Gathering Breadcrumbs at St. Joseph's Abbey...

On my window sill...

   I had brought three books with me to St. Joseph's Abbey for my weekend retreat.  I planned to do a lot of reading during my stay.  I also planned to do a bit of "reading" of the landscape around the retreat house through the lens of my camera.

   Gathering breadcrumbs, my contemplative practice of randomly receiving images as I stroll through a location, is a way I read the "text" of that particular place.  Everywhere we find ourselves is like entering into a vast story book of place and time.  Gathering breadcrumbs is like flipping through the book and letting our finger come to rest on a single sentence.  It is not the whole story, just a tiny part.  Each person will find and respond to a different sentence in the story.

   Each breadcrumb is an opportunity to reflect on meaning; both personal and universal.  It is a dialogue with world around me...whispers from the landscape.  They can occur indoors or out but they all are moments of pause.

In the early evening sky...

   Some breadcrumbs are subtle and gentle, like the solitary leaf on the window sill of my room in the retreat house.  Some can be dramatic and evocative, like the jet trail in the sky about the monastery.  There is no need to go beyond the obvious...I saw this, it made me pause.  Metaphors, interpretations, the process I call Photo Lectio, can be done later...sometimes much, much later, sometimes not at all.

   The world is a vast, unending novel for me.  Each location another chapter.  But there is an undercurrent, a theme that runs through it all and that theme will be different for everyone who walks in the landscape.  It is a theme that each of us brings with us, along with our camera and journal.  Here are a couple more of my breadcrumbs from my time at St. Joseph's...

Hanging from a tree branch...

In a Mirror's Reflection...

   Tomorrow I will discuss one breadcrumb that had special significance for me...