All the beautiful plants and trees in bloom and so much potential to be out there with my camera taking it all in, but the recent heat and humidity are in direct correlation with my almost complete lack of desire and motivation to do much more than sit in the cool of an air-conditioned room with a good book or movie.  I did manage, a few weeks ago, to be near the Whitney Museum in lower Manhattan on a day that was, by my standards, a perfect summer day and did a little ‘street photography’ which I have come to enjoy doing.

It takes a little courage to do ‘street photography’, as I am learning, especially when one is not using a zoom lens that allows one to be far enough from the subjects to not be noticed. In the case of these few photos I only had with me my ‘nifty 50″ lens- a prime lens that does not zoom in and out but instead relies on the photographer to be the ‘zoom’ and use one’s legs and feet to get closer.  I was too lazy that day to get up from my seat but I still hope I captured a little of what Merton saw standing in the midst of human activity. The appeal of seeing life happen, hopefully seeing love happen in the smallest of details, of people being connected and, as he writes: “exercises all the deepest capacities of our nature”.  Just maybe, in the middle of all the unrest and fear and tragedy and hate that surrounds us now on an almost daily basis, it’s good to sit back on a lazy summer day and watch the world go by as each of us tries in our own small but significant ways to be for ourselves and others islands of love and peace.

While I was snapping away I was thinking of some of the things I’ve read in Thomas Merton’s book, Conjectures of a Guilty Bystander.  May be the lazy way out for me  is to rely on Thomas Merton to express how I feel but what are hot summer days for if not to be lazy?

He writes:

“…First of all, the Law of Love is the deepest law of  our nature, not something extraneous and alien to our nature.  Our nature inclines us to love, and to love freely.

The deepest and most fundamental exigency of the divine law in our hearts is that we should reach our fulfillment by loving.  It is not enough for us to possess human nature, we have to act as humans, we have to exercise all the deepest capacities of our nature…

The demands of the Law of Love are progressive.  We begin by loving life itself, by loving survival at any price.  Hence, we must first of all love ourselves.  But as we grow we must love others.  We must love them as our own fulfillment.  Then we must come to love them in order to fulfill them, to develop their capacity to love, and finally we must love others and ourselves in and for God.”