Encounters

All actual life is encounter.

-          Martin Buber

This morning’s sunrise at Cutler Park was beautiful . . .

and, at moments, dramatic.

But sometimes the most important “moments” aren’t captured in images.  This was one of those mornings.

Walking in, I was looking through the trees and listening to the sounds of the woods, when a movement ahead and to my left in the now-leafless woods caught my attention.  There wasn’t much light, but there was enough to see a dim flash of bushy white.  I stopped, and could barely make out the shape of a deer.  I took a few more steps, and the deer took a couple of leaps ahead in response – but amazingly quietly as it traveled through the underbrush.

Knowing that (a) there wasn’t enough light to get a picture, and (b) the deer would be gone instantly anyway, I decided just to keep on walking down the trail.  But as I proceeded, the deer didn’t move, so in a few steps I was parallel with it, maybe 50 feet away.  So I stopped again, and we looked at each other for a few seconds.

Martin Buber, the Jewish philosopher, calls moments like this the “I-Thou” moment:

When I confront a human being as my Thou and speak the basic word I-Thou to him, then he is no thing among things nor does he consist of things. He is no longer He or She, a dot in the world grid of space and time, nor a condition to be experienced and described, a loose bundle of named qualities. Neighborless and seamless, he is Thou and fills the firmament. Not as if there were nothing but he; but everything else lives in his light.

So it was with the deer.

The moment passed.  I walked on down the trail to the river.  But another was yet to come.

Cutler Park draws lots of people on mornings like today's.  There were walkers (sometimes with dogs) . . .

 runners . . .

bicyclers.  

On my way back to the car, I encountered a solitary walker heading into the woods.  He was an older African-American man, who stopped me to ask what kind of camera I was using.  I told him.  He explained that he had been looking at ads for cameras in the “Black Friday” newspaper inserts this weekend because, as he said, “I’m 70 years old and I want to take some pictures.”

I encouraged him to start simply, with a small digital camera, and take lots of them.  I handed him my Hastings Street Photography business card; we introduced ourselves, shook hands, and went our separate ways.  It was a simple encounter, but there, in that moment, he had spoken his dream to me.

All actual life is encounter.