Whims of the Cortex

An image is painted with photons that originate in our star's core before spending 100,000 years to reach its surface. After another eight-minute voyage, the photons illuminate an object on the Earth and reflect. Then they enter an imaging device through its glass and hit the sensor to paint the image. The image then goes through millions of processing cycles in a camera's processor and the photographer's development machine to render what we finally see. That is the story of photons! Images on this page are about the creator of those photons that bathe our planet every morning.

They came long before we did. Learnt how to feed the world by capturing energy from photons. And all that while enchanting us with their magical friendship with the butterflies and birds and the blue sky with pelican-white cloud. The images on this page are about those Green Sages.

After thirteen billion years since coming into existence, and going through many stellar cycles, the particles in our cosmos create those completely random, yet stunningly beautiful moments. They are always there. They just wait for us to be awake and to be witnessed! The images on this page are a few that I chanced upon!

It worked on the primordial energy fields, bit by bit, to form all that we see around the Universe today. Like an alchemist, it first transformed energy fields into particles. The particles are fused into elements to create stars, nebulae, galaxies and us, the sentient beings on this moist rock. The alchemist then worked as a sculptor to chisel out beauty, the very notion of which it also formed within our neural chemistry. It is Time, the great sculptor, is continuing to transform and sculpt nature in front of our eyes at a scale that our brain was not evolved to fully comprehend. We can perceive the sorcerer’s work only after millennia are passed over its creations. Never have I felt Time’s work more intensely than while standing in a sea of magically sculpted red rocks of Northern Arizona during a recent trip. This page captures some of my experiences of Time’s work there.

An 8000 mile wide rock is hurtling through space at 19 miles per second. The rock endured over 4 billion years of geo-chemical unthinkable, and accidentally produced our experiential abstractions like the fragrance of a Jasmine, pain of losing a sister, or the exhilaration of touching a newborn. We, the rock-dwellers, are indescribably fortunate to be able to experience that bio-chemical process, we call life, on this moist rock! Images on this page are about that rock we call home.

When the snowflakes give in to Earth’s gravity and start covering its surface with their soft unique ice crystals, the planet transitions into a monochromatic wonderland. Immersed into a meditative silence created by snowflakes soaking up the rustling sound of lonely winter leaves, and the creaking noise of the yearning branches of hibernating trees. Nature renders an image of its past ice ages, and what is to come for the Universe after its inevitable heat death in a distant future. It reminds, water exists only as ice everywhere in the Universe except on this precious moist rock. The landscape in monochrome magically blends one’s senses of impermanence and eternity together into the present moment of one’s existence.

A river’s incessant flow, ethereal beauty, and unconditional support for life had endowed it with a rich metaphorical place in literature. River’s flow is often likened with time due to its irreversibility and a sagely indifference it exudes towards everything around. On an overcast late summer afternoon, while hiking by the river Huron, I chanced upon an abrupt transformation of the river within a short stretch of only a few hundred feet. While flowing in a gentle meditative mood, young Huron suddenly finds herself in the embrace of a group of feral rocks and pebbles. She responds with the passion of her fierce current and wild rapids around the lush green offsprings of a fertile summer. The result was a beautiful display of courtship between a seductive wild river and the world around her. I was able to capture a few of those moments and put together an edit with one of my all time favorite cello pieces - The River Cam.

Contemplating astronomical objects and their dimensions is known to be corrosive to one's self-perceived importance in a cosmic context. A season of pandemic-triggered lockdown which prevented going out in the nature led me to explore the world of imaging the nature above. Why image an astronomical object? The look of it has not changed over millennia, already imaged millions of times from this planet and from space, and often with quality that an amateur astronomer can only dream of. It is, I found, not the image itself, but the awe it inspires by the feeling of being able to look into millions of years back in time, and distances that our brain had not evolved to be able to fully comprehend. I am learning to fall in love with the intoxication of the sense of being part of something whose vastness can let one's ego dissolve into insignificance! No one expressed it better than Carl Sagan in his book Pale Blue Dot. Astro-imaging is an enduring test of one's patience and perseverance that demands countless nights under the stars, with crickets, mice, deers, badgers and many other living parts of the Universe.

While wandering through the woods and wetlands and lake shores, I often think about how the other creatures would view what I am witnessing. When a beautiful moment in nature makes us, the humans, merge into it, how does it appear to the birds, squirrels, serpents, insects, and their likes. Even if our science would understand the neurochemistry of their brain during those moments, we may never know the experiential parts of it. These thoughts often lead me to anthropomorphize their perspectives by orienting the camera in angles that are close to their viewpoints. Sometimes, the perspective in an old footage can also appear to be anthropomorphized, when looked through the filter of those thoughts. This page captures a few instances of such perspectives.

Judgments and searching for patterns in sensory experiences are how human mind evolved. Yet, mindfulness in many contemplative traditions values raw sensory experience without judgments and classifications, which are inherently subjective and arguably distracting! Images on this page are not categorized and left without captions for promoting raw visual experience.