Meditation

Looking deeply, in love with awareness itself. And what is this awareness that exists beyond any idea of a self? How to nurture it, cultivate it? Meditation helps, and I think photography is good too.

I've meditated for all of my adult life (with a few breaks) -- from age 14 -- and very early in my photography I noticed that there was of course an interplay between meditation and the process of seeing and making photographs. As life and these practices go along, it becomes more and more absurd to make distinctions between the two. In some sense this is an artificial distinction here, as I consider most of my photographs to reflect my "good eye" and years of development of my contemplative practices. They are all about looking deeply.

In addition to practicing sitting meditation, I've also practiced Tai Chi for most of my adult life, for the last 10 years pretty seriously. Besides being another form of "meditation in action," practicing Tai Chi outdoors in the warmer months with a camera nearby provides me with a time of literally extending my meditation practice into photography. Many of my water photos are made in breaks while practicing Tai Chi near some body of water or another. As I practice I start to see things differently.

The Tibetan meditation master and gifted teacher, Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche brought photography into his Shambhala teachings on meditation and dharma practice under the name Miksang; photography as well as Ichibana flower arrangement and calligraphy, and other forms became part of the path of waking up in his sangha. I was very lucky to have encountered Trungpa Rinpoche's work early in my life, and I'm very lucky to practice with a local Shambhala center (White River Junction) and also to live near Karme Choling in Vermont.

Early on my photography was based more on some kind of clinging: attempting to grab, or capture, or freeze a moment. Now it's very different. Rather than trying to "capture" reality, I'm helping to liberate it in a new form. I'm helping it to help me wake up, and hopefully I'm helping you too. Images are made with full awareness that the light, the frost, snow, trees, leaves, style, fashion, and buildings are ephemeral. The world is like a fireworks display, each moment we freeze an image of the world into something solid in our minds, while the world moves on, flashes, disolves. Each of my images represents a self-existing moment of light and form that passed, quickly or slowly.

From Emptiness comes this: