Longing

"A longing to wander tears my heart when I hear trees rustling in the wind at evening. If one listens to them silently for a long time, the longing reveals its kernel, its meaning. It is not so much a matter of escaping from one's suffering, though it may seem to be so. It is a longing for home, for a memory of the mother, for new metaphors for life. It leads home."

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)
Wandering

An Illusion, a Phantom, or a Dream

“So I say to you –
This is how to contemplate our
conditioned existence in this fleeting world:
'Like a tiny drop of dew,
or a bubble floating in a stream;
Like a flash of lightning
in a summer cloud,
Or a flickering lamp, an illusion,
a phantom, or a dream.'
'So is all conditioned
existence to be seen.'
Thus spoke Buddha."

- Diamond Sutra (c.858)

Macro and the Micro

"It is all very beautiful and magical here - a quality which cannot be described. You have to live it and breathe it, let the sun bake it into you. The skies and land are so enormous, and the detail so precise and exquisite that wherever you are you are isolated in a glowing world between the macro and the micro, where everything is sidewise under you and over you, and the clocks stopped long ago."

- Ansel Adams (1902 - 1984)
Letter to Alfred Stieglitz

Postscript. The purest simplest joy of life is life itself: living, being, breathing, seeing, feeling, sharing, ... But there are preternaturally precious moments when the experience is so all-consuming and so far transcends what words alone are incapable of revealing (though the wisest among us are sometimes able, in Zen-like fashion, to capture glimpses of the deepest truths), that one is simply lost in the Einsteinian awe of it all ("I have nothing but awe when I observe the laws of nature," as quoted in Einstein and the Poet). For me, this happens (alas, far less frequently than I wish) when I become "lost" amidst the "macro and the micro"; when otherwise arbitrary language-driven distinctions among trees and forest and leaves and space and time ... all dissolve and become one and inseparable. A feeling that seems to be also shared by my eldest son, Noah, who is seen here contemplating his own universe of mysteries by the side of a small footpath he and I took this weekend in a local park:

Unheard Music

"There are mornings when, from the first ray of light seized upon by the eye, and the first simple sounds that get inside the head, the heart is convinced that it is existing in rhythm to a kind of unheard music, familiar but forgotten because long ago it was interrupted and only now has suddenly resumed playing. The silent melodies pass through the fabric of the consciousness like the wind through the meshes of a net, without moving it, but at the same time unmistakably there, all around it. For one who has never lived such a morning, its advent can be a paralyzing experience."

- Paul Bowles (1910 - 1999)
The Spider's House

The Brown Autumn Came

"The brown autumn came. Out of doors, it brought to the fields the prodigality of the golden harvest, —to the forest, revelations of light,⁠—and to the sky, the sharp air, the morning mist, the red clouds at evening. Within doors, the sense of seclusion, the stillness of closed and curtained windows, musings by the fireside, books, friends, conversation, and the long, meditative evenings. To the farmer, it brought surcease of toil,⁠—to the scholar, that sweet delirium of the brain which changes toil to pleasure. It brought the wild duck back to the reedy marshes of the south; it brought the wild song back to the fervid brain of the poet. Without, the village street was paved with gold; the river ran red with the reflection of the leaves. Within, the faces of friends brightened the gloomy walls; the returning footsteps of the long-absent gladdened the threshold; and all the sweet amenities of social life again resumed their interrupted reign."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)
Kavanagh

A Little Round Grain of Rock

"I perceived that I was on a little round grain of rock and metal, filmed with water and with air, whirling in sunlight and darkness. And on the skin of that little grain all the swarms of men, generation by generation, had lived in labour and blindness, with intermittent joy and intermittent lucidity of spirit. And all their history, with its folk-wanderings, its empires, its philosophies, its proud sciences, its social revolutions, its increasing hunger for community, was but a flicker in one day of the lives of the stars."

- Olaf Stapledon (1886 - 1950)
Star Maker

Silence

“How to be a Poet
(to remind myself)

i

Make a place to sit down.

Sit down. Be quiet.

You must depend upon

affection, reading, knowledge,

skill—more of each

than you have—inspiration

work, growing older, patience,

for patience joins time

to eternity…

ii

Breathe with unconditional breath

the unconditioned air.

Shun electric wire.

Communicate slowly. Live

a three-dimensional life;

stay away from screens.

Stay away from anything

that obscures the place it is in.

There are no unsacred places;

there are only sacred places

and desecrated places.

iii

Accept what comes from silence.

Make the best you can of it.

Of the little words that come

out of the silence, like prayers

prayed back to the one who prays,

make a poem that does not disturb

the silence from which it came.”

- Wendell Berry (1934 - )
 Given

Looking Inward

"He sees the truth as with a jolt. There it is, within his own being, lying deep down but still in his own self. There never was any need to travel anywhere to find it; no need to visit anyone who was supposed to have it already, and sit at his feet; not even to read any book, however sacred or inspired. Nor could another person, place, or writing give it to him; he would have to unveil it for himself in himself. The others could direct him to look inwards, thus saving all the effort of looking elsewhere. But he himself would have to give the needful attention to himself. The discovery must be his own, made within the still center of his being."

- Paul Brunton (1898 - 1981)
Advanced Contemplation: The Peace Within You

Places of Initiation

"… a ditch somewhere – or a creek, meadow, woodlot, or marsh…. These are places of initiation, where the borders between ourselves and other creatures break down, where the earth gets under our nails and a sense of place gets under our skin.… Everybody has a ditch, or ought to. For only the ditches and the fields, the woods, the ravines – can teach us to care enough for all the land."

- Robert Michael Pyle (1947 - )

Thunder Tree

Unfathomable Depth

"Words, no matter whether they are vocalized and made into sounds or remain unspoken as thoughts, can cast an almost hypnotic spell upon you. You easily lose yourself in them, become hypnotized into implicitly believing that when you have attached a word to something, you know what it is. The fact is: You don’t know what it is. You have only covered up the mystery with a label. Everything, a bird, a tree, even a simple stone, and certainly a human being, is ultimately unknowable. This is because it has unfathomable depth. All we can perceive, experience, think about, is the surface layer of reality, less than the tip of an iceberg."

- Eckhart Tolle (1948 - )

Arbitrary Divisions

"The true splendor of science is not so much that it names and classifies, records and predicts, but that it observes and desires to know the facts, whatever they may turn out to be. However much it may confuse facts with conventions, and reality with arbitrary divisions, in this openness and sincerity of mind it bears some resemblance to religion, understood in its other and deeper sense. The greater the scientist, the more he is impressed with his ignorance of reality, and the more he realizes that his laws and labels, descriptions and definitions, are the products of his own thought. They help him to use the world for purposes of his own devising rather than to understand and explain it. The more he analyzes the universe into infinitesimals, the more things he finds to classify, and the more he perceives the relativity of all classification. What he does not know seems to increase in geometric progression to what he knows. Steadily he approaches the point where what is unknown is not a mere blank space in a web of words but a window in the mind, a window whose name is not ignorance but wonder."

- Alan Watts (1915 - 1973)

The Immediate Moment

"We could say that meditation doesn't have a reason or doesn't have a purpose. In this respect it's unlike almost all other things we do except perhaps making music and dancing. When we make music we don't do it in order to reach a certain point, such as the end of the composition. If that were the purpose of music then obviously the fastest players would be the best. Also, when we are dancing we are not aiming to arrive at a particular place on the floor as in a journey. When we dance, the journey itself is the point, as when we play music the playing itself is the point. And exactly the same thing is true in meditation. Meditation is the discovery that the point of life is always arrived at in the immediate moment."

- Alan Watts

(1915 - 1973)

Experience of Mystery

"The most beautiful emotion we can experience is the mystical. It is the power of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead. To know that what is impenetrable to us really exists, manifesting itself as the highest wisdom and the most radiant beauty, which our dull faculties can comprehend only in their most primitive forms—this knowledge, this feeling, is at the center of true religiousness. In this sense, and in this sense only, I belong to the rank of devoutly religious men."

- Albert Einstein

(1879 - 1955)

True Quiet

"Ask the world to reveal its quietude —

not the silence of machines when they are still,

but the true quiet by which birdsongs,

trees, bellworts, snails, clouds, storms

become what they are, and are nothing else."

- Wendell Berry

(1934 - )

Nothing to Add, Nothing to Take Away

"In anything at all,

perfection is finally attained

not when there is no longer

anything to add,

but when there is no longer

anything to take away."

- Antoine de Saint-Exupery

(1900 - 1944)

Nothing is as it appears

"Know all things to be like this:

A mirage, a cloud castle,

A dream, an apparition,

Without essence, but with qualities that can be seen.

Know all things to be like this:

As the moon in a bright sky

In some clear lake reflected,

Though to that lake the moon has never moved.

Know all things to be like this:

As an echo that derives

From music, sounds, and weeping,

Yet in that echo is no melody.

Know all things to be like this:

As a magician makes illusions

Of horses, oxen, carts and other things,

Nothing is as it appears."

- Samadhiraja Sutra

Aftermath of Inactivity as a Probe Into the Creative Process

A few days ago I posted my first blog entry in over 3 months. It consisted of little more than explaining the long delay (attributed to "day job" related constraints), highlighting some recent publications, and briefly amplifying on an observation I made in a recent interview. But I left out a deeper thought; one that I think goes to the heart of the creative process. Namely, the degree to which what - not how - we choose to photograph defines who we really are; particularly after a long absence from doing photography. This is a point both obvious and subtle.

It is often said that the best (perhaps only?) way to discover who we really are is to see what we do in moments of crisis. I use the word "crisis" here not to label some profound existential angst or trauma, but simply to denote a "moment of truth"; i.e., some instant in time during which a decision must be made now. Perhaps we've delayed a decision, perhaps the problem or issue facing us is too ill-defined, or maybe a looming deadline is just too far in the future for us to care. But then the deadline comes near, or circumstances change, and a decision must be made right now. Malcolm Gladwell (in his book Blink) calls this thin-slicing, though his use of the term refers specifically to those situations where the person making a decision has very little time to make it. However, for the point I'm trying to make, I'd like to relax this last condition; i.e., I am interested in the "I need to make a decision now" process that allows the decision-maker time to reflect on her decision. Yes, a decision needs to be made (today, and not tomorrow, or next week), but you don't need to "thin slice" your response; rather, give the issue some thought - or take a "reflective slice" - and temper it with intuition. Now, what do you decide to do?

My (hardly original) hypothesis is that what we decide to do under these circumstances tells us a lot about who we really are (stripped of all the usual encrusted layers of decisions past and pending). In the context of photography, the problem is: "OK, Andy, you haven't been out with a camera for a while, and now you have an hour or so to prowl around, where do you go and what do you photograph?" My claim is that what I naturally - intuitively - train my camera's lens on says everything about me as a photographer (and about my creative process) that needs - and/or is ultimately worth - saying.

Paradoxically, the deepest insights come from moments of decision that follow long periods of inactivity. For it is only after we have not done photography for a while that the photography most important to us is best revealed. Immersed (as I usually am) in multiple simultaneous ongoing projects, the day-to-day (and shot-to-shot) decisions collectively sculpt only a fleeting image of a particular period of my creative process, as defined by the needs of specific projects; but they do not easily reveal fundamental truths about me as a photographer. While I may discover details about "what I am doing" by paying attention to what I am doing when "I am doing photography" (at times when I am immersed in doing it), I can only discover the truth that underlies all of my photography (perhaps my entire creative process) by paying attention to what I turn my attention to first after not having done photography for a while. It is only after not doing photography that our attention is naturally and strongly drawn first to what matters most deeply; not subject to the vagaries of whatever projects we have just finished or are next on our agenda.

Look at the first photographs you take after dusting off your camera. What do they say? Wherein lies their true meaning? Most likely it is to be found in what the photograph - as a whole - is about. The details matter little; indeed, because of the inevitable build-up of aesthetic rust, the details are just as likely to obscure the intended meaning as illuminate it. In Zen-like fashion, the time during which a photographer - who may normally be obsessed with rendering the tiniest of details in an image just so - is unable to focus on detail, is actually the best time for achieving the deepest clarity of vision.

And so I discovered (or relearned) a truth I've known for as long as I've been a photographer; perhaps longer, since photography is but another word for "seeing with a camera," and I've been "seeing" the world at least a few years longer ;-) To whit, after months of relative creative inactivity, my attention is first drawn to quiet, simple scenes in familiar locations in local parks; and my eye to humble uncluttered rhythms of basic shapes and tones. Though I will undoubtedly soon resume my journey towards ever-deeper abstractions in subject matter and imagery, I know that my creative heart yearns for nothing so deeply as glimpses of a simple sudden stillness.

Quiet Mind

"Learn to be silent.

Let your quiet mind

listen and absorb."

- Pythagoras

“Only in quiet waters things

mirror themselves undistorted.

Only in a quiet mind is

adequate perception

of the world.”

- Hans Margolius

Aphorisms on ethics (1955)

Words, Signs, Stories

"The universe is made of stories, not atoms." — Muriel Rukeyser Poet (1913 - 1980) "Every phenomenon of nature was a word; the sign, symbol and pledge of a new, mysterious, inexpressible but all the more intimate union, participation and community of divine energies and ideas." — Johann G. Hamann Philosopher (1730 - 1788 )

Networks, Processes, and Self-Creation

Autopoiesis = Self-Creation
(from Greek auto = “self” and poiesis = “creation)

"… a network of mutually interacting processes that
continuously both create, and sustain, components that
regenerate the network of processes that produce them.

There is a constant and intimate contact among the
things that coexist and coevolve in the universe,
a sharing of bonds and messages that
makes reality into a stupendous
network of interaction and communication.”

— Ervin Laszlo
Philosopher / Systems Theorist (1932 - )