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“Let me look on you with my own eyes”

This post is about Beautiful Things. (Not, as some who get the reference might think, about Darth Vader.)

But first, I draw your attention to the compulsion by us humans to photograph or record every beautiful, and not beautiful, thing. It wasn’t always this way, before we had cameras in our back pockets 24/7. Once upon a time, if we were fortunate enough to visit the Louvre, we looked at the Mona Lisa. The last time I was at the Louvre, I saw dozens of people taking selfies in front of it, but not looking at it.

And here is the weird thing I’ve been noticing: When I see a beautiful thing — like an absolutely spectacular full moon rise over Salt Spring Island in British Columbia — I have two thoughts: “Is that real?” and “Will it turn out in a photo?” And I don’t want those to be my thoughts. I want to look at and absorb the beauty of the Beautiful Thing. 

I’ve wondered if I am questioning reality because I am so accustomed to seeing a beautiful thing on my screen, in my feed, or on a website and not right before my eyes. For example, when I was in Voyageurs National Park in 2022, I took a boat tour and brought my binoculars. We were going by several tiny islands, and I was scanning the trees. Suddenly, I saw the most majestic bald eagle, in profile. I said out loud, “Is that real?” I really did have a moment of thinking that some crazy person had climbed this very tall tree to put a fake bald eagle there, just to fool tourists. My eyes, my mind, couldn’t take it in. Then the eagle turned its head and took flight. Of course I thought about looking away to grab my phone, but it was too late anyway, so I just looked. It was magnificent.

Sometimes I try to do that: just look. But then I feel the tug of needing to photograph it. And everyone around me is photographing and video taping and posing and taking selfies. And when they ask me to take their photo, I often ask them to take mine. And now I’m looking not at the thing in real life but rather at my phone to see how the photo turned out. Earlier this year, I was at the Iguazu Falls in Brazil, something so magnificent that even now I can’t believe I saw it, but instead of looking at the tremendous power of the water pouring down, I was looking at my fucking phone. 

I’ve seen some amazing sights this past week that took my breath away. I looked and looked. I tried to stay fully present to witness the Beautiful Thing. But you already know what I did next: I took out my phone. 

Here are some of the Beautiful Things, with and without photos:

• Butchart Gardens: These famous gardens are built in part on an exhausted limestone quarry, which is now called the “sunken garden.” That this family converted something so ugly, like a quarry and cement works, into something so gorgeous is only one of the many reasons I loved this place. As you walk from one garden to the next (the sunken garden to the dahlia walkway to the Japanese garden to the rose garden), you are treated to amazing color combinations, flower borders planted around a tree to complement the hue of its bark, the little bench placed in the perfect place so that you can rest among the flowers, the fountains that create either a babbling brook or an explosion of water. Each thoughtful pattern and combination are so utterly perfect that even though I promised myself I wasn’t going to take photos, in the end I wanted a photo of every flower.

• A stunning full moon rising above the harbor on Salt Spring Island, in British Columbia. The orange orb was slightly masked by some clouds, which gave the entire moonrise a sense of mystery and possibility.

• Two whales surfacing and then diving, and then doing it again, seen through binoculars on the ferry from Salt Spring Island to the mainland.

• The Milky Way: Rarely do the right conditions collide for me to see the stars. Either the skies are overcast or rainy, I am in a place with too much light polution, the moon is too bright for the best viewing, or I am just too tired to stay up very late!! (Honestly, that last one is the main cause of my failure to stargaze.) But this week I had an opportunity to see the night sky in all its brilliance, even well enough to make out the Milky Way.

• A perfect crescent moon framed by only the brightest stars on an absolutely crisp, clear night.

• A gorgeous sunset as I drove along the Fraser River in British Columbia.

• The peaceful purpose on the faces of people joined in community at a retreat at Salt Spring Yoga Centre.

Here are a few photos that I did take, each of which can only be a reminder of the Beautiful Thing, which was much more beautiful when looked on with my own eyes:

Butchart Gardens. I even experimented with wildlife photography 😉

Stages of a sunset near Chilliwack, British Columbia

Full moon rise over Fulford Harbor on Salt Spring Island.

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