Category Archives: Musings

Nothing Whatsoever, But Anything Can Arise

Photography and meditation — and art, aesthetics, and seeing altogether as an intersection with meditation keeps coming up in my thoughts. So one might wonder, “What is the aesthetic of meditation? The vision? What is the substance of meditation in this regard?”

None. No substance. Nothing whatsoever.

It’s interesting that different Buddhist cultures have evolved their own aesthetic within their dharma culture — dharma art — which is almost always beautiful and evocative. The interesting thing is how different that art is from culture to culture, even as the practice itself may not be all that different at its core. It’s not that doing a particular meditation practice leads, nor should it lead, to a specific state of mind that creates a vision.

To offer one contrast, Zen art tends to be quite spare and open, while Tibetan Buddhist art is over-the-top vivid. It is true that vajrayana practice in the Tibetan tradition is based on experiencing vividness through the senses, while Zen practice — from the little I know of it — does not emphasize sensory vividness during sitting practice. Still, generally eyes are open during meditation in both traditions, and a root in the Mahayana gives both Zen and Tibetan practice many similarities in terms of the view.

I won’t go through all Buddhist traditions and compare aesthetics, because that isn’t the point here. The point is that the practice is not creating a solid state of mind or a solid material vision, but rather an empty space, an experience of space, from which possibilities may arise. As photographers, as artists, as practitioners, as humans, we are enriched when we can let experience and phenomenon arise without fixation or aversion, without clinging or aggression — and without the dullness of ignorance.

That approach to experience may in fact influence the art quite a bit.

The title of this page is a quote my teacher likes repeat in regard to Dzogchen practice, as he learned it in his Tibetan lineage. The essence of the experience is nothing at all, but anything may arise — and you can bet something will. This is echoed by meditation instruction from a very different teacher in a different tradition and a country distant from Tibet: Ajahn Chah said something like, “Sit in a chair in the middle of an empty room. See who comes to visit.”

As a photographer I can keep a camera handy to interpret the changing dance of phenomena and light in front of the lens. That is tricky enough. As a human experiencing life in general it is a little trickier, but the same thing, to stay open to whatever arises and let it pass without aggression or clinging, aware that everything changes like the weather and passes through a bigger space like clouds in the sky.

A bit more on meditation and photography

Orange Begonias through screen in rain

I’ve written about meditation and photography some, maybe too much. I keep trying to make things clearer, but I’m afraid there may be misunderstandings. There are certainly misunderstandings, but I hope they at least don’t get worse on account of me. Probably, at times, I’m making things worse. And of course I am a mere practitioner, so if you are interested in how the mind works and what is going on with meditation, I encourage you to seek out a qualified meditation teacher. (I’d strongly suggest a Buddhist teacher, even if you are uninterested in Buddhist trappings or notions. The 2500 year tradition provides a detailed map of the terrain of working with the mind rather than a mere technique, as you will get in a a secular approach).

First, meditation is its own practice, a kind of not-doing, mostly, done on a cushion or a chair. There are many approaches to it, and some are perhaps more active than others, whether on that cushion or while actually doing something. But the important point is that basis of it is working with mind and awareness itself, directly, and not dressing that up or confusing it with some worldly or materialistic pursuit. Photography, of course, is different. You are doing something, often with a different motivation than purely working with mind.

So, this relates to photography in a couple of ways I’m aware of. Meditation, if one works with it consistently over time, may have some impact on our awareness, clarifying our perception. This could also include perception of our emotional world, so the resonances in photography, what we may feel as a result of a made image, may become clearer as well. We may see better, and we may feel more. Less numbness means more engagement.

Then it goes the other way as well, with photography having its own impacts on our vision, awareness, and emotional development. This is where the connection with meditation gets confusing to many, as well as to me sometimes. There is an aspect to practicing photography that puts us in touch with opening our awareness of the world and also the emotional realm — how we resonate with the world. This can function and feel a lot like meditation. I think if done with awareness of what’s going on, there can be something like meditation going on in the practice of photography — sometimes.

I think there is a big difference in some ways that are important. Meditation, at least Buddhist meditation, is non-material, not goal-oriinented. It is a pure practice. As such, it is extremely radical and transforming, a dissolving force applied to the concept of selfish-self and ego altogether. It’s important for the meditation to be pure that way, not done with what Suzuki Roshi calls “gaining idea.”

Photography is quite different. As a photographer, we want to make “our own” good image. In some way this effort is attached to our ego. There may be something pure in our desire to see and perceive and do the work to increase our awareness and resonance and openness. There may also be something that is — from a Buddhist perspective and from the perspective of reducing ego-clinging — sometimes less productive in this regard.

Personally I feel my own photography has improved a lot as I have done a lot of meditation and studied with amazing Buddhist teachers over the last several years, but that’s just a side-effect, not why I meditate. To the extent that my photos are “Buddhist, meditative photos” I hope any such characterization also finds them to be radical, intense, cutting through — not some kind of new-agey mellow peaceful thing. My intent is more to cut through the solidity of our mis-perception, which is a radical act. Nor is the transformation of my mind the sole object of my photography, though it is there. Photography and meditation are different, but they dovetail.

One thing that is interesting to me and important to point out: most of what we consider the great masters, contemporary and historical, were not meditators. Look at a photo by (in no particular order) Elliot Erwitt, Paul Caponigro, Edward Weston, Paul Strand, Fan Ho, Saul Leiter, Ansel Adams, Andre Kertesz, Cartier-Bresson and so many others — looking at their best work one should gasp and wonder “how did they see so well?!” And that is a mystery. They worked and worked, practiced a lot of photography, embraced art as a whole, lived life deeply and in the end it showed in their work. That gasp we do, “How did they see so well?” might be part of that mysterious connection we might make between meditation and photography, but in this case it is not related to meditation as such.

New Ice With Brush Stroke Texture, 2017

This photo looks like I somehow enhanced it to create a painting appearance, especially through the middle of the print and on the left, but that is how the ice looked. I just saw it that way through the lens.

For a larger view or to buy a print, go to this photo’s page

Practice helps us remember what we know, when we are in other situations. This goes for practicing photography, and the same for my meditation practice and dharma studies. It’s hard to practice enough, but it helps if I do. The point isn’t just so one can best inhabit the moment when things are going well, but also when things are going badly.

What is the practice? What helps? Well, keeping what we might call The View. Which is to say an understanding of how reality works. It turns out that photography is a lot like meditation in a lot of ways. Probably meditation is the more important practice, but it’s also interesting to have an action that manifests the same wisdom that we mostly learn through non-action. The active version helps spread the view into life. Then there is mindfulness. Attention. Cultivating, making better and better friends with awareness. Again, this cuts both ways. Sometimes with feet in the fire, it just makes it more intense. But then, strangely, sometimes it helps. It helps to feel the fire. It helps, in photography, to be able to wait until the situation is one to work with.

As a photographer, we are open to experience. Shape, form, light, and other events manifest in various ways, and we make an exposure through a lens. Usually that manifestation is temporary. The exact circumstance and light will not occur again. Our job is to experience and recognize the moment and then keep it together to do what we need to get an exposure to work through the lens. Sometimes nothing much is happening that seems worth photographing, and other times it’s hard to keep up with it. Sometimes, from a photographer’s perspective, the world in front of the lens is lousy, and sometimes fantastic.

Al our life is the same. It comes together in a way that will please us from some perspective; then sometimes the way it comes together is not pleasing, useful, or interesting from our personal perspective. Of course the perspective that finds the world pleasing, or not pleasing, is as temporary as other manifestations. If we are hungry, food is beautiful. If we are overstuffed, it can be repulsive. The world changes, perspective changes, but there is always a relationship between our current perspective, arising and changing, and the outer world, manifesting and changing.

Usually the appearance of new ice on my pond is interesting and pleasing to me as a photographer, plenty of chance for interesting texture, color, abstraction. I know it will be gone soon, melting by noon, or else settling into a more solid and boring form as it becomes an enduring sheet.

I used to try for deep depth of field a lot in this kind of photography, but I am loosening up quite a bit, mostly starting last year. This was exposed through a medium long old Zeiss prime lens with amazing sharpness and also a beautiful quality to the blur when out of focus at a medium aperture.

Early Breakfast, Jersey Shore Diner 2016 & More Saul Leiter Musings…

I think generally a photographer’s vision might stay somewhat “true” but of course it will also change and develop over years. It’s an interesting question for someone like me, a Buddhist, one who perceives the notion of a steady and enduring “self” as an illusion, a process with no real solidity. But some threads of continuity continue; things fall apart and then something comes back together, possibly with some relation to the momentum before. It’s hard to say what “my” vision is, except it’s whatever I do, how what I do in one season might relate to what I did in past seasons.

This photo was exposed in the summer of 2016, at a time when various influences were at play and new flavors were coming into my work. I started using manual focus lenses much more — something I hadn’t done since the late 1990s. This period was different from my early photography though. I started working with the lenses much more rigorously, exploring their character through the range of apertures, getting to know the quirks of their out of focus rendering as well as the qualities of their sharpness. In short I can say I want lenses that are very sharp where they are sharp, and show the not-in-focus areas beautifully. But there is a lot more to it than that. Each (prime) lens has quite a bit of personality in different situations and at different apertures, so I work with that as I get to know it. It changes my eye a bit.

This image used a lens that was not a vintage lens, but a vintage-like lens, the Voigtlander 35mm f1.7 Ultron. They market it as a “vintage” lens — but it has modern glass and coatings. It’s quite excellent, with some of my favorite bokeh, and it inspired me a lot that summer and onward in the months after I got it. It surely was a factor in changing and developing my eye.

That summer of 2016 my father’s health was declining quickly and dramatically. Certainly strong emotional shocks, influences that break apart my solidity — as his decline and death did — certainly that kind of thing opens up my vision as well. So this image is very much of that time, a bit of seeing and creating some beauty in some darkness. This image is also of this current time, the continuity, the continued urge to find the light shining through the dark of these times.

So what about Saul Leiter?

I saw the film about him last week: “In No Great Hurry.” I recommend it strongly. I guess the link is that seeing that film encouraged me to pick this image to publish here to some extent. So the funny thing is that as the film showed his images, my wife said, “I can see how he’s been a big influence on you!” I told her, “No!” I hadn’t known about Saul Leiter until I started seeing his images in 2018 in twitter posts by @danielbrami1, who I follow for his excellent taste in art and photography. I immediately appreciated him as a kindred spirit in exploring color, abstraction, and the quality of blur, often choosing longer focal length lenses. One thing we share is an appreciation that the composition, the print, lives as its own forms, colors, textures that have a life of their own independent of a mere subject.

In the film he said a lot of Buddhist-like things. I don’t know if he explored Buddhist thought or meditation. He came from a serious Jewish background. His mother expected him to be a rabbi. The Buddhist teacher Jack Kornfield has joked that without Jews and Catholics, there wouldn’t be many Buddhists in the west. Whatever label one could try to pin on Saul Leiter’s spirituality or artistic approach, I’ve been glad to meet him as an old friend. He died in 2013 in his 80s, so our friendship will continue through the common thread of whatever things each of us found and cultivated as we explored and developed.

Water Lily After Rain, 2018

I may have mentioned, it’s been a busy summer, including some travel and doing a lot of work for the Post Pond photos show in Lyme NH. I used my camera a fair amount, but I didn’t deal with any of the image files at all. I just put them on disk as the summer tore along, and even the initial bifurcation process that determines the backup strategy (for better vs maybe less good images) wasn’t even done. So I hadn’t even backed up about half the summer’s camera work until today. (I need to rework my backup strategy, as any bottleneck in the way of getting it done quickly and regularly it is not OK.)

Going through the images, I found a lot more good images than I remembered. Good to have something to look forward to: sorting them out, bringing them out into the world.

Usually an image that makes it onto the site, into print, goes through a rather long process. I have ways to bounce even moderately good images back into my memory over and over, and I cull out the ones I don’t want to see again. Usually an image needs to haunt me for a while, sometimes to literally enter my dreams. For example one of this summer’s images was in my dreams last night, and so I might work on presenting that one next. Or something might bump into the line ahead of it.

This one though, pop! I saw it, saw it’s potential. (asked my wife, my second eyes, who agreed). It needed a crop to a 4×5 aspect ratio to really work. Tonally, it needed just enough contrast to pop and have the tones and forms create their pattern in a distinctive way, without losing the subtlety of tone. A little tricky, that.

This was exposed through a somewhat legendary vintage manual lens, Olympus OM 50/2, which is not one I would have picked for this exposure. It’s a lens with only a six bladed aperture, which produces some of the most beautiful of lens renderings when it works out, and some of the worst when it doesn’t. Usually it can be very nice wide open but not so nice stopped down past f4. This was stopped down. I was walking around with just the one prime lens on the camera and not a full bag or two. That I didn’t go get another lens shows I didn’t really see the potential of this exposure. But that’s OK.

I just read some interviews with Saul Leiter, a photographer I love more and more, and especially after reading these interviews. In one interview he said he used the lens he had with him (he of course used single focal-length prime lenses), even when he might have preferred another lens, and that is that. It worked out. He said Picasso did it with paint colors as well, using the paint he had, even when he might have picked another color. Saul Leiter and Picasso worked with what they had, turned the constraints into the working method that succeeded. (In Tibetan Buddhism we say that confusion itself is the path, the only path, to wisdom. How could there be another path than the one we walk on?)

And so it is with life: we have our lenses with which we view the world, our colors, our karma, and it’s not always what we would prefer. To some extent we can change the lenses, change what we are working with, but we have to keep working within limitations of our own tendencies, limitations, resources — and the vagaries of the world. The world does what it pleases, and we work with it as best we can. We don’t always like that, but it’s what we’ve got to work with.

Photography is interesting right now, on the day it is clear that a misogynist, drunk, liar, and probable sexual assaulter will be confirmed to the supreme court. Today when the weight of one attack after another on decency, honesty, values, hope for the American system, fairness for women, kindness for all — a day when that hope seems rather dim. Photography keeps me going on days like these, even when its importance seems diminished by the significance of global and national political disasters — things which will increase the amount of suffering in the world, for sure. After I heard that Susan Collins would vote to confirm the scumbag Kavanaugh, I went out with my cameras for a bit.

How to respond to this crisis of our time?

I think there are a lot of reasonable responses, including political activism. Sorry if I lose the few Republicans that are reading right now as fans, but: everyone vote. If you care about decency and you are in the US, vote for Democrats; vote in the midterm elections.

Besides voting, and even if you aren’t going to vote for a Democrat, the best thing you can do is to cultivate your own intelligence, compassion, openness, clarity of mind, kindness. Feel the anger that is natural when things we hold dear are falling apart, but don’t let that anger control your behavior. Sure, we feel anger, but let it pass through like a wave. Work with the world we are given as best you can. Walk the path of confusion in such a way that it manifests as wisdom and clarity. I do that with meditation, and my practice of photography is not by any means a substitute for meditation, but it helps. So I keep on.

You, a fan of photography, or if you found this by being a fan of waterlilies — look! Open! Appreciate this beautiful world, and see the light inside the dark.

In and Out of Time, Past and Present

I’ve been working hard on the upcoming Post Pond show, at Matt Brown Fine Art in Lyme New Hampshire. I’m excited to share the space with Matt’s woodblock prints, other great contemporary artists, and also old woodblock prints. Matt is collecting and dealing Kunisada woodblock prints, among others — those are really something.

Matt asked me to make a show of my time in Lyme and to focus it around Post Pond and its immediate watershed. I spent a lot of camera time around Post Pond, the meadows near it, and the inlet and outlet streams: Trout Brook and Clay Brook.

Poet Jim Schley and I are going to give a talk, roughly around the notion of Time. I touched on that in my last post.

Passing through time is always interesting, and certainly no less as a photographer. All those older images represent both a period of artistic development as well as emotional experience. Also of course a record of the world passing through time, weather and light and atmosphere, as well as physical artifacts like trees that will change. One big dead tree that is prominent in many of my photos of Trout Brook no longer exists. The leaning tree above is a different story. Above, in about 2006, that tree had been leaning for a while. Below, in 2016, it was a bridge across the stream, completely fallen. I don’t know how it survived last winter or spring’s high water. No doubt it is different still. As the Buddhists say, annicca, annicca; impermanence. Everything is impermanent. Especially the state of my mind in the early 2000s when I lived near that spot.

And yet, here are some photographs. A reflection of my mind when I lived there, a record of the phenomena in front of my camera, a print that exists and resonates in this moment — and, really, nothing at all. Illusion. But illusion fun to play with. All life is a dance with illusion, so let us dance onward.

Oh, and a news flash: I will be a featured artist at the rest area in Hartford on Route 5 in Vermont. Starting tomorrow, July 1, through the month. Those photos will not be Post Pond.

Back from Ireland, working on Post Pond show

I have new work from Vermont I’m quite excited about, and also I’ve hardly sorted through photos from the Ireland trip, just recently over. But I’ve been focused on working a show of work made in Lyme New Hampshire, which opens on July 12 at Matt Brown’s Gallery in Lyme.

The photo above is relatively recent, made with a modern Zeiss lens and the full frame camera. Maybe more like what I would do now. I’m including a big print of this, Foot Bridge Over Trout Brook in the show as bit of new work done in Lyme.

Though the show will mostly be of work just around Post Pond, I’m also including this old one, just brought live and printed large. It was exposed on 4 x 5 film back in my view camera days, in 1983, when I was a skinny kid with a pony tail. This was exposed at a pond called Pout Pond near where I lived in ’83, schlepped my view camera up there. I haven’t been there since ’84 or so, so I don’t know if it is still wild and undeveloped.

Then I’m also working up several images, often reworking them. This is one I tried a different file of once, but I never quite was happy with it. Worked it up now, and it’s nice:

On July 12 at 5PM there will be a gallery talk. I will be joined by my friend, poet and writer Jim Schley, and Matt Brown will join in as well. We are going to be talking about time.

I’ve talked about time some. Anyone who knows me knows I have an unconventional sense of time. Time is interesting in photography for a few reasons. Any time I make an exposure, the subject of my attention is instantly destroyed immediately after. Sometimes the actual subject doesn’t last long, but certainly the light, the feeling, the moment will never come again. Have I “captured” that moment? No way! I create a new experience, which will perhaps live on in a series of new moments.

Time is also interesting, I think in that it is a bifurcated experience. We experience Newtonian time, a ball drops to the floor in the time we expect, a car accelerates on the highway according to its capabilities, and we experience that in accord with the real time, often enough. But also, we live in what I’m taking to calling “literary time.” In a novel time is never “real” but subject to the character or narrator’s looking back, looking ahead, paying attention to details as the moments unfold in the story. The reason we can click into this so well when we read a novel is that we experience this way anyway. Anyone who has ever meditated much knows that time shifts and warps with our mindstream. An hour can be a very long time, or fly by. Nothing to do with the clock, when we are with our experience. All very interesting.

Insubstantiality of Place

Just a simple photo exposed on film when I was young and skinny with long(er) hair. A simple bit of writing might match it nicely, but I’m afraid nothing is as simple as it looks, or as real, and I’ve been thinking about this all week so I will be going deep.

I exposed this image on 4 x 5 film in 1982. I was driving my VW rabbit to New York City to show a gallery some silver gelatin prints. I was a couple of years out of college and had been working very very hard on my photography, quite sure I was going to have my photos hanging everywhere in the world quite soon. A March morning just like this one, still some snow, drizzle, and fog hanging over it — and I saw this row of trees off the highway as I drove through Massachusetts from Vermont. Of course I pulled off a nearby exit, set up my view camera, and exposed some sheet film. It’s always slow to set up a view camera, and, like now, I was always late for everything on account of photography. I was a little late to the gallery meeting, but the image was better than the gallery meeting. It’s important to stop if you’ve got a chance at something. (I don’t remember the name of the gallery or the woman I met. She was kinder than she might have been in telling me my photos were not going to make it into her 1982 New York City gallery, the work I was doing then, and that gallery. I remember there were some platinum prints, or they looked that way, of flowers hanging there then.)

The reason this comes up now is that I was driving past that spot a couple of weeks ago in a different Volkswagen. I had driven down to Northampton MA to buy a used car to replace my almost 19 year old current car. In the test drive we drove by this erstwhile row of trees, which had been broken to bits by time and storms. It was nothing like it had been. That was very striking, though of course I was trying to pay attention to the test drive as best I could. I’m used to buildings I have photographed going down, trees falling or being cut. Happens all the time. But this whole row of trees was kind of smashed to bits, and it hit me.

And then the other day I was out with my camera on a trail I take camera hikes on pretty often. I like that trail not because it is a steady example of enduring reality, but because it manifests constant change. Images I make there on any day will never be the same as on any other day. Here’s one I made the other day, as an example of something you won’t see if you go there today:

I often annoy people who know me when I claim that time doesn’t exist. I don’t mean the clocks don’t tick, or that we don’t have appointments we will be late for when we stop with a camera. I just mean that from a human perspective, it’s complicated. I’ll talk about time in another post, or maybe in a book.

This week I was experiencing how it’s even more crazy than that. Places don’t really exist, at least not in an enduring way. From the point of view of making subtle photographs that aren’t set up with artificial props and light, the light and matter we use to make the exposure onto film or sensor is so fleeting, as is the mood and vision and entire cognitive realm; that configuration only exists for the briefest moment, and then, from an experiential standpoint, that place no longer exists. If I go back to those GPS coordinates tomorrow, the light is different, I feel different, I see differently. Also physical bits of the world often quickly manifest as impermanent. I often joke to my wife, who, amazingly, understands me: “I’ve never been here before” — and I say it in a place where of course I’ve been. Earlier in our relationship I would explain, “The light is different.” I leave that part out now, as it is well understood. The thing is I really have that experience. The place is different. I’ve never been there before.

We Buddhists say things are “empty.” This is a simple thing, but tricky. There are a lot of ways to attempt to describe and understand it. The brilliant Indian Nagarjuna has lots of difficult but good text. Our current Dalai Lama frequently talks about emptiness enthusiastically, and he often cites Nagarjuna. Dogen, in the Zen tradition points to it in his “Moon in a Dewdrop.” But I think the only way to understand is to meditate, really quite a lot I think. And, like Nagarjuna and Dogen, photography points it out as well.

I’ll leave with a bit of a prose poem to point this out a bit more

Clouds In Each Paper

–by Thich Nhat Hanh (Mar 25, 2002)

If you are a poet, you will see clearly that there is a cloud floating in this sheet of paper. Without a cloud, there will be no rain; without rain, the trees cannot grow: and without trees, we cannot make paper. The cloud is essential for the paper to exist. If the cloud is not here, the sheet of paper cannot be here either. So we can say that the cloud and the paper inter-are.

“Interbeing” is a word that is not in the dictionary yet, but if we combine the prefix “inter” with the verb “to be”, we have a new verb, inter-be. Without a cloud, we cannot have paper, so we can say that the cloud and the sheet of paper inter-are.
If we look into this sheet of paper even more deeply, we can see the sunshine in it. If the sunshine is not there, the forest cannot grow. In fact nothing can grow. Even we cannot grow without sunshine. And so, we know that the sunshine is also in this sheet of paper. The paper and the sunshine inter-are. And if we continue to look we can see the logger who cut the tree and brought it to the mill to be transformed into paper. And we see the wheat. We know that the logger cannot exist without his daily bread, and therefore the wheat that became his bread is also in this sheet of paper. And the logger’s father and mother are in it too. When we look in this way we see that without all of these things, this sheet of paper cannot exist.
— Thich Nhat Hanh

Row of Willows for sale as a print

Ice on Little Cascade Falls Print

Kandinsky Again

I don’t have a formula for composition, obviously. I like simplicity, I like abstraction. I like foggy mystery, but also piercing clarity. I’m happy enough sometimes to simply represent something interesting, but mostly I’m looking to move the eye around a space, and to move the mind with it. More and more (though I always have), I think of art as being a reflection of, or projection of, mind. Mind doesn’t really have a form or shape or color, as any meditator or neuroscientist knows. But somehow I feel like a state of mind (always transitory and fleeting) can have a graphical representation. A lot of modern art is interesting to me not purely because of color and form, but because of Mind. Kandinsky is a different state of mind — when viewing the painting you are in a different state of mind — than say in front of a Rothko.

Photographing ice on a winter stream is always an opportunity to explore a lot of mental states, a lot of chances for simplicity, tranquility, and also more kinetic and energetic situations.

I like this one, for now, because it has about as much energy, form, texture, detail, as I dare squeeze into a photo. The eye moves around the image; it’s not a simple, settled thing. Like Kandinsky paintings, the mind can be this way too. It’s worth spending time with it, whether it is a Rothko or a Kandinsky.

This is a stream in New Hampshire that I particularly like to walk along, because there is a nice trail along it, and the stream is interesting — sometimes slow, sometimes fast, sometimes even a waterfall. The stream is a mind of its own, moving through all the states and shapes and form that a real mind will, and always changing. In winter here, pretty much any day will be different from the next in terms of how a stream like this will look, and of course the light changes through the day too. It is as fleeting as a one day flower, a dandelion head in a breeze, a human mood or set of thoughts.

Eight Wordly Winds

The last week has been an interesting one photographically, and of course it always is. To start, I had a very fruitful day early last week, where I exposed the image above. The light, ice, and snow were nice all day, and it wasn’t too cold to spend a 7 hour day out with the camera. I enjoyed it, and I think I made some other good exposures.

Before I move on, what about the same exposure rendered in black and white? Thirty five years ago, when I used 4 x 5 sheet film, it would be a no-brainer: of course it has to be black and white. But I find I love the subtle colors in the image above. A photographic friend once said of me that I make color photographs like I’m working in black and white (I’m not sure it was a compliment from him). But personally I’ll take it as a compliment. For me, form, texture, tone very often take precedence in deciding a composition, but lately color is a bigger influence as well. As an option, here it is below in black and white. I think I’ll put them both on the site for sale until it is clear which is better.

Icicles on Cliff, Mt Ascutney Vermont

Anyway, it was an interesting week, as I said. After this great camera day, I had a let down from a potential vendor of my work. We’ll still see about that. But it felt like a blow. And then I think the next day, or day after that, I got an out-of-the-blue email from the office of one of my Vermont Senators, Bernie Sanders. Yes, Bernie. They asked if I would be so kind as to let them hang some of my Vermont images in their DC office. Umm, yes, I would be flattered.

Then another camera day, yesterday. It was a promising camera day, beautiful new snow lacy on all the trees, some rime ice in some places, and nice ice over rivers and streams. The only problem was that about 2/3 of the way through my stamina and camera battery supply, I fell through some ice into a stream, about belly-button height or higher. I was too busy to take careful notes at that moment. The water was ice cold and running fast. It was all I could do to pull myself up on the ledge of ice. (I noticed later I scratched my hands and wrist in that endeavor.) I had a camera backpack and a side-bag full of gear. The side-bag was floating. All the gear stayed dry enough, except the micro four thirds Olympus, not my main camera, but I love it, and on it was a lens I love. They fell in the water as I tried to scramble out. I fished them out and am drying them, though I think the lens is a loss. Besides being quite miserable for some time until I got home and dry, I was pretty bummed out about that lens. The camera, we’ll see. It didn’t seem to take on much water, and it’s quite a weatherproof wonder.

Also this last week, my ancient car, which has had charging system trouble since November, has made it clear that it is still not working. I was nervous climbing up the riverbank to it, soaked through, in about 15 degree F temperatures, not 100% sure it would start. It did. Being that wet and not sure the car would start was damn scary. It’s an 18 year old Volkswagen, which I’ve really loved for all these years, my favorite car ever. But now I think it’s time to get rid of the damn thing.

So, ups, downs, and my mind continues along, stumbling and soaring, as it does.

One Buddhist teaching on this as aspect of life is formulated as “The Eight Worldly Winds,” or often, “The Eight Worldly Dharmas.” In life we sometimes get praise and sometimes blame. Sometimes fame, and sometimes its disrepute. We get things that we want, but then we lose them — we can’t keep anything permanently. So there is always gain and loss. Likewise with pleasure and pain.

Though obviously derived from the Buddha’s teachings, I’m not sure it was formulated and presented as this list of 8 pairs of opposites in his time. I’m guessing as a list it comes from the Nalanda period in India, around the ninth century, but I’m not a real scholar of this, and there is a lot of pseudo scholarship online.

Between the idea of the title of “The Eight Worldy Dharmas” vs “The Eight Worldly Winds,” I like the Winds better. Right at the start, you get the idea. There are these winds always blowing us around. We are pulled and pushed by our attraction, aversion, and ignorance. We can tend to go off to the races every time the winds blow, or we can train to understand that this is just what happens as humans in this world and take our seat to watch the display without getting quite so caught. I like this teaching, this view, because it is basically neutral. Of course, as humans, things happen and then we respond emotionally. No blame. It’s just that we’re better served if we place our allegiance with awareness rather than with the emotional tides.

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