March 19th, 2015

I called my recent book, "Images and Meditations."  What I've been reading lately supports much of what I included there for meditation, and so today, no image, just some quotations (meditations) from Fenton Johnson's essay "Going it alone  The dignity and challenge of solitude" in Harper's:


"The word 'restraint' implies the asking of an essential question, one that is . . . antithetical both to capitalism and science as we practice them:  Because we can do something, must we do it?


What . . . joys and sorrows can solitude offer?  
I hear the answer in this quiet room; I see it in the angle of the autumn sun . . . To live for the changing of the light seems adequate reward.


I . . . imagined  a world in which the people of compassion have reclaimed the institutions and the language of compassion--words like holy, sacred, sacrifice, divine, grace, reverence, God--words that have been handed over to demagogues."


And he quotes Emily Dickinson:  "I find ecstasy in living--the mere sense of living is enough."


And he calls for a new vision "to counter the call to unrestrained consumption that is trotted before us at every hour of every day in every popular medium."


He concludes, "what love are we solitaries mute witnesses to?  The omnipresence of great aloneness, the infinite possibilities of no duality, no separation between you and me, between the speaker and the spoken to, the dancer and his dance, the writer and her reader, the people and our earth."


Many of themes resonate strongly with my own thinking and experience, including what I find when I am making images with my camera, so I offer them for others for their consideration and reflection.