“Give it a rest,” screamed my shoulder this weekend,”after a day of photographing art you should put the camera down. Nature can wait!”

I couldn’t – the wondrous landscape around me begged to be documented, for the 100th time that I’ve walked these hillsides. And also, there is always Ibuprofen…

The essay attached all the way below points to something that we should keep in mind, though: finding succor in the beauty of our surrounds should not be reserved for the awe-inspiring vistas. We should also attend to things that are small, or familiar, or habitually by-passed.

Poore’s essay riffs off Annie Dillard’s question: How blind are we? How resistant to wonder have we made ourselves, and how unaccommodating of the universe’s gifts? As Dillard phrases it: “Who gets excited by a mere penny?”

She goes on to distinguish between environmental conservation’s focus on wilderness, prized environments in distant regions, instead of applying efforts to protect what we have in our neighborhoods, on a small scale. Your garden, my yard, this little city park. The need for being astute observers rather than starry-eyed adventurers, as she puts it.

The Columbia Gorge in today’s photographs is, of course, full of grandeur, as are the views of Mt. Adams at sunset – all experienced on Saturday. But as you know, if you’ve followed my stories, I can get just as enthusiastic about the bees in my garden, or the little birds in Eastern Oregon.

I truly believe it will make us better environmental stewards.

A Lifetime of Pennies

In the end, I dropped the camera after all – the sight of this mouse-catcher who appeared out of nowhere in the middle of the meadow made me laugh so hard I could not longer photograph. Shoulder was happy.

Music today is a 1943 orchestral concerto by Bela Bartok, who stayed pretty close to the ground as well, incorporating quotidian folk tunes.