Lucency

Lucency is for the person who rarely stops to notice something unless it forces them to.
 
I was on a weekend away in Bundalong, on the edge of the Murray River, woken well before I meant to be by a racket of cockatoos loud enough to make the windows feel like they weren't there. I was tempted to go straight back to sleep. Instead, I got dressed, grabbed my camera while still yawning, and stepped outside to find gold light hanging low between the trees, cool in the shade but already promising a hot day. I walked down past a small native garden and mown lawn to the water's edge, where a still wetland inlet mirrored a row of gum trees, a scatter of dead timber, and a quiet jetty almost perfectly, without so much as a ripple to break it. I kept the foreground dark, in the shade of the trees, so the eye would move straight toward the light gathering behind it.
 
What struck me, once I'd taken it, was how close I'd come to missing it entirely, that the whole photograph existed only because a bird chorus was rude enough to win an argument with my slumber, and because I was curious enough, even half asleep, to go and see what all the noise was reacting to.
 
Lucency is for the mornings you don't plan for, the ones that arrive as an inconvenience before they arrive as anything else. Let it hang somewhere you pass without meaning to stop, and it will keep making the same quiet offer that morning made me: look now, before it's gone, and let the interruption be the whole point, rather than something to get past on your way to the rest of the day.