Living mindfully: Moment to moment awareness of changes in light and perspective deepened my experience of Uganda.

Dennis Sparks/Contributor

I dislike dust. But I dislike dusting even more. So when former U.S. Poet Laureate Ted Kooser offered as part of his “American Life in Poetry” series a 9-word poem by Joette Giorgis who turns an awareness of dust—both its presence and absence—into a poem, I took notice. In his introduction to the poem, Kooser explained his fondness of “poems that demonstrate their authors’ attentiveness to the world about them” and noted how much feeling can be conveyed in just a few words about an “ordinary” occurrence.

Paying attention isn’t the same as flipping a switch that lights a dark room which stays illuminated until we turn off the light. Rather, it’s more like a micro-burst of awareness that may or may not be followed by another such moment. Dust and its absence can pass through our consciousness so quickly that they escape notice. Or they can become the subject of a poem. We may experience the vitality of that awareness, of that unique and irreplaceable instant of time, or we may miss it. That’s what living fully in the present moment means, at least to the best of my understanding.

Photography taps and develops my moment-to-moment awareness more consistently than any other method, although I know that others find it in meditation or prayer, in hunting and fishing, or in running or cycling, to name just a few examples. The world in front of the lens is continually transforming itself, ever changing in subtle but often significant ways, until the shutter is depressed.

In the Tao of Photography Philippe Gross and S. I. Shapiro note Marc Riboud’s observation that “Taking pictures is savoring life intensely, every hundredth of a second.” Like the creation of a poem, photography is a mindfulness practice, which Jon Kabat-Zinn defines in Wherever You Go, There You Are as “paying attention in a particular way: on purpose, in the present moment, and nonjudgmentally.”

I thought back to a visit I made to Uganda in late 2008 and how attuned I felt to each moment as it unfolded. In an instant a vista appeared, the light shifted, an expression changed, or a perspective was altered.

In was in that awareness that my experience was both expanded and deepened as I savored those moments intensely. And that is what it’s all about.

Dennis Sparks’ “Things Observed” photos and essays encourage readers to see familiar things in new ways. You can contact him at dennis.sparks@comcast.net.