Seeing and Sharing Beauty

Category: Musings (Page 1 of 3)

Giving Empathy: A 4-Step Formula

Over my lifetime I’ve had a hard time giving empathy. I’d often excuse myself until one day my wife Marti gently said, “You are so competent in so many things. I bet you can become competent in being empathetic, honey.”

This was a challenge for a guy with an ego that sees itself as competent, wise, and action-oriented. When I see my highly capable Marti troubled or in tears about something and ask her about it, I usually go immediately to giving solutions or advice.

Wrong approach!

I recently listened to Brené Brown’s audio book “Men, Women, and Worthiness: The Experience of Shame and the Power of Being Enough”. Brown suggests the following 4 steps on how to give empathy. They seem to be working, but I’ll admit I’m still a novice (take that, ego!). Here’s what I got from it, framed in a me-she interaction:

1. See the World as She Sees It

“If you can learn a simple trick, Scout, you’ll get along a lot better with all kinds of folks. You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view, until you climb inside of his skin and walk around in it.”

Atticus Finch in To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee

Try to take her perspective. This really takes some work, because my first thought is “Jeez, why can’t she see this my way?” As I am not a woman, and especially not this amazing woman, I have to work hard to try to get into her experience and imagine how she sees things—her perspective.

2. Be Non-Judgmental

“Any fool can criticize, complain, and condemn—and most fools do. But it takes character and self-control to be understanding and forgiving.”

Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People

If I let my ego run things, I’ll think I know everything and that I can judge my wife for not being “x”. This will only lead me into giving advice or solutions. As I said earlier—wrong!

The x thing represents all the ways I think I am superior. But in truth we are all at least partially deficient in those things. As Brown puts it, “We judge in areas where we feel insecure.”

3. Understand What She Is Feeling

Acceptance is Understanding. Understanding is Love

Thich Nhat Hanh

Here again I was awesome at implementing the wrong approach to this. I would say something like “So, you must be feeling ‘y’.” Wrong, Marti was not feeling y, and this made it worse because it showed I was reading her mind wrong.

The better approach is to ask in a curious and friendly way, “How are you feeling?” This is what my daughter Helena often says to me after I’ve had a new medical procedure. Asking Marti this will educate my know-it-all ego to proceed more”wisely”.

4. Communicate That You Understand

Once you’ve completed steps 1 through 3, you now have the basis for communicating that you understand. And, if you have had the same kinds of feelings in your own life under similar situation, you can even say, “Yes, me too, I’ve felt ‘y’ too when ‘xyz’ happened in a similar situation.”

However, given all that, and knowing that I should not give advice or solutions, I sometimes end up just telling her a lot of stuff about how wonderful and amazing she is, followed with, “How about I fix you a nice warm bubble bath.” And BTW, I didn’t get this from Brené


So, as my dad always said, “There you have it!” I hope this helps shed some light for you on what has been, for me, a baffling skill to learn.

Peace, love , soul, and rock ‘n’ roll!

Harry

To keep your marriage brimming
With love in the loving cup,
Whenever you’re wrong, admit it;
Whenever you’re right, shut up.

Ogden Nash, “A Word To Husbands”

Photo Credit: Archie Fantom

Why Do We Like an Image?

Gone the Sun

Gone the Sun – Ontonagon, Michigan

Since the beginning …

Since the beginning of my “pro” digital photography life (back in 2009) ,  I wanted to get some outside confirmation that my photography was any good.  So I chose to compete in the local camera club competitions.

The camera club only allowed nature photographs.  The club defined a nature photograph as a photograph of nature that did not have evidence of hand of man, as defined below. So, I have looked mostly to create nature images, eliminating such hand of man images from my own artistic consideration.

“Nature photography is restricted to the use of the photographic process to depict observations from all branches of natural history, except anthropology and archaeology, in such a fashion that a well informed person will be able to identify the subject material and to certify as to its honest presentation. The story telling value of a photograph must be weighed more than the pictorial quality. Human elements shall not be present, except on the rare occasion where those human elements enhance the nature story. The presence of scientific bands on wild animals is acceptable. Photographs of artificially produced hybrid plants or animals, mounted specimens, or obviously set arrangements, are ineligible, as is any form of manipulation, manual or digital, that alters the truth of the photographic statement.”

— The Hand of Man as defined by the Photographic Society of America

Until now!

What changed my mind? In the voting for my top photographs of 2017, the image above was in the top four, and, there were two people (that I know of) who liked this image the best.  Is there a problem?  Yes, the fire on the beach is definitely hand of man!

I have essentially been keeping most of my hand of man images unpublished.

So now, I am going to go through my hard drive inventory of nature type images that contain hand of man, and I will share that collection with you.

Thank you for you support over the years, and for the voting for a campfire that has given me a new thought.

I hope you will enjoy whatever comes next!   🙂

Denali National Park

Vast and High

“Vast and High” – Denali National Park

Having returned from a trip to photograph the majesty of Denali National Park, I sat down to write a piece to go along with the posting of a photograph.

Yes, I have photographed Denali, but how can I possibly write about it?

I could take the angle of humor.

About how my wife imagined that our ride into and out of the park for 12 hours and 185 miles round trip was going to be on a luxury tour bus with huge windows and a glass rooftop and on-board restroom and a gourmet lunch and hors d’oeuvres, when it was actually only a repainted school bus.

About how the bus driver, who was also the tour commentator, kept repeating himself and constantly telling us to buckle our seat belts.

About the 15 or so stops where someone on the bus would shout “STOP!” when they thought they saw a bear, actually showed up as a slightly moving brown dot some ¾ mile from the road.

About how when we got to Reflection Lake, the water was rippled and the top half of the mountain was hidden by clouds, and the bus driver said, ”This is called Reflection Lake, but today it is just ‘Lake’”.

But instead of humor, I want to write about the beauty, and yet how can mere words do it justice?

My puny photographs try to do it some justice in this pitifully limited thing we do with our cameras and software.

I try by taking several images and merging them together into a wide panorama, with the only way of indicating the scale of the scene is by including a small bit of road in the corner of the frame.

Nearing Denali

“Nearing Denali” – Denali National Park

I am perplexed knowing that my making a photograph takes what I love and have seen in person, and shrinks it.  I have made the beauty smaller.

But also, I have made it possible for me to see it again, here on my phone or my computer or in a print on my wall.

By creating a photograph, I have made it possible to be reminded of that day and that sight by my image of it.  And, I have made it possible, in some small way, to let the viewers of my art in on something they may never see in person.

Come on Up and See Me Sometime

“Come on Up and See Me Sometime” – Denali National Park

And not seeing it in person is a fact of life.

We cannot go and see everything because of the limits of time, money, health, access.

Someday, there will be fully developed VE (virtual experience) technology that enables one to visit almost anywhere in the world, by simply driving over to a VE Realitorium and buying a ticket.  VE will allow us to “feel” like we are climbing around the hills beneath the mountains of Denali, “feel” the gentle breezes of walking through low-lying clouds, “smell” the scent of pine trees.

All without having to ride a school bus on a one lane road 92 miles in, 6 hours in and 6 hours out, driving 2 hours from Fairbanks to the Denali Park entrance, flying 12 hours from Chicago to Seattle to Fairbanks, fiddling and searching the internet to make airline reservations and bus reservations and hotel reservations, and spending  the money to pay for all this.

So yes, God bless technology and the artists and creators of it.  If they can create a VE Denali Trip — the views and smells and sounds of this beautiful place – and I can have it by simply hopping over to our local VE Realitorium, I would definitely do it!

Until then, I will enjoy my humble photographs, and those of other photographers, bringing me the beauty of these wondrous places.

Denali Fall Color

“Denali Fall Color” – Denali National Park

 

Majesty Doubled

Majesty Doubled

Majesty Doubled, Sierra Nevada mountains near Bishop, california

This photograph could have been called “Persistence”.

Not the persistence of mountains, not the persistence of trees, not the persistence of water and clouds.

This location is not in any Guide Book or Google Map.  It’s not on anyone’s GPS tracking device.  This location — the place where I was standing to make this photograph — was discovered through Persistence.

And it was not discovered by MY persistence but by my friend Steve Ornberg‘s persistence!

After a long day of mostly cloudy skies, the sun came out and we wanted to drive around and see what we could find.  I hiked into a field for an hour and had a really mediocre composition of a cotton wood tree from a really bad angle.  I was fed up and wanted to quit for the day.

Then good old Steve, as we were driving back to our hotel, said “Hey, I wonder what’s up this way.”

We followed a nondescript dirt road for about a hundred yards and came upon an irrigation pond that served as a perfectly positioned reflecting pond.  It doubled the majesty of the Eastern Sierra mountains in the west.

Majesty Doubled!

North Lake Sunrise

North Lake Sunrise

Sunrise on North Lake, Eastern Sierra, Near Bishop, California

“My happiness grows in direct proportion to my acceptance, and in inverse proportion to my expectations.”

– Michael J. Fox

I could have become very unhappy on this trip because of a certain expectation — that the aspen leaves would have been present on the trees, creating a bright yellow band on the distant shoreline.

Instead, the leaves were gone, wiped away by a winter storm the day before.

Instead, an even more glorious show of yellow beyond my expectations appeared, reflected in the icy covering on North Lake.

Instead, I experienced and accepted this marvelous morning with great gratitude and happiness.

« Older posts