TIME AND A WORLD OF CHANGE ~ PART III

Image screen-captured from a video of earth-and-sky timelapse scenes.
Image screen-captured from a video of earth-and-sky timelapse scenes.

The first time-lapse segment I saw on Disneyland was the closest thing to magic I had ever experienced. Normally slow-changing objects or scenes were filmed over hours or days or even weeks with an umoving camera to reveal  glacially-slow and otherwise imperceptible changes of form or color. This was not Disney’s animation work but that of nature itself.

This was real and true just outside my door–a state of flux and motion happening every second of every day. I couldn’t see it with my own eyes, but I was made able to imagine and to know it, having been shown the existence of this grand motion and dance. In subtle ways, it gave me a new lens for seeing the world.

From this kind of photography came landscapes–desert or mountaintop or seashore scenes–captured over full light-and-shadow-shifting of dawn to dusk, daylight melting beautifully into the after-dark appearance of the Milky Way and wheeling constellations overhead against fixed and motionless objects in the foreground.

The spinning field of stars revolved majesticallyagainst the blackest heaven, slashed by bright streaks of high-altitude jets and meteors and sometimes stroked by the fast-moving squiggly red taillights of auto traffic in a city. The busy-ness and stir of a single day anywhere in this world was anything but ordinary!

This is the third excerpt from this topic of “seeing time” taken from One Place Understood–a book in my mind only, maybe always, but at least until summer of 2018.

Time and a World of Change ~ Part I
Time and a World of Change ~ Part II

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fred
fred

Fred First holds masters degrees in Vertebrate Zoology and physical therapy, and has been a biology teacher and physical therapist by profession. He moved to southwest Virginia in 1975 and to Floyd County in 1997. He maintains a daily photo-blog, broadcasts essays on the Roanoke NPR station, and contributes regular columns for the Floyd Press and Roanoke's Star Sentinel. His two non-fiction books, Slow Road Home and his recent What We Hold in Our Hands, celebrate the riches that we possess in our families and communities, our natural bounty, social capital and Appalachian cultures old and new. He has served on the Jacksonville Center Board of Directors and is newly active in the Sustain Floyd organization. He lives in northeastern Floyd County on the headwaters of the Roanoke River.

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  1. I can hear your voice in this piece. It always makes me feel at peace to read your style of writing, whatever the topic (as long as you aren’t upset when you wrote it!)

  3. Thanks, y’all, I’ll go ahead and finish the thought (another two posts maybe) to the extent I have it down so far. My end goal for the book is, in part, to instill a desire to see the world through new eyes, and for the changed reader to pass along to their children and grandchildren an empathy with life on earth–human and non-human–lest we fail to nurture the basis for those things that keep us alive and give us well-being, if used as responsible stewards and not frenzied consumers.

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