Welcome, one and all, to this October edition of Through the Cracks. I must admit that I’ve been hesitant to write anything these past weeks, with so much turmoil and confusion in the world. As the drumbeat of news continues, it is hard to think that I have anything useful to say. And yet, here I am, trying to create something, anything, because that is how I cope.
Before I continue, though, I want to say a special welcome to all of you who have joined us here at Subversive Light in the last months. I am grateful for your presence here, as I continue to grow the offerings here at Subversive Light. Please, invite your friends, there is more to come. And if you aren’t a subscriber, please sign up! The newsletter continues to be free.
And with that invitation, I turn to the matter at hand…a few words about fog.
Images Speak Louder than Words
I’m sorry to say that right now, I, like so many of you, find myself frightened and sad and confused as I look at history unfold around me. Peace of any kind seems so far away, and, sadly, so unattainable. As a writer, I feel my words slipping away from me, too. Words seem so insufficient in the face of the pain of the world. But creating is my personal consolation, it is the way that I adjust my relationship to the world, the way I make some little sense of the chaos and the fear. My ability to create in any moment is an indicator of my ability to hope, even against all hope. And so here I sit, typing away.
In times like these, I often turn to images when words feel out of reach. Here, I offer you a photo essay on one of the greatest of images linked to confusion — fog. As a writing teacher, I have been known to students to take an image or an object as a writing prompt. Often, when you cannot write about the subject before you, that will free you up to write. And so, today, I take my own advice.
Why Fog?
There are a lot of obvious reasons that I’m thinking about fog right now, some metaphorical and some literal. And oddly, fog seems to say something to everyone.
A few weeks ago, I posted this image on Instagram. I was having a weekend away to mark the 10th anniversary of a successful, major surgery (hence, the #happy10thbirthday tag). We had finished breakfast and stepped outside to pack up the car and ahead of me was this beautiful misty fog in the Allegheny mountains. I stopped, and stared, and then snapped an image of the distant mountains from a hotel parking lot in Harrisonburg, VA:
Of course, this isn’t all of what I saw, but it was where my focus landed. My attention that morning was certainly not on the seeming miles of asphalt that stood between me and this fog-scape. I always want the picture to reflect what I saw not necessarily what there was to be seen, which sometimes requires a little cropping. Not even the bright orange of a Home Depot sign could distract me from the foggy peaks and valleys, and that orange certainly did not belong in the final version of the picture.
In the moment, this captured vision became a random reminder of a morning sight that for me gathered together all of the beauty and uncertainty of life, the qualities of living that I hold fast in tension each and every day. I hold them especially tight as I remember that surgery, now an event in the past. This image became a frozen moment of joy and awe, and very personal, and yet not just personal.
I was surprised at the number of people who reacted to the picture after I shared it. That foggy sight drew a lot of digital attention, and I thought, why? What speaks to so many here? I began to ponder the universality of fog, the variety of the metaphors about fog, and why fog is so important to me that my picture gallery contains hundreds of attempts to capture it and hold it still for digital posterity, or least for my personal contemplation.
Okay, Obvious Metaphor, But Is It?
I realize that many of the common symbolic meanings which fog represents are not positive ones. We are in a fog when we are confused; being in a fog can refer to being lost, physically, spiritually, or emotionally. We talk about brain fog as a medical problem or a medication side effect. Fog is used in fiction and drama to create a sense of foreboding, of other-worldliness, of displacement, the precursor of monsters and villains. Fog is literally dangerous — just ask the hundreds of people caught up in the recent super fog in Louisiana. I myself remember one white-knuckle trip along the Skyline Drive in Shenandoah National Park during an October snow…foreboding doesn’t begin to describe my feelings that day.
And there is that phrase, now all too timely and sadly, too relevant: the fog of war. That phrase takes all of those other metaphors and rolls them into one intense bundle of fear and dislocation. I mean, no one ever talks about the fog of peace, the fog of contentment, the fog of happiness do they.
Does fog get a bad rap? Maybe. Yes, I have experienced fog as all of the above, and yet, fog has other qualities, qualities I see in the images that I have captured, that I remember from long walks in the woods on a foggy morning. I have found fog to be not only beautiful but restful and comforting. Dare I say, I find fog creative.1 And I have been known to seek it out. Maybe that is why I photograph it over and over again as I try to understand it. I’m human that way…I want to know. When I see fog I wonder why here? why now? how long will you stay? where will you go when you leave? what are you saying to me?
I blame Mrs. Wiley (um…4th grade) for my interesting dialogue with fog. She made us memorize that Carl Sandburg poem, the one about the cat feet. It was the first poem that I ever memorized and recited, a task that probably lead to a life of lieder singing:
I mean, there is nothing at all sinister in these words. Fog just is, it comes and it goes. And it doesn’t come like a lion, it comes on little cat feet. It comes quietly, and gently, albeit with a little sneakiness. And then, it just moves on.
Maybe it is Carl Sandburg’s fault, or Mrs. Wiley’s, that I seek out the fog, but I’m grateful for the gift of what I can learn from it. Fog invites me to stand still, to just be, to wait. It calls me to breathe, and to listen, to feel the tiny million drops of moisture that create its very being. And, it calls me to curiosity. Why, for instance, is it a sunny morning at the summit of the trail and, at the same time, the valley is painted with strings of mist? Oh, I know the meteorological science involved, but that is not the kind of why my deeper self asks. My why is the kind of why with no answer, it is the pure curiosity that accompanies the gift of awe.
Learning my Way Through
Fog teaches me. It teaches me that answers are not everything. Questions are. Feelings are. Being is. Standing still in the moment is. Listening is. Fog carries in it the potential for everything, it calls us to new creation. With fog the possibility and the inevitability of change is made manifest...even if the face if that change is not seeable. No matter how foggy the moment, the light is still there.
And so here I sit, in this foggy moment in our history, in this foggy moment in my life. And Carl Sandburg and a few captured moments in time (otherwise known as photographs) have helped me remember how to write my way deep into the fog and to listen as the words projected by these images help me walk though it and invite me to find that sense of peace and wholeness I felt when I took this last picture. Seeing, listening, I stand on that wet, leafy, path in the early morning fog. And from this place in the forest of wet leaves, I can let all that pressure to create drift away as eventually this current fog will do and I remember the beauty and the possibility of just being alive.
The world needs beauty to remind us of our humanity in the face of all this chaos. May the writers keep writing, the poets keep crafting, the musicians keep musicking, the painters paint, the photographers capture the world in a moment. It is at least worthwhile to try.
The greatest fog we experience is the belief in our own illusion of clarity. And that kind of fog is not the exception in our lives it is the rule. We need to learn to love the fogginess of our humanity, the kind of in-between-uncertainty of daily life, and embrace those rare and precious moments when, perhaps as we struggle to create beauty, we actually see a ray or two of light through the mist.
Genesis 2:6, King James Version. Sometimes, I just can’t help myself. In the King James translation of Genesis 2:6, fog, well mist, makes an appearance in the Creation story itself: “ But there went up a mist from the earth, and watered the whole face of the ground.” No current translation, including that of the Jewish Publication Society, uses this imagery, but it somehow intrigues me to think of fog as creative force.