We had a bit of snow last week, and I was out with my camera with my iPod on, making exposures in the fresh morning. After some uncannily good photographing-in-the-snow music, Bill Frisell, shuffle play on the ipod gave me a talk by Jack Kornfield. That, too was just right. He was talking about the way things are, in both mind and the world: Things arise, and then they go away. There is space, and then there is something happening in it or appearing in it, and then there is just space again.

When I was young, a real influence on my work, among many others, was Wassily Kandinsky. In some ways it might be hard to see any relationship in this image, and it’s something that only clicked for me when looking at his paintings in the Guggenheim in about 2005: his paintings are like mind. There is space, gap, peace, and then there is stuff happening within that — maybe pretty wild. Probably pretty wild and full of energy at times. There is always some silence around any noise. I thought, “Those paintings are like meditating!” I don’t know if Kandinsky ever meditated as such, but it seems to me he knew about mind and energy.

Way back, just starting with photography, I really wanted my photos to be infused with the energy of the world, and there was the challenge to make that happen. I wanted the energy, but I didn’t understand about the dance between energy and space. I’ve always understood that there was some mysterious resonance between the way things appear, the way we feel, and that a two dimensional surface could be an interface to that resonance. That was the magic I wanted to tap into, to work that interface.

Now I think of it more as Chogyam Trungpa might describe it: Ordinary Magic. It’s the most ordinary thing in the world. And deeply magical. Our minds work this way, and the world works this way, and we are all mixed up together in it. It just goes along, the most ordinary thing, and the most profound thing.

This photo was not made in the new snow last week, but my experience out in it, and the audio track, made me think of this image to post. The funny thing was that I was late for something when I stopped to expose this image a few years ago, my life moving wildly along the road, stopping for a stolen moment to trip the shutter. The other morning, taking time and enjoying some peace, I don’t think I got any photos with quite this quality. It’s funny, we can only be in the world as it presents itself, appreciate it as we can. Like the stream above, like the energy in a Kandinsky painting, like our minds and life, things arise, and then they change just like our thoughts and moods. There is stuff happening, and there is also a context for that, a bigger frame.

It’s really too bad to post this image so small. There’s all kinds of nice texture in the snow that gets lost, and the patterns of the shadows seem to get lost in jpeg compression artifacts, even though this is saved at a decent quality. Since I can’t post the whole image at a decent size, here is a detail, below:

This exposure was made a few hundred sheets of film later than last week’s post, in the winter of 1981-82. I used to spend time in this gorge with the view camera and tripod quite a bit in those days. It’s one of the most magical places I know of within a short drive of my house. Still, in spite of that, I hadn’t been there for years and years. My beloved and I took a snowshoe and camera walk there this year, reminding me of the old film, and I scanned this sheet.
Here is an exposure made in nearly the same spot in the summer.
I’m going to try to be disciplined and scan good old film and try not to get distracted by new work. However I’m nothing if not distractible. Sometimes a virtue; I wouldn’t be a photographer if the world didn’t pull at me in this way.
Today is an especially good day to post this, with heavy snow falling all day, about an inch per hour for most of the day. I think there are some large boulders and a frozen cliff that look quite a bit like this today, and probably nobody there to see it.
Once I saw a great horned owl fly through this gorge at dusk. I’ve never encountered another person there, though sometimes there are footprints in the snow.