Different Eyes

my little terrorist
Originally uploaded by dogfaceboy.

What is it about the tree that makes a writer see it, scrutinize it, wax romantic and poetic and philosophical about it? The wiggly limbs of the willow, winter bare, invite some fabricated lore. The peeling bark of a beech tree, its trunk full of eyes that look back at you, begs for its own tale.

In October, I got a digital camera, and since then, I have been seeing with different eyes. What, I ask myself, is the limb's relationship to the sky? If I get close enough, I tell myself, this trunk has a face.

I have photographed the dogwood tree beside my house from every angle, under every type of sky. One sky makes the tree look sexy. One makes it look ominous. One sky makes you think the tree itself is beautiful, instead of just an old, raggedy dogwood with a few dead places.

The camera takes the small and makes it big. It pulls the tree out of the world, frames it four and a half by six, elevates it, knights it. While a poem about a tree is a closeup, those words give the tree back to the world in a new context, with a new relationship to our souls.

Of course, in the world of philosophy, a thing is what it is not. So while photographs take the small and make it big (eye of beech, limb of willow), they also take the big and make it small. That tree, too large to carry, is now in the palm of your hand.

So what of those thousand words? Are they superfluous beneath a photograph? What more could you say about a tree the world can see?

Here is what makes a writer: the ability to say what can't be seen. And so a picture—of the face in a tree, of a real-life "whomping willow," of the eyes of a seven-year-old child on a cold day in a bad mood—is a close cousin to the words about it. Neither is extravagant.

These days, I see with different eyes. And I continue to show my daughter the things I see with the hope that she will see differently, too.