Finding Space to Navigate into the Unknown While Spending Time on McCurdy Pond

Lilies Emerging From and Disappearing Into McCurdy Pond

This is one of my favorite images that I’ve been blessed to be able to co-create with nature. One fall afternoon, I took a kayak out on McCurdy Pond from Blenheim Park and came across these lily pads shaded by the trees lining the bank. Summer had ended along with the blossoms and the pads were not perfect either. They showed signs of having lived through past seasons. Yet their shape on the pond’s surface and the water they held on their leaves was refracted into glistening stars. One of the lily pads had turned away from the light and sunk below the surface, as if it had given up. but its stem was still being supported by the other plants. I felt the poignancy, power, and beauty of lifeforms continuing to endure for as long as possible, even when the conditions were no longer optimal. It was the perfect example of the concept of Setsuna we had been studying with George Nobechi in our Japanese aesthetics workshop. The water will evaporate, the starbursts will only exist for a fleeting moment, the lilies will continue to degrade, and weather and waves and the inexorable passage of time will continue to alter and even destroy the beauty I witnessed. Nevertheless, for a fleeting moment this ordinary scene was transformed into a divine work of art, and it surpassed anything I could have imagined or created alone.

Dancing in the Clouds

As I pushed off from the bank and drifted further into the center of the lake, the pads and stems seemed to dance in the clouds. The scene was still ephemeral, but it felt airier and dreamier, and I felt a lightness of being I had not experienced in some time. For a moment, the lilies seemed freed from the constraints of earthly existence and illustrated the concept of as above so below, linking the spiritual and the material and the individual and the universal.

The Spirit of McCurdy Pond Coming to Life

Another morning, I went down to the pond just before sunrise. The fog felt palpable and the stillness of the water was gently disturbed by the movement of aquatic lifeforms. As I stared into the distance, I could feel the presence of lake spirits. The pond illustrated another Japanese concept, this time the concept of Kehai–an unseen presence and the subtlty of atmosphere. What struck me most was how different the lake appeared and felt under different atmospheric conditions and at different times of day. Someday I will have to return in different seasons to see how it continues to transform and how the spirit of the lake shifts. The beauty I experienced was also tinged with sadness, since I recognized no state that I experienced would last. Yet, my awareness of the inevitability of change was something I knew I had to accept and even embrace, since it offered the possibility that more manifestations of beauty would likely be revealed in the future.

One of the most haunting and beautiful sounds I heard all week was the sound of loons calling. The loons in the images above are a mother and an adolescent. The chicks stay with their parents for twelve weeks before the parents leave for their migration in the fall, often leaving the chicks alone to fend for themselves. I spent half an hour watching this pair. First the adolescent swam away and then back and then eventually mother and child both took off and flew through the mist towards the forested shore. It was so touching to watch the tentative movements of this pair and I felt a strong bond with them as I keep feeling we are all headed into unknown territory.

Pondscape of Fog, Light, and Shadow

After the loons departed, I kept watching the spit of land across from Blenheim Park. The conditions were constantly shifting and the landscape appeared insubstantial. In Japan, people often think of landscapes as being constituted of wind and light and other atmospheric conditions instead of solid earth, a concept which is foreign to most westerners. Yet, that morning as everything kept transforming before my eyes, this view of the landscape seemed perfectly understandable to me. Everything is connected to everything else and is continually being transformed through visible and invisible interactions. There is spirit in the natural world–in the trees, the water, the fog, the light, even the rocks. When we appreciate and understand this, we will be motivated to live more harmoniously with our environment and work towards upholding sustainability instead of trying to harness nature for our own purposes without caring about the Earth’s long-term viability.

Dissolving into the Ethers

As the sun rose higher and higher, the light streamed through and I leaned into this by overexposing the frame to show the ephemeral nature of existence. The landscape seemed to dissolve into the air like a late Impressionistic painting and the scene felt like a memory while I was still witnessing and experiencing it. Once I had a near death experience and the light at the end of the tunnel that I experienced appared much like this. That experience and my remembrance of it were peaceful and seemed like epiphanies of non-attachment.

Night and Day in a Tensional Balance

So much that I have learned about the cosmos and my place in it has come for observing the ever-changing landscape and its infinite scale in relation to my smallness. Yet, my time in Blenheim observing the stars in the night sky and the sparkling water of the lake helped me appreciate how each point and even my own being are jewels in Indra’s net. It is not that nothing has value or that we are more valuable than other lifeforms, it is that all matter and all beings matter. That spending a single week on a relatively unpopulated lake could offer so many lessons is quite amazing, yet it was the perfect place to be present and pay attention since many of the distractions that throw us off course were absent.

Before I close, I must thank Kerry Payne and her husband Justin Stailey for creating such a perfect environment for our creative explorations and for their kindness and support. Spending five days with George Nobechi was also a gift as always. The generosity with which he shares his culture and spirit always nourish my soul.