The Mirror of Everything
Water reflections offer a scintillating mirror of the world. It’s a mirror into which I look more frequently than any silvered glass. Most often I look through a lens, aiming to see and keep glimpses of the insight reflections offer.
I find creative inspiration in the way water takes the world it’s given, and reflects something equally natural and even more beautiful. I consider that a model for what I wish my own creativity to accomplish. Perhaps once in awhile, my own efforts will reflect something half as beautiful as what water reflects every day.
As my own vision has softened and deepened with practice and age, I’ve begun to see the entire world as a reflective surface. Reflections beyond water and glass provide more challenging insights, which are often difficult to see, yet perhaps more vital.
With every surface from flower petal to cracked concrete, I find myself asking: What does this reflect of me, of us, of how we relate to our world, and affect it? Is there a way in which I can find the beauty within it, then newly add to it in some small way?
It’s a difficult softening, at times, in a hard world. It’s easier to see our beauty reflected in a cultivated bed of flowers, than in roadside detritus. Yet if seeing and photographing the latter provides inspiration for cleanup, therein lies the reflected beauty.
Sometimes the hardest reflections are in our own faces. I tend not to photograph people much, since I value their privacy and cherish my own. Still, I frequently return to the words of a portrait photographer who said that everyone he photographed became beautiful to him. The magic of the mirror of everything, and the magic of the lenses that can capture it, is that ability to illuminate the beauty in anything and anyone, if we learn to skillfully look.
The reflections of the pained and difficult aspects of the world, including and especially our imperfect selves, illuminate what we need to love in order to change, to soften suffering, to see our own role in its unnecessary creation. That is what I frequently see in the mirror of everything. I see that for all of us, our growth begins within, in those seeds of imperfection.
When seeing beauty in the world’s reflections gets challenging, I always return to water to inspire my energy to reflect and grow. I seek the reminder of how water takes whatever sky it’s given without complaint, then silently does what it can to make it one trace more beautiful.
Perspective restored, I can then sleep and rise eager to greet the mirror of morning. I can rise with gratitude and worthy working sweat, to reflect the world’s beauty one more time.