In the middle of February, craving a little colour in our cooped-up winter, we took a day to visit the Royal Botanical Gardens exhibit in Burlington, Ontario. It was the homebody’s version of a tropical vacation, and vibrantly joyful. Beautiful orchids basked in bright sunlight in the greenhouses. Grown people walked around with smiles on their faces, sharing comments, taking photos. Magically, we were all transformed into children, caught up in the whimsy of Lewis Carroll’s tale.
Lewis Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson, and he taught mathematics at Oxford. He was also an excellent photographer. To real life Alice Liddell and her sisters, he told his Alice in Wonderland stories, imaginatively playing around with reflections, logic, and time.
His characters and their views were wonderfully nonsensical. Who can forget the imperious Queen of Hearts insisting that, at Alice’s age, sometimes she’d believed as many as six impossible things before breakfast! Or the Cheshire cat, only his smile remaining as the rest of him disappeared “you may have noticed that I’m not all there myself!” The Mad Hatter is sentenced to be trapped in tea time, and the exhibit featured a laden tea table and clocks everywhere.
A big take away of our visit to Alice in Bloomland was knowing I could scroll back through the snapshots of the day whenever I want. I could fall, Alice-like, into a rabbit hole at any moment in an ordinary day. And it is the intriguing conundrums that Alice fell into, the shifting of perspectives, mirroring, the questioning of limitations and conventional ways of thinking that permit us to playfully imagine and incarnate our own Wonderlands.
In the old days of Brownie cameras, we had to wait patiently for our Kodak films to be developed, and had to be mindful of the expense. When the palisades on the black and white photos I’d snapped on a class trip to Sainte-Marie among the Hurons looked like just a pile of sticks, it was a great disappointment.
Today, with my cell phone camera, it’s cheap and easy to grab a great shot of the light reflecting in the hall, the snow-covered deck, a handful of beaded pins, anything that captures my fancy. Odd how a picture sometimes reveals dimensions otherwise overlooked, light and shadow, glimpses into the ravine beyond the evergreen trees outside my east window, or the glittering of an icicle overhang. When we step out of our mad haste to be somewhere else, we can stop and linger in new dimensions and the beauty everywhere.
