October 04th, 2017

No image today; I need to change how I see the world around me or need to see a different part of that world.  Santa Fe would have helped, and so would have Key West.  Unfortunately, both of those journeys were cancelled.  So I am at the usual place:  looking out my window or walking by the bay or gulf:  while I can often see something there to reflect on in an image, recently my vision of them has grown cold.  I've looked back through earlier work, but that all feels stale and cold to me too.  I don't know when I will awaken from this "visual slumber."  
Meanwhile, I have found a piece of prose that seems to me to be one way to move beyond what I wrote yesterday.  It is probably only part of an answer to my question there, but it seems right to me as a part of a path forward.  Andrew Harvey wrote:
"there was an exhibition of Japanese and Chinese paintings by Buddhist masters . . .of which I can remember only one painting.  It was of a butterfly about to alight on an open flower . . . I realised that what moved me was not merely the dazzling and delicate artistry of the work, but the ​attitude of clear joy, of tender, precise and unselfconscious wonder at things . . ."  (italics added)  It's that last part that  sometimes resonates so strongly with me as I roam through the inanity and insanity of our time.  An attitude of joy and unselfconscious wonder at things (while perhaps and particularly difficult to know in this time and place) can awaken hope—something we always need in one way or another. And it usually takes quiet and solitude to see and feel what Harvey wrote about here.  More I cannot wish us all.