Tuesday, December 18, 2018

Watching and Waiting: Fog

I wrote words for these photos yesterday and somehow lost them.
I was crestfallen, but then today found more words that fit with what I was thinking,
so perhaps it was best this way.




These images come from my walk in the park yesterday morning. The fog was amazing.




I tend to love fog, so I found it beautiful.
But I was also thinking how it might be for someone not used to fog and not familiar with the place.
It could be disorienting, even frightening.



If you'd never experienced fog before, you might wonder how long it would last,
or even if your whole world had somehow changed.



I thought about people I know, mostly younger than me, going through hard things,
disorienting experiences, confusing transitions, strong emotions,
which tend often to make it very hard, if not impossible, to see clearly.





The fog yesterday was so thick, it condensed on branches like this. Beautiful to me, but not so beautiful if you were wondering whether your feet would ever be on dry ground again! 




In the fog, our eyes can play tricks on us. You have to lean on your knowledge of what you knew was there before, and trust that memory, that knowledge.




This is beautiful as an image of reflections on water, but when life situations feel this unstable and distorted, even the light coming to us can seem painful sometimes.




I found myself yesterday thinking of these people, thinking these things, and wanting to say, "Watch carefully and wait. Don't give up. Refrain from making rash decisions about which path to take."
As a friend once told me in a tough time, "Don't doubt in the dark what you've seen in the light."

Those are good words.



And then today I read these words of John Donne, from the blog of a friend of a friend:

But today if you will hear His voice,
Today He will hear you.
He brought light out of darkness,
Not out of a lesser light;
He can bring thy summer out of winter
Tho' thou have no spring,
Though in the ways of fortune or understanding or conscience
Thou have been benighted til now,
Wintered and frozen, clouded and eclipsed,
Damped and benumbed, smothered and stupefied til now, 
Now God comes to thee,
Not as in the dawning of the day,
Not as in the bud of the spring
But as the sun at noon,
As the sheaves in harvest.




It wasn't quite noon, but this last picture was taken less than an hour after the first one. The sun's rising to a certain point completely cleared away the fog, and it felt like a different world.

This Advent I'm thinking those words of John Donne might make a good Christmas gift to lots of people living in the foggy confusion of our world these days.

"Now God comes to thee." Emmanuel!

3 comments:

GretchenJoanna said...

I read recently that we should think of the fog as like God's love blanketing us. But I haven't got on board with that yet!

I grew up in California's Central Valley where tule fog is thick as mud in the winter. My sister posted a photo taken this month from her car on the highway and I thought she had forgotten to include the picture, there was so little that wasn't white. It's grueling to try to drive with a few feet of visibility, and your whole body strains to see through the soup. But I did that even as a teenager.

The fog there was often cold, too, around freezing; the dampness seeps into your bones. So if we didn't have to go anywhere, I stayed in the warm house. And I still do that for the most part in foggy weather, being wimpier than ever.

So though I've had lots of experience with fog, I have never thought about how it resembles the foggy thinking we do, or the disorienting feeling of not being able to see the future, or the usual landmarks. I really enjoyed your musings.

Pom Pom said...

Hi Sheila! Good thoughts and good truths. Faith. Metaphorical fog DOES test our faith. Beautiful photos, too.

Sheila said...

Gretchen, I thought after writing this that I might ought to have said I find fog beautiful as long as it's not too much. Northern Italy also gets horrifically thick fog and is extremely dangerous to drive in. Most of my life I've lived in areas with less intense fog, so it just makes everything mysterious and, well, beautiful. But thick fog is certainly not.

PomPom, thank you for the compliment. The fog, the trees, and the water did most of the work, for sure!