My online journal where I share my interests in photography, nature, coffee life, journaling, fountain pens, bicycling, spirituality and asking deep questions.
I don’t know about other people’s cameras. Mine is a thing I had cobbled up, it holds together with tape and is always losing parts. All I need to set is the distance and that other thing—what do you call that other thing?
Mario Giacomelli
“Everybody needs beauty as well as bread, places to play in and pray in, where nature may heal and give strength to body and soul.”
John Muir
Drove to the Arapaho Bend Natural Area. Sun had just set. No wind. A subtle pink color in the clouds to the north. Walked to the edge of the reservoir and setup my tripod. Waited and watched. I was given the gift of this moment. Just what I needed. Beauty does that.
Above the mountains
the geese turn into
the light againPainting their
black silhouettes
on an open sky.Sometimes everything
has to be
inscribed across
the heavensso you can find
the one line
already written
inside you.Sometimes it takes
a great sky
to find thatfirst, bright
and indescribable
wedge of freedom
in your own heart.Sometimes with
the bones of the black
sticks left when the fire
has gone outsomeone has written
something new
in the ashes of your life.You are not leaving.
David Whyte
Even as the light fades quickly now,
you are arriving.
As David Whyte’s poem suggests I arrived in time for the sunset offered by Nature.
Some of my photographs have always been a mystery to me in terms of how I arrived at them. Even with the technical ability to produce fine prints, I am hard put to know how it happens, yet unless technique and materials are seriously investigated and experienced, I see that moving statements are seldom made. The process of photography ever invites me. I hope never to lose this feeling. At times I make photographs for the sheer magic of its process, and the good feeling about the very stuff needed: light, chemical combinations, some imperceptible forces at work behind the scene. I am part of the drama which takes the guise of photography.
Paul Caponigro
I shoot very few vertical images, but with all these wide open spaces, shooting horizontal may be the preferred format. Maybe I need to look at that, take more time before pressing the shutter. Anyway, here’s a slideshow of a few vertical images over the past 18 years, all cropped to 8 x 10.
“The spiritual life, in other words, is not achieved by denying one part of life for the sake of another. The spiritual life is achieved only by listening to all of life and learning to respond to each of its dimensions wholly and with integrity.”
Joan D. Chittister
Life is all about change. For me it’s been those transformations from within, rather than my effort to be different, that really alter my life. I can only speak for myself but these transformations are from a life rooted with quiet prayer, meditation, solitude, detachment and a renewed connection with all of creation. My prayers are no longer pleading for help but ones of gratitude and questioning, mostly without words. Meditation teaches me to stay present and awake. Each of these has lead me to what I understand is a contemplative life. I enjoy the new eyes and voice I have. I seem to see all of creation with a new pair of glasses. My voice now includes writing, both prose and poetry. The only church I attend is in nature, which has no walls, places such as the Riverbend Ponds along Prospect Road. I like this spiritual life.
“I wish it need not have happened in my time,” said Frodo.
J.R.R. Tolkien
“So do I,” said Gandalf, “and so do all who live to see such times. But that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”
Took this image last Thursday evening on Larimer County Rd. 19. Needed to get out of the condo so I decided to spend my time given to me by being open for a sunset image. I just knew there had to be one…
“It is the duty of the human understanding to understand that there are things which it cannot understand…”
Søren Kierkegaard
We are a culture that does not want to admit or even think we don’t understand. I’m becoming much more comfortable with setting aside my pride and say, “I don’t understand.” And there are those moments when I must pause and question myself “…what if what I think I think I know, ain’t so.” Then go for a meditative walk with my camera and just take pictures.