What a great word, auspicious. Surprising without being bratty about it. Sounds a lot like suspicious, but that’s just a coincidence. It’s all about the auspices, another word worth the attention it demands.
Guidance. Protection. Care.
Influence.
I keep wondering about 2024. It was, in many ways, a year of bests, first-evers, yeses. But those cervicogenic headaches were frequent and severe. Some messes I got myself into felt dangerous, violent, unsurmountable. It was a year of extremes. Of transitions so decisive, my steps forward could be measured in miles. Maybe it is no surprise that the ones back felt accordingly big, too.
My last blog post was a thank-you to the people in my life. To my life, for making room for people. The ginkgo leaves had to sit that one out, but now they have the stage.
Today I’m sharing the stroy of just one auspicious photo from 2024, which I invite to guide me in 2025. It documents easy beauty in a shot that took effort and luck. It was taken during a challenging time, it required that I consider the matter of perspective, and it wound up a much better photo than I ever expected. Is it my favorite photo from last year? In a way, yes, because as far as this impossible question can be answered at all, this photo is my answer.
The ginkgo trees that line the western terminus of Madalińskiego turn to gold and drop their leaves in ways that are sudden and dramatic, which is also how I would describe my moods and actions in the weeks following my late-October birthday (this year the forty-seventh). A photo walk felt both wild and timid on the day in question (a Friday). It felt wild because it seemed like a clear yes to something elusive, a surprising twist considering how familiar and effortless it might have been to keep saying no. And it felt timid because I was so exposed, trying things, leaving the safety of home, embarking on new journeys, allowing things to happen (hey there, Jan).
I’m not sure when I noticed the similarity between those ginkgo leaves near me and that string of lights flanking a mid-size building across the street, but it surprised me when I did and I remember being skeptical as to whether I could convey this complementary contrast in a photo. The effort was not just conceptual but also physical—composing the shot and getting the angles I wanted required that I stand on tip-toe, attain an archer’s balance, lock down that tricky framing, hand-hold that exposure.
What I discovered afterwards on the sixteen-inch screen exceeded all of my expectations, even all of my hopes. I had taken a photo that seemed to me to be so clean, so clever, and so rich with meaning, I couldn’t help but again see myself as either very capable, extremely lucky, or both. The auspicious ginkgo leaves of early November had shown me the way.