What We Learned About Mist (Chasing the Mist) sept 12- oct 8 2016
Every morning for a week or more there was a season of mists on the lake across the street. An autumn season, of mist and wild birds. The kids are on their 6:45am bus and we head down to stand-up paddle (SUP). We discovered last year the boards are stable enough and we're balanced enough that we can take them on the lake in fall off-season before it freezes; with coats and shoes on, a camera in my pocket, a new season on the lake. These mornings were amazing with mists--and we had a way into them. In mist everything looks different, the very familiar became unfamiliar, which gave us a new look at things.
And we learned: As much as it is of humidity and temperature, mist is a phenomenon of light. When the water is still warm and cool pockets of air sit between the hills.
We found that as we approached the swirling mist, it disappeared. It was always elsewhere.
We could only see it when there was a certain, very low angle of light going through it, our eyes had likewise to be at a low angle to see the enlightened (or as the kids would say, lit) mist. So it disappears as you approach and the angle increases…but it is really gone? Depends how you define mist.
(The FAA defines mist as humidity you can see through for one kilometer or more, anything thicker is officially fog.)
Mists are air currents made visible. It appears to our eyes when the light is right (and the humidity is right). Humidity, like waves, is an interaction of air and water, where they overlap, interchange. (All the great outdoor water sports take place at this interface, including skiing, surfing and sailing.) The cool morning air laying low over the lake, the warmer water evaporating, and the light at a low angle to our line of sight. Like the dust in the living room air that's momentarily visible in afternoon light, it's always there whether we see it or not. Mist: Humidity in the air made visible by very low angled light.
The first morning, Julie paddled off and seemed to be in the midst of it, but she could not see it around her as I could taking pictures from a distance. "Chasing the Mist," she said when I caught up to her: Julie's new title and metaphor. One lesson: whatever we're chasing, it is all around us whether we see it or not.
And what you could see of the mist in the morning light: a swirling beauty, constant flows and funnels, astoundingly beautiful, like a moving stream of art. When you can't see it, you can still feel it...but barely, the soft coolness of the air around your legs and arms.
It is an inherently temporary phenomenon: as the earth rotates towards the sun two thing happen: the angle of light becomes more acute, and the air warms--both decrease visibility. As there are limited wavelengths of light that we can perceive, there is a brief and close limit to when we perceive mist. And as with light, there are no doubt other creatures out there who can see flows of air that are invisible to us. Our sharp distance vision would be interrupted which would hinder our survival.
If we could see the air all the time, as some creatures surely must, it would be too much, too much distracting beauty would interfere with our survival. We need to see through it.
The "invisibility" of air may be part of our sense of separation from the world: it makes us think that there is only "empty space" between here and there, rather than an active fluid medium that connects and sustains an interplay between here and there, us and them.
Where we find clues to the dynamics of nature. At the interfaces of the great fields of water and air, where the constant invisible interaction become visible--waves, mist, clouds, sunset and sunrise. Weather. Hurricanes and thunderstorms and drought.
The visible air reminds us of the swirling beauty of finger-painting and Van Gogh and psychedelic art. These arts often depicts what's there but not visible. What is always between us, the fluid we live in, like the line about Being to us is like water is to fish. What's water to a fish that's never been out of it? Seen by children or the insane and the stoned.
Huxley's idea of the mind as a reducing valve that filters out what we don't need to see; with Blake's idea that “If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, Infinite."
But more than beautiful, what I saw on the lake those "misty mystie mornings"--as my father called them when we were kids--was that what we were moving through has a quality of animation; that is, of aliveness--a spirit, as in the breath of the land. Ghosts--spirits--are associated with mists. Mists are the breath of the earth, the visible exhale on a frosty morning. In its complexity and subtlety you see it's aliveness--its spirit.
This is a "spiritual" experience, seeing the breath of the world, of nature, a feeling a connection with it. If we could see it all the time it would be a trip--beautiful, confusing, distracting, ultimately profound to see this complex flowing spirit that we are being in. A trip without psychedelics.
Genesis 1:2: Darkness was on the face of the deep, and the Spirit of God moved upon the face of the waters."
Gen. 1 is a description of a sunrise. Next? And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light. Not creation, but re-creation: the process of what you can see or re-discover at sunrise--darkness, water, mist, light, sky, land, vegetation, sun, moon and stars, animals, man and woman.
