Autumn Lights

“Along the coast-road, by the headland,
the early lights of winter glow.
I’ll pour a cup to you my darlin’,
and raise it up, say ‘Cheerio!‘”
-Ian Anderson

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I enjoy looking at the “art” of nature through its seemingly random arrangements of, say, branches, leaves, seed-pods, grasses, clouds, etc.  During Autumn, all these artistic “renderings” become lighted. For example, take a look at this image showing a view upward toward a tree on our lawn.

Fall Maple Beside the House

The beautiful lines of the dark branches against the now luminescent leaves of this tree and the backdrop of a pure blue Fall sky is striking.  To emphasize these lines and shapes, I took this image into Photoshop® and fiddled with it a bit.

Autumn Maple Altered To Illustrate Forms

Those are some pretty weird colors (appropriate for Halloween!), but when you alter an image this way, it seems to help the mind escape habitual patterns of perception.  In this case, it seems to allow one to see the fascinating shapes and contours which nature has crafted into this particular  Maple tree.  The original Fall colors contribute to the overall patterns as well, and when altered in this way, that aspect is also emphasized.

If it weren’t for the fact that this is a known shape, one could enjoy this as an abstract painting or work of art.  It’s the shape and form, the flow of energy, separated from the association with an external object that I hope to call attention to by this exercise.

Taking that process just a bit further, with nothing but some creative “Photoshoppery,” one can emphasize hidden shapes and patterns in the above image to an extreme point.  The following is purely from the original image above, just manipulated creatively through Photoshop® to bring out more of what nature has hidden within itself.  Nothing was added to the image.  All that was done was to emphasize and de-emphasize certain aspects of a portion (the mid-right margin, basically) of the original image in an artful way.

Nature's Hidden Arts

Nature gives us many such marvelous things to enjoy, especially during Autumn.  Here’s a close-up of a leaf I found while walking around the property, camera in hand.

Leaf of Autumn (Rhododendron)

I love the fact that the leaf looks like parchment and the veins like sacred hieroglyphs hinting at hidden laws and whispered marvels.  [See potential medicinal qualities of this plant here.]

This might be a persimmon leaf. But I’m not sure because its location didn’t seem to indicate a suitable source.  However, if you click on that link, the persimmon leaf shown does look like the leaf from which the above image was taken (and we do have a persimmon tree on the property).  In fact, our persimmon has a number of nice green fruits which have just lately begun to turn slightly orange, as if they’re being gradually fired from within.

Here’s another lovely artistic arrangement by nature from a woods by the house.

Maple Leaf Under the Trees

In enjoying that image, I feel compelled to quote Heraclitus again (frag. B124): “The most beautiful order is a heap of sweepings piled at random.” The word he used for “order” was the Greek “Kosmos,” which implies an ordered system, an interrelated structure, the opposite of chaos. We can see that order manifested in all that unfolds before our eyes when we observe the earth in its natural state.

And to close, from that same woods looking up from where the above leaf was laid.

A California Woods in Autumn