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!