph was 1.3 milliseconds.  The trilogy this weekend will be 43,560,000 milliseconds... Suffice to say...there’s a lot of geeky excitement in the house that has been going on all week and will continue through the weekend.  The road goes ever on and on...

BTW - here’s the Psalm quoted above but translated into Elvish…

Courtesy of https://www.jenshansen.com/pages/online-english-to-elvish-engraving-translator

Grace, Peace, Love, and Joy.
Ed

---

1. McKibben Dana, MaryAnn. Hope: A User's Manual (p. 103). Wm. B. Eerdmans Publishing Co.. Kindle Edition.

2. Picking Flowers On The Edge Of The Abyss