 "Just as the mystic must dare to leap into divine darkness, the photographer must also take a leap of hope. There is first the choice of subject, and then follow decisions of angle and light, but in the end when he clicks the camera's shutter, he is not absolutely certain of the results. He can only hope he has captured the moment's beauty. The physical and the camera's eye come together: eye, camera and object become one." Robert Waldron
 Japanese prints are an inspiration; this is my version of such a print.
Ruminations: I've been reading about Gary Snyder and his book, Mountains and Rivers without End. Snyder is much influenced by Zen and its emphasis on meditation which involves at least purposeful attention to the world around us. This all reminded me of a Zen story (I rather freely interpret it here): a Zen master said "before I started on a spiritual path, I saw mountains as just mountains and rivers as just rivers. When I had started on the path, mountains were no longer just mountains and rivers were no longer just rivers. When I achieved peace, again I saw mountains as mountains and rivers as rivers." This seems to me to be like something T. S. Eliot wrote in his poem, Little Gidding: "We should not cease from exploration And the end of all our exploring Will be to arrive where we started And know the place for the first time." Here are some mountains and rivers to be explored and to be seen: Triple falls in North Carolina Frenchman Coulee in Washington State
Recently, in looking again at images I've made over the last dozen years, I realized how many have water (rivers, the sea, lakes) as a focus. This led me to wonder why this is so (why does water speak so much more to me than other subjects), and so I have been looking to see just what else I have used as a focus of attention in my images. In my last post, I began to show some of these other images, and I am going to continue along that way for a while.   These two images represent to me two intertwining experiences of human existence: impermanence and incessant change, and then constancy and persistence. The first is a meadow in a mountain valley in North Carolina, the second are Wanapum petroglyphs in the Gingko Petrified Forest State Park in Washington state.
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