Let The Light Catch Your Eye

I was driving my brother-in-law’s 2000 Jeep Cherokee, east, on highway 101 on the north-western most edge of the United States. The Jeep is awesome! It has a reinforced suspension and mud tires!

Jeremiah, my 13-year-old son, was in the backseat going through the photos of the first half of our trip. We were in the middle of a vacation to the Pacific North West. If you’ve never seen it, go!

I have never been more awestruck by a larger variety of landscapes. In five days we’d visited beaches, mountains and a rainforest. My kids had climbed on the world’s largest spruce tree, and built a driftwood beach fort. We had clambered through tide pools and climbed over stoic haystacks on Ruby Beach. We saw Roosevelt Elk, seals, sea otters, sea stars and a host of other creatures you can’t find in Charlotte, where I live. It was overwhelming. It was wonderful.

“I like that picture of the little white flower in the green leaves, Dad,” Jeremiah said over the roar of the Jeep’s knobby tires and powerful engine.

It took me a second to realize what he was talking about. Out of the 200 photos he’d likely scrolled through, I couldn’t at first imagine which photo he was looking at. If he’d said, “Ruby Beach was really incredible…” or, “Man, that tree was huge…” I think I would have known immediately what he was looking at. But he didn’t comment on those photos.

It would have made immediate sense if he recalled the adventure of stopping to take pictures of the elk, or commented on the clump of eighteen sea stars all piled on one another – those experiences were remarkable and the pictures of them were striking.

Instead, he commented on the seemingly common photo of the little white flower.

This struck me.

Light is captivating. The impressionists in the late 19th century understood this so profoundly that they upended the status quo in order to push light and its striking artistic value to the forefront of our conversations about the visual world.

We had been walking through cobble stone beaches and down moss covered rainforest trails for several days. We were headed back to the jeep for lunch. There were no more pictures to be taken.

But, as we rounded a corner, there it was – a strikingly vibrant patch of green leaves with a little pinkish-white flower protruding from it’s center. It was illuminated with light breaking through a densely packed tree line. I snapped a quick picture.

We live in a crowded world. Our attention is constantly pulled to tens-of-thousands of competing targets. There is so much we could look at that we often see very little.

Every once in a while, however, a little light breaks through. You’re exhausted. You’re hungry. You’re tired of negotiating with your kids to keep walking up the steep hill. You’re stressed about impending, life-altering decisions needing to be made. You’re distracted and you’re not really paying attention anymore but, the light breaks through anyway.

Pause and take a picture of It. That picture will have something special about it. You’ll want to keep it for later.

There is dark all around, but just a little light can chase it all away. If you’re present enough to capture it, or courageous enough to be it, Let the light catch your eye.