Green Sages

The word opacare in Latin means dusk. That makes Opacarophilia the addiction to sunset. The addiction started for me since when I was a child. I remember spending many late afternoons staring at our setting orange-yellow star over a concrete laden horizon from the roof of my childhood home in Kolkata. It was not until recently that I learnt the word Opacarophilia, and started noticing it in me. Especially while looking at the sun setting over mighty Lake Michigan through various camera lenses on and above ground. Every sunset is unique in its colors, and the emotions it evokes before, during, and after the sun goes below the horizon. As my addiction deepens, a sunset appears less and less about an end. Rather, it projects a cortical bonanza of experiential windfall in our fleeting existence in the midst of eternity. I learnt to see a sunset also as a moment of renewal just about 8000 miles east on the planet. This page contains a few sunset footages out of countless that I was able to record over the years.

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.

All major languages relied on our moon as a metaphor to create odes of dream, love, and softness. Its liquid yellow-whiteness covers oceans and mountains while mellowing human emotions into expressions. The cycles and phases of this rock had provided cultural references and influences for human societies throughout history. Its influences can be found in language, calendar systems, art, and mythology. Moon also majorly influences our climate by stabilizing Earth’s axial tilt, which is responsible for the seasons. Without moon, climatic extremes caused by seasonal irregularities may have prevented life from evolving on this planet. From a distance of quarter of a million miles, moon also contributes to our oceans’ tidal cycle, which transports heat around different parts of world’s oceans and impacts evolution and speciation of life. The satellite is receding from us about 1.5 inches every year, making the days and nights increasingly longer by slowing down Earth’s spin. This page contains a few images of our Dreamers Rock!

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!

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.

Over four billion years, our rock's geology transformed its gift from the comets into limitless oceans with waves of surreal beauty. Seeing a wave's ephemerality and its vigor to embrace everything in its way always reminds me of uninhibited expressions of intense human emotions. Yet, those waves are oblivious to our presence and existed every moment since water was gifted to the planet. The videos in this page were aerially shot along the Pacific coasts of the United States.

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.

He saw the rhythms and patterns in all beings and inanimate objects as parts of a connected web of infinity. He promised the comfort of permanence through his odes of impermanence in nature, in us, and in the infinity of this universe. Much of his seemingly endless amount of poetry is about finding limitlessness in the ephemeral rhythms and patterns we experience everyday. His work instruments a unique way of mindfully observing existence, moment by moment, and identifying it as part of a calm and comforting eternity. This page contains a few of Gurudeb Rabindra Nath Tagore’s songs. The audio is overlaid with some of my images and footages that captured emotions evoked in me while listening to those songs.

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.