Backlit Leaf

Posted: July 27, 2009 
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It was a tiring and off day all the way through; but, in the mid afternoon, I mustered the time and energy to go out for the first time into the woods near my new home in Bells Corners.  I went to a trail system called Lime Kiln, so named after the ruins that inhabit its age old and comfortable air, that settled quietness of centuries looking down on you with curious whispers traded from crown to crown.  The ruins lie like a tomb unearthed, warning of how a shell is lost with time like all other things.  But I had yet to discover all of that as I ambled my way along the ski trail that begins the circuit of trails like arteries pumping people into all parts of the wood.  That day, though, it was only me that coursed their ways.

As I started along, I began to think of the transience of everything around me, really focusing on what it was that I was seeing, not just what I was perceiving.  I thought of the physical miracles around me, the unseen, the atomic reactions that sustain the whole grandeur of existence and how this little consciousness of  mine was naught more than a precipitation of the collective motion of all the chemical reactions occurring within my body every hundredth of a second.  Thought, or so I thought, exists by the electricity in our brains and stretching to every extremity of our body; that is, something about all the collective activity of the brain emits consciousness.  But it got complicated when I began wondering what the word consciousness actually meant in terms of an objectified, definable idea.  As I was stuck on this, I noticed a shard of light piercing through a thicket of mature bushes backed by young poplars and birches.  It had made its way through all those hundreds of obstacles and fallen on the most vividly scarlet leaf.  The connection between my current paradox and the image of the backlit leaf kept me from moving any farther down the trail until I had figured out a way to interpret what was happening.

I approached and crouched beside it.  It looked so much like it was filled with blood, like I would look without my skin.  The two ideas matched each other so well, I knew I needed to focus on the vein-like quality of all the passageways within the leaf.  The busy activity of photosynthesis was the leaf’s version of my aerobic cellular respiration, two complimentary physical chain reactions – sets of chain reactions, rather – somehow evolving together into a perfect mutual beneficence.  An ideal harmony.  Blood, I realized, was a word far too wrapped up in the human experience.  As a function, blood is the carrier of the necessary ingredient to initiate and sustain cellular respiration; and, since the materials passing through the inner structure of the leaf were performing the same function, they can easily be considered the leaf’s blood.  This is what I wanted to show.

I turned on my spot meter system and checked the brightest area in the center and the edges of the frame.  I used my Sigma 70-300mm macro lens at closest focusing distance, augmented by my Nikon 6T close-up lens.  When I was sure I was going to get sufficient underexposing in the shadows surrounding the leaf, dropping the shutter to 125 and, keeping it at maximum aperture at 200 ISO, I took the shot.  It is made all the more meaningful by the small rust spots, which remind us that our bodies, too will rust by a slow oxidization, the inevitable killer of Man.  It is what causes our aging, what leads to inevitable cessation of motion within us, the end of the sum of reactions we call Life.  Our bodies will fall to the earth, like these leaves, and melt back into it to be reabsorbed by a plant and spread throughout the ecosystem via the food chain.  But by the motion of blood we are all made alive.  Does it not look like a human heart, as well?