Photo by Letícia Alvares
“Hurry up, slow coach!” Ask anyone who knows me what it’s like to take a walk with me, and they might either laugh or roll their eyes. It seems I’m stopping every five minutes to photograph some gilded leaf, a moss-covered wall, or a reflection in a puddle. My camera slows me down! And I embrace it.
My first ‘proper’ camera was a Canon 350D; you can probably pick one up for the price of a McDonald’s meal these days. Back then, it felt like holding The One Ring. Suddenly I was seeing a world within a world in a far more immersive way, all my senses heightened.
I thought of myself as a butterfly catcher, creeping up on beauty with my net. Over the years, though, I’ve learned that beauty can’t really be captured as such; it must be experienced. Like a butterfly, it lands when I’m still enough to let it come to me, and I am thus invited to stand in quiet awe.
Today, we live in a culture that records everything yet experiences very little: crowds filming moments on their phones but often failing to inhabit them. The problem is not photography itself but the attitude we bring to it. Beauty can be approached through consumption, through possession disguised as preservation, or through contemplative creation, as in my Still Life work. I arrange petal and leaf, place bird or bug, and watch how the light falls to reveal the intricacies of beauty and design.
As I take my time over the composition, I find myself drawn into wonder. The camera becomes spiritual when it slows us down rather than speeds us past. To use a photographic metaphor, it’s like taking my focus in from wide angle to macro. Time begins to slow as the details emerge, pulling on my attention.
Butterfly on apples: still life by Jacqui Wakelam
Simone Weil wrote that “attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”. To truly attend to something is an act of love. Jesus understood this. When he told his anxious listeners to “consider the lilies”, he was directing their gaze towards beauty so that they might remember God’s care for them. The bible is brimming with signposts to the natural world as a means of unpacking spiritual truths.
What I’ve discovered is that attention flows both ways. When I stop for a mossy wall or a wild flower, I give something of myself through taking the time to really notice, and I receive something back in return. One afternoon, when I was grieving a broken heart, I stepped into the garden to take a breather. Quite unexpectedly, the silver birch flared at my side, its leaves gilded by sun breaking through heavy English cloud. This was God’s invitation to make evident to me that light was contending about me even while grief churned inside.
iPhone 13, taken by Jacqui Wakelam on this occasion.
In moments like that, beauty becomes one of the ways God reminds us we’re held within a greater love story, one that carries us through the dark towards something more beautiful than we can ever imagine.
So take this as your permission slip to be the slow coach. Treat an interrupted walk as an invitation to taste and see the goodness of God, and to abide there. Granted, the phone in your pocket can hurry you past a moment before you’ve truly lived it. Yet held with an open hand and curiosity, it can help you delightfully dawdle, dilly-dally even, and let beauty reveal itself to you. The gilded leaf may be gone by tomorrow, so stop and look, and most importantly, let yourself be reminded of God’s love.
Taste and See: still life by Jacqui Wakelam
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