The quality of attention

Craggs Road trail flanks Malibu Creek for most of is length. The water flows all the year round and has small fish and crayfish. Blue, green-backed and night heron fish here, along with great white egret, pied-billed grebe and a rare visiting osprey.

The blue heron fishes the whole length of the creek. Often she looks sleek and elegant and mysterious, yet at times she can be engagingly like a gawkish growing young teen.

I learn from the quality of her attention. She stands perfectly still for minutes on end, observing. Often she tilts her head to one side. Sometimes she raises her crown feathers to shade her eyes from the sun. When she moves she does so slowly and sinously, curving her neck into a perfect S. She waits and waits. Then suddenly her focus will sharpen, and she will tense in readiness, and lunge, and emerge with a fish.

And so, standing still for minutes on end, in the shade of oaks buzzing with bee colonies, with my camera and telephoto set and ready, I wait and watch her patiently, then suddenly tense, sharpen the focus and shoot, and emerge with a photo.

I am only present in that moment, I am nowhere else.

All worries and concerns have long evaporated. All sense of self has dissolved. I fuse with the scene, I am what I see.

No camera is needed for this exercise, only a body and eyes and brain and memory on which to record the instant.

Every instant is as precious as a fish or a photograph.

Paul Harrison