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LET TIME STAND STILL

Afterword
Lijuan Yuan September 2017 Blacksburg, VA

Sun Jun said that her writing of poetry is unintentional, they appear by chance. It was completely by chance that her poems encountered my photography. My first encounter with Jun was on the way to a Keystone conference in February 2009; we were on the same long bus ride from Albuquerque, New Mexico, to Tao’s in the mountains. She later said that she was observing me all the way while I was taking photos of the winter scenery outside the bus window with my Canon 7D camera.

The mutual appreciation of our scientific research areas led us to begin our collaboration. In the years that followed, our laboratories published two research papers together, and my PhD students and I participated in the writing of a book chapter and review of other chapters in the book titled “Mechanisms underlying host-microbiome interactions in pathophysiology of human diseases,” of which she and her colleague are editors. Over those years the communication between us was purely a scientific exchange between two female scientists.

Then one day in March 2017, a heavy snow covered the peach blossoms in my garden. A group of pictures of the snow-covered flowers I posted on Chinese social media WeChat Friends Circle touched Jun’s aspirations. She sent me her poem, "Plum Blossom In My Old Garden" and some of her other poetry works. It was only then that I learned she was a poet. I am a long-time poetry enthusiast, so from then on, our communication included another dimension of language: in addition to talking science, we began to talk about poetry and art.

One day Jun told me that she wished when she reached the age of fifty she could publish a collection of her poems with matching illustrations. I said “How about my photos?” She said “You took so many beautiful photos, are they not waiting for my little poems?” As a result, a collection of poems and photographs created by two female scientists who both have a “literary complex” was born as this book.

Photography is not only a hobby I began when I was a teenager, it is part of who I am. On my photography website (http://yuanphotography.zenfolio.com) I quoted the words of a scientist and painter, Dr. Bengt Goran Hellekant to explain why I am a scientist and a nature photographer “In a sense, science can turn dreams into reality in a way art never can, which is one of the reasons why I am passionate about scientific research. On the other hand, art allows people to express themselves more uniquely than science. This is one of the conditions for being a good artist. In art at its best, brush strokes or the camera lens can capture not only what you see, but also what you feel when you see it. In science, objectivity, accuracy, and a single interpretation should be the goals of what we pursue. However, in both science and art, creativity and breaking rules are equally valuable. Both have cherished moments when everything falls into place”. Life is made of our encounters with these wonderful moments, again and again. The two encounters between Jun and I, first as fellow scientists and then as artists, doubly enriched the lives of both of us. We hope encounters with our book of “little poems” and photographs adds a bit of enrichment to the lives of others, too.