Inklings 2020

THROUGH MY CAMERA’S EYE Alyssa Coy What does it mean to feel one with nature? Is it simply observing one’s surroundings or is it interacting with the natural world? I look at life through the eye of my camera. Through my camera, I steal an instant I can keep and travel back to time and time again. I collect instances: the last rusted leaf to litter the ground, a flecked cheetah slinking through golden, Savanna grasses. In search of its mate, a male albatross performing a courting dance to engross a female’s attention is a treasure for me to seize. Click: my camera’s shutter ruptures the silence, the red, swollen sky, and the landscape of thousand-year-old lava, still releasing warmth. The crisp air enlivens my mind. My feet, planted on Floreana’s ground, explore. The Galapagos feeds my curiosity. I crouch, fixed and waiting. I prepare for a lava lizard, an iguana, perhaps a lava heron, some organism to dance across the frame of my camera’s lens. I hope for wildlife, but the terrain itself is enough; I am satisfied by the rugged ripples and jagged curves the dense and solid, tar-colored substance has created. I think of a time when this molten lava flowed, incinerating anything and everything in its path. I think of how liquid fire spewed from the mouth of hell to create an ethereal and silent belt of islands. The Galapagos is a pristine world of its own. I am isolated on this island, but this isolation is not bone-chilling nor agonizing; this isolation beckons me. I am alongside the coast where birds call out. Long, sharp sounds escape their black bodies; perhaps, they call out to the others who search for food above the frigid and dark cerulean water. I watch these birds through the lens of my eye. I capture hundreds of darts propelling themselves from a cliff in search of breakfast. Their lives depend on it, and this moment stays with me. As I leave the island, I am one with these images of plants, animals, and terrains. In such silence, the world is deafening. 18