Our magnolia and Jim, its biggest fan.

By Barbara Falconer Newhall

He shows up every spring. Some years we see him. Some years we don’t.

He shows up at our house just as dozens of daffodils are showing their bright, ridiculously optimistic faces all over the neighborhood and the show-offy star magnolia in our front yard is glorious with blossoms.

Every year he arrives with his camera to try yet again for the perfect shot of the perfect magnolia.

This year I spotted him just as I’d pulled my car out of our driveway and was heading downhill to the camera shop.

I stopped the car and rolled down my window. “Hey, are you the guy who takes pictures of our magnolia every year?”

“Yes. I hope I’m not intruding.”

“Not at all.” I check my rear view mirrow for cars coming down the hill behind me. “How long have you been doing it?:”

“About ten years.”

“Well, this year I’ve got my camera with me. So I’d like to take a picture of you taking a picture.”

“No problem.”

Photos c 2010 B.F. Newhall

Click.  And click. I get two shots. Now there’s a car looming in my rear view mirror.

“Gotta go. See you next year. What’s your name?”

“Jim . . . . ”

The guy in the car behind me does not honk in frustration. 

Of course he doesn’t. It’s spring.

© 2010 Barbara Falconer Newhall

I confess, I’m not very good at being in the moment, even if — especially if – the moment is a nice one. If I’m having a good time, my mind tends to lurch into the future to the day when this loveliness will be no more. My thoughts sink into nostalgia and sadness at the knowledge that everything ends, especially, it seems,  the really good stuff.

Be alive to the moment. Be present to the holiness of this place. Buddhism recommends this. Modern psychology encourages it. Christianity and Judaism know about it. (“Be still and know that I am God.”) In my opinion, it’s what Edna St. Vincent Millay was thinking when she wrote “Renascence:”

God, I can push the grass apart, And lay my finger on Thy heart!

The physical therapist reiterates it as she contemplates my overstressed and overdeveloped trapesezius  muscles. I gotta do it, she tells me. Relax those muscles. Let go of that anxiety. Be in the moment. Be here now.

But — and here comes the big but – when I encounter something beautiful, I can’t seem to just sit there and be with it. For reasons I don’t understand (yet) I am greedy and grasping when it comes to beauty.

An exquisitely foggy day in the canyon behind my house? A star magnolia blossom battered by yesterday’s rain? Across the Bay in Marin county, a footpath cutting into the steep western flank of Mount Tamalpais? In Florence, the Last Judgement frescoed onto the interior of the Duomo? On a scorching, sun-pierced day in Bangkok, a Thai peddler offering me a hat?

In each instance, I feel I must do something about this wondrous event. Make it last. Make it mine. And so, like a lot of people, I get out the camera and take a picture.

What you see posted here, therefore, is the work of a greedy woman, a person who can’t get enough of that wonderful stuff, beauty. Right now, however, I’m not regretting my greed. As I upload these photos, one at a time, I notice myself lingering over them, studying them, savoring them. I am lost in the moment.

Beauty drove Tess Gadwa  to larceny on the way to church yesterday. A Greenfield, Massachusetts, blogger, Tess says she found a painted Easter egg  lying on the ground, forgotten and forlorn.  Instead of putting the egg back where she found it or handing it off to a deserving child,  Tess boldface kept the thing. The Egg Thief’s reasoning: “Beauty is worth stealing when you find it.”

Text and photos © 2009 Barbara Falconer Newhall