Speaking of Greater Forces

"Mountains seem to answer an increasing imaginative need in the West. More and more people are discovering a desire for them, and a powerful solace in them. At bottom, mountains, like all wildernesses, challenge our complacent conviction - so easy to lapse into - that the world has been made for humans by humans. Most of us exist for most of the time in worlds which are humanly arranged, themed and controlled. One forgets that there are environments which do not respond to the flick of a switch or the twist of a dial, and which have their own rhythms and orders of existence. Mountains correct this amnesia. By speaking of greater forces than we can possibly invoke, and by confronting us with greater spans of time than we can possibly envisage, mountains refute our excessive trust in the man-made. They pose profound questions about our durability and the importance of our schemes. They induce, I suppose, a modesty in us."

-  Robert Macfarlane (1976 - )

Mountains of the Mind: Adventures in Reaching the Summit

Seashore of the Mind

"Sit in reverie

and watch the

changing color of

the waves that break

upon the idle

seashore of the mind."

- Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (1807 - 1882)

Mutual Interdependece

"The realm of yin and yang is the life where we oppose one thing against the other: good against bad, up against down, heaven against earth, this against that, self against other, form against emptiness, speech against silence. This is not a matter that exists in the realm of yin and yang points to the place where there’s a merging of opposites. In the Identity of Relative and Absolute we chant: 'Within light there is darkness but do not try to understand that darkness. Within darkness there is light, but do not look for that light.' Light and darkness are opposites, yet each one of them contains the other. They’re mutually arising and interdependent. There’s no separation between them. We tend to see them as separate, but they’re not... form is emptiness, emptiness is form, form is exactly emptiness, emptiness exactly form. Can it be any more specific and clear than that?"

- John Daido Loori (1931 - 2009)

Bringing It to Life

Life is a Secret

"The deeper we look into nature, the more we recognize that it is full of life, and the more profoundly we know that all life is a secret and that we are united with all life that is in nature. Man can no longer live his life for himself alone. We realize that all life is valuable and that we are united to all this life.  From this knowledge comes our spiritual relationship with the universe."

- Albert Schweitzer (1875-1965)

Limit of Our Sight

"Life is eternal,

love is immortal

and death is only a horizon.
Life is eternal as we

move into the light
and the horizon is nothing
save the limit of our sight."

- Carly Simon

Dream Before the Awakening

"It is possible to believe

that all the past is but

the beginning of a beginning,

and that all that is and

has been is but the

twilight of the dawn.

It is possible to believe

that all the human mind

has ever accomplished is

but the dream

before the awakening."

- H. G. Wells (1866 - 1946)

Receiving the World

"Paradoxical as it may seem,

the purposeful life has no content,

no point. It hurries on and on,

and misses everything. Not hurrying,

the purposeless life misses nothing,

for it is only when there is

no goal and no rush that

the human senses are

fully open to receive the world."

- Alan Watts

(1915 - 1973)

Essential Unity of the World

"We try to realize the

essential unity of the world

with the conscious soul of man;

we learn to perceive

the unity held together

by the one Eternal Spirit,

whose power creates the earth,

the sky, and the stars,

and at the same time

irradiates our mind."

- Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941)

Experiencing Eternity

"When you realize that eternity

is right here now,

that it is within your possibility

to experience the eternity of

your own truth and being,

then you grasp the following:

That which you are

was never born

and will never die."

- Joseph Campbell (1904 - 1987)

Thou Art That: Transforming Religious Metaphor

Skye: Not even a Thousand Pictures

"Use a picture.

It's worth a thousand words."

- Arthur Brisbane (1864 - 1936)

(This aphorism is usually ascribed to an old Chinese proverb,
although it has been traced to an instructional talk given by Brisbane
to the Syracuse Advertising Men's Club in 1911)

I have no deeper words of wisdom to impart in regard to this photo than to simply echo Brisbane's admonition. I could say that it was a photo taken at Trumpan (Skye, Scotland at some precise lat/long coordinate), on July 4, 2016 at 10:13 local time (as one might guess, the sun sets very late on Skye in the summer), looking to the north west toward the isle of Harris, and that the ambient temperature was hovering near a comfortably cool 54 deg F. I could write some words to convey a sense of the mysteriously "dynamic stillness" that the slowly dwindling light infused the "air" with. I could wax poetic, and conjure some lines to describe the forms and colors of the evanescent clouds that so transfixed my wife's and my attention with their phantasmagorical - mystical - undulations. I could even evoke the faint, but soft accompanying symphony of mooohs and baaaas of Skye's - and Trumpan's - omnipresent cows and sheep, now cloaked by darkness, to provide a (dare I say it: synesthetic) dimension to the experience of seeing a sunset from this particular spot in space and time on our planet.

But none of these incantations come close to matching the power of a simple "picture." And yet, even the picture is inept (as would be any other I could insert in its place), and woefully inadequate to express the feeling of what it was like to be actually like being there in that moment, a short walk away from our little rented cottage, a warm meal in our bellies, kids safely by our side (though more engrossed in their flashlight-lit books than the aesthetic wonders surrounding them), knowing there are two full weeks still awaiting us on our vacation, looking out into the distance, just meditating on, and enjoying, the simple beauty spread before us.

"Use a picture; it's worth a thousand words" - yes, all true - but even a thousand pictures will fall far short of conveying what it is really like to experience the preternatural riches of Skye.

Interior of the Soul

"There is one spectacle grander than the sea,

that is the sky;

there is one spectacle

grander than the sky,

that is the interior of the soul"

- Victor Hugo (1802 - 1885)

Skye: Secret Eyes

"In a few moments he came into the core of himself, where he was alone, and felt strangely companioned, not by anyone or anything, but by himself. The rejected self found refuge here, not a cowed refuge, but somehow a wandering ease; as if it were indestructible, and had its own final pride, its own secret eyes.

That's the way it went...the way. No one could see the end of the way, but of the way itself, in insight, in understanding, there could be no doubt. For man could experience that, and know its relief, and know its strange extended gladness. That was the beginning... if the lure of transcendence, of timeless or immortal implication, came around, pay no great attention, but move from one step to the next, and look at this face and stay with that... and let what would happen in the place where happenings and boundaries were."

- Neil M Gunn (1891-1973)

Postscript: Although I rarely include people in my photographs (I can echo Ansel Adams' retort to the criticism that he never took pictures of people: "Well, that's not my style!"), I have a fondness for capturing my wife in Friedrich-like poses whenever we travel. In this instance, while I was bent over my tripod looking for something interesting to shoot at my feet on a beach somewhere on Skye, I noticed how my wife's small solitary figure dwarfed - yet mysteriously, somehow also perfectly balanced - the spectacularly expansive and desolate, landscape we were immersed in. Micro and macro, momentarily fused into a state of perfect boundary-less clarity.

Skye: Suffused with Wonder

"But it's the next and final step that the difficult one - and really quite impossible to describe because of its unique nature... In the end thought itself gets choked and the mind becomes a void. It's at this point that the miracle happens, and the void, the void itself, gets lit up: the light spreads, burgeons; it is suffused with wonder, delight, a miraculous sense of freedom."

- Neil M Gunn (1891-1973)

As I've mentioned repeatedly on these pages since my return from last month's trip to the wondrous Isle-of-Skye in Scotland, Skye is a paradoxical mix of majestic landscapes, seascapes, and clouds - that are almost too overwhelming in their cosmic scale and intensity to appreciate fully - and a sublime timeless stillness that permeates and infuses even the smallest elements with an transcendent ethereal glow, elevating the merely physical into a spiritual dimension.

There are some who believe that "reality" is but a thin - mostly illusory - veil separating one invisible realm, that defines the "seer," from another, that defines what the seer "sees" (without diving into deeper ouroborian realities!)  Nowhere else does that veil seem quite as thin as when it is rendered momentarily visible on Skye. 

Scotland, Skye, and Schueler

"I wasn't sure if it was a place or a mood or what it was, but there was something I was looking for .... As I approached the sea near Mallaig and the Sound of Sleat I could see these massive forms like the Isle of Eigg and the southern tip of Skye and Rhum, and I could see these things sort of glowering in this kind of wild light that took place that day and the Geiger counter just went berserk. I'll never forget the excitement."

- Jon Schueler (1916 - 1992)

The Sound of Sleat: A Painter's Life

Those were words written down by abstract artist Jon Schueler after arriving in the remote fishing village of Mallaig in western Scotland in 1957, overlooking the Sound of Sleat and toward the isle of Skye. Except for the time and specific place (in my case, in 2009 during my wife's and my first trip to Kyleakin, Skye, and, more recently, last month, as our whole family arrived in tow to Trumpan, Skye - the northern part of Skye's "second finger" - including our two teenage boys), I could use Schueler's words to describe my own reaction to the preternatural splendor of Skye's landscapes and skies. It is a wondrous place that somehow exists both inside and outside of time; where shapes, textures, and colors appear, and disappear, fleetingly and constantly, that one swears have never before appeared anywhere else on earth; where so much Wagnerian-scale drama unfolds in its undulating land, sea, and cloudscapes during even that ephemeral instant between involuntary blinks of an eye, that one's aesthetic senses are delighted and overwhelmed. Oh, but what a magnificent symphony!

Over the next few weeks, I will be posting images as I "develop" them, and that I somehow (inexplicably) managed to capture in between slack-jawed exclamations of "Ooh!" and "Ahhh" and the occasional, "Just extraordinary!"; as Skye sporadically allowed hints of its ineffable mystery and beauty to enter my camera's lens and viewfinder.

Again, I cannot improve upon Shueler's own words:

"When I speak of nature, I speak of the sky, because the sky has become all of nature to me. And when I think of the sky, I think of the Scottish sky over Mallaig. It isn't that I think of it that nationally, really, but that I studied the Mallaig sky so intently, and I found its convulsive movement and change and drama such a concentration of activity that it became all skies and even the idea of all nature to me. It's as if one could see from day to day the drama of all skies and of all nature in all times speeded up and compressed. I knew that the whole thing was there. Time was there and motion was there - lands forming, seas disappearing, worlds fragmenting, colors emerging or giving birth to burning shapes, mountain snows showing emerald green; or paused solid still when gales stopped suddenly and the skies were clear again after long days of howling sound and rain or snow beating horizontal from the sky."

Perhaps Skye's deepest mystery, is how - despite the incessant drama of all of its basic forms, and unending froth of light and shadow - there is a deep, deep, spiritually infused fantastical quiet that envelops the senses (when the moment is right and Skye has chosen to briefly reveal that side of herself).

One's Real Self

"As the self is borne away, as the central ego or clot thins, so is the self more profoundly and centrally enriched. This is a common experience. It happens. The wording, the analogy, may be matter for debate. There is no doubt about the happening, about the feeling, the apprehension, that in those minutes one was with one's real self, and also with that which was beyond the real self but yet of which the real self was part...

...In that extraordinary moment when one becomes aware of oneself, self-aware, it is exactly as if there was an over-self seeing the ordinary self, and this creates a sort of amplitude of being in which there is light, and delight, and understanding. The 'first self' and the 'second self' (or, above, the ordinary and the overself) are now one, and second containing the first within its circle, which can - and generally does - expand outwards with a wonderful sense of freedom, or may narrow upon the first self with an understanding that has its own clear affection, a seeing that comprehends the whole, the unity and accepts within a - or the - region of ultimate reality."

- Neil M Gunn (1891-1973)

Postscript 1: The image above was captured in 2009 during a trip my wife and I took to Scotland, which is where we will again be for the next three weeks or so (mostly on the Isle of Skye). So, for those of you kind enough to frequent these pages every now and then, please rest assured that the apparent dearth of images over the interim means only that this humble blog's author is out capturing new images to post in the weeks to come.

Postscript 2: As a parting gift (at least to those of you with iPhones;-) here are links to a selection of my Synesthetic Landscape series resized as "screen backgrounds" for 4.7 inch (resolution = 1334 by 750) and 5.5 inch (resolution = 1920 by 1080) iPhones. 

Mystery

"There is nothing in the world

that is not mysterious,

but the mystery is more evident

in certain things than in others:

in the sea,

in the eyes of the elders,

in the color yellow,

and in music."

- Jorge Luis Borges (1896 - 1986)

Hearing Through the Eyes

“At the root of creativity is an impulse to understand, to make sense of random and often unrelated details. For me, photography provides an intersection of time, space, light, and emotional stance. One needs to be still enough, observant enough, and aware enough to recognize the life of the materials, to be able to ‘hear through the eyes’.” 

- Paul Caponigro (1932 - )

Light and Peace

"Thus Gotama [Buddha] walked toward

the town to gather alms,

and the two samanas recognized him

solely by the perfection of his repose,

by the calmness of his figure,

in which there was no trace of seeking,

desiring, imitating, or striving,

only light and peace."

- Hermann Hesse (1877 - 1962)

Siddhartha

Constituent Parts

"The entire range of living matter on Earth from whales to viruses and from oaks to algae could be regarded as constituting a single living entity capable of maintaining the Earth's atmosphere to suit its overall needs and endowed with faculties and powers far beyond those of its constituent parts."

- James Lovelock (1919 - )

Geological Time

"The formation in geological time of the human body by the laws of physics (or any other laws of similar nature), starting from a random distribution of elementary particles and the field is as unlikely as the separation of the atmosphere into its components. The complexity of the living things has to be present within the material [from which they are derived] or in the laws [governing their formation]."

- Kurt Godel (1906 - 1978)