Annie Dillard's "Seeing" Response

For my project study work in architecture, I was supposed to study the movement of the sun for a day. I attended my site as early as 6am in the morning. I had some food and snacks with me plus a camera for taking pictures of sun positions. This experience actually reminded me of the concept of “Seeing” written by Annie Dillard. I relate this experience to the concept because 100% of the work involved is all about seeing or visualizing. The site of my observation was at the rear of the architecture building on campus facing the woods and the baseball field. My vision was towards the tall trees at the side of the baseball field. Because of the darkness of dawn, the trees along with the rest of the woods formed a dense dark cloud as they blended with the dark sky. They always say that it’s hard to study how the sky changes but “it’s all a matter of keeping my eyes open.” Around almost five minutes to 7am, the darkness in the sky started to fade into light blue as the sun began to rise up. I kept my eyes and camera at the same position as I saw the outline of the tall trees in the woods beginning to show and the dark cloud which was formed the entire woods started becoming semi opaque as the rays of the sun began to run through the branches and leaves. I began to hear sounds of the early birds. As I continue to focus my eye at the sun rise from behind the woods, about more than hundreds of leaves flew out of the branches of the tall trees, which in a second or two, I realized that they were birds instead of leaves. How amazing and interesting. At fifteen minutes after seven, the sun appears almost fully. And as the sun appears, everything that seems like they had a monochrome color began to acquire their unique and individual colors like the leaves, tree branches flowers and even the concrete ground. And animals like squirrels could be seen playing and leaping from tree to tree as the sun continues to rise. The only thing I could see was the small stream down the bushy area next to the field shielded by the tall plants and trees that overshadowed them, however, “still a great deal of light falls on everything.” By twenty minutes to eight, I could see shadows of objects facing the sunlight begin to form solidly including mine own shadow as compared to how blare they were at their outlines during 30 minutes earlier. In this I can say that, “I see what I expect.” After I got all the recording on my camera for the morning, I took a break to review the progress of what I got so far. On the recording, I fast forwarded it to find the motion and change in color of the environment. During the fast forwarding, the color of the environment smoothly turned for a monochrome of dark bluish gray color to a beautiful multicolored environment. The outline of trees slowly appeared and the leaves flew and smoothly turned into birds flying away. The concrete ground went from being visually smooth to having detailed rough textures as the sunlight hit the ground. These amazing changes are good signs which show that “we miss a great deal because we perceive only things in our own scale” instead of seeing and concentrating on the amazing things that makes the environment.