Guided Meditation...

Passing into the Storm

   I've written extensively about my practice of "Visual Listening", something I do before I begin my camera work on location. This is simply my term for the guided meditation I engage in before I begin the Deep Play of the photographic experience. I want you to realize how simple I try to make this process. I think everyone needs to establish their own way of approaching this phase of contemplative photography but it is a crucial phase for me. In fact, I might go so far as to state that without some form of guided meditation, preparing your mind for receiving the images, there can be no true contemplative photography! Without this preparation, you are just on a "click and run" mission snatching fragments of the landscape and missing the essential truth of it.

    I sometimes just do a simple breathing meditation to quiet my mind but I often begin the process with an inspiring poem, a quote from a writer I admire or another written form that seems to have the possibility of generating a new way of regarding the world. Simply reading and re-reading the piece, perhaps narrowing it down to just a phrase or even a word, can induce a meditative state. Music is also a lovely way to guide your mediation. It serves to block extraneous noise in the environment that may distract your meditative mind. But use it with caution. The natural sounds of the landscape, wind and bird sound for instance, are very important to an understanding of the place so be careful not to block these sounds completely! If I use music, I am sure to turn it off and listen for these natural sounds as well. They are part and parcel of the landscape and can guide our thoughts (and our photographs) in the most unexpected ways. Once in a meditative frame of mind, I find I am more receptive to the whisperings of the landscape which I then record in my field journal. This is often simple, rambling "word trains" but whatever comes into my mind I record. Then and only then do I pick up my camera a begin to receive my images.

    However you chose to guide your visual listening experience, be sure that your primary objective is to enter into a shared experience with the landscape. You can visit the link below to explore other ways of employing guided mediation in your contemplative practice.

  

Head Space

The Way of Water...

The Ocean at Peace

Water does not resist. Water flows. When you plunge your hand into it, all you feel is a caress. Water is not a solid wall, it will not stop you. But water always goes where it wants to go, and nothing in the end can stand against it. Water is patient. Dripping water wears away a stone. Remember that, my child. Remember you are half water. If you can’t go through an obstacle, go around it. Water does.

-Margaret Atwood

   Water is the ultimate metaphor in Taoism and this passage from Margaret Atwood explains it so perfectly. I especially like the sentence that reminds us that we are half water.  When we are born we are nearly 75% water but we continue to loose water as we age.  We never loose our attraction to the watery world though.  Years ago I had contemplated a move to the Southwest but I just couldn't do it.  I couldn't be that far from the sea!  The sea pulls me to it, that's probably another reason I love islands so much...I'm completely surrounded by water!

   Photographing water, reflections, light on the surface, it's movement or stillness, is a wonderful resource for contemplative photographers. With 70% of the earth's surface covered with water, we have lots of opportunities to explore this metaphor.  I have friends who grew up in the mid-west who prefer lakes to the ocean.  I'll admit, the sea can be a bit scary in its vastness and power but that is part of its attraction to me.  After all, we are creatures of the sea and we are reminded of it every time we taste the salt of our tears.

  

A Thought for Today...Journey into Nature

The Path Inward

Beaumisnil, France - 2012

Slow Travel...

   Since photography's inception, people have been carrying cameras into the wilderness to record the things they saw.  In the 19th century it was quite a cumbersome affair.  Huge wooden box cameras and glass plates...it is amazing to consider how far we've come technologically speaking.  But with all our convenience and ease, in both traveling and photographing, I believe something precious has been lost.

Photographing the Train

   In the 19th century the journey was every bit as important as the final destination.  In Corrine Smith's book on Thoreau's travel to Minnesota, "Westward I Go Free", she describes in great detail the long and arduous train journey he and his traveling companion had to endure to reach their final destination.  What took them many days to do, we can now accomplish in a few hours in a plane.  We would fly over the land, 30,000 feet above everything that matters, while Thoreau slowly moved through the landscape discovering amazing things out the window as he chugged along the tracks.

   When I traveled in Scotland back in 2005, I took a train from Glasgow to Fort William.  I traveled in a restored steam train, the only steam train in the UK that makes regularly scheduled trips as a passenger train and not a tourist attraction.  It was an amazing experience. Since trains often travel through remote places, I got to see landscapes I would have missed if I'd made the trip by car.

The Engineer at Fort William

    As a child, my family would drive to upstate New York from our Eastern Massachusetts home.  It was a two day journey then because there were no super highways to speed our journey.  My mother would pack a lunch and we would picnic along the way and stay a night in a roadside motel.

   Yes, slow travel is a thing of the past but it needn't be.  Why not plan your own slow journey this year?  If you can't go by train, load up your car for an extended road trip.  Make frequent stops along the way and don't be in a terrible hurry.  Judge the success of your trip not by how quickly you can get from point A to point B but by how many new and wonderful sights you see along the way!

  



  

PhotoTao Card #24 - Skill...

Card #24

Skill

When your eyes and mouth are choked

with the dust of someone elses feet, neat

walkers command your respect.

- Exercise -

If you want to create great photographs,

look at the work of the Masters but don't 

let them cloud your perception of your

own work.   Learn from them and then

discard them as you would a pair of shoes

that now pinch your toes.  You've grown 

and your new skill has given you your

unique voice.  Give yourself a private

exhibition of what you consider to be 

your best work to date.  See where your

"new shoes" have taken you!

Self Portrait on the Beach on Harris - 2005

  When I first went to the Hebrides in 2005 I went with the firm intention of walking in Paul Strands footsteps.  His book, Tir a Mhurain, was like my bible and the images of his 3 months in the Outer Hebrides in 1954 were etched on my brain.  When I discovered someone else had already "been there, done that" the year before I was, at first, crushed.  After all, I had written the grant that funded this trip with the express purpose of re-visiting Strands locations.  It turned out to be a blessing in disguise as many things in life are.

   From then on I was free to experience the Western Isles with my own eyes...from my own perspective.  In the process of doing that I "discovered" contemplative photography.  My life and my camera work would never be the same.

   That autumn, when I had to present the work I had created on my trip to the charitable trust that had funded it, I simply told them the truth.  I set out on one path and came back on an entirely different but wonderful one.  They were quite please with that and so was I.

    

Deep Play...

(dep), adj. (pla), n. 1. A state of unselfconscious

engagement with our surroundings 2. An exalted

zone of transcendence over time 3. A state of

optimal creative capacity

   I have always enjoyed Diane Ackerman's books (Natural History of the Senses and A Slender Thread: The Rarest of the Rare).  Her book "Deep Play" is the subject of this post.  It's the type of book you can pick up and read in installments and go back to over and over again for inspiration.

   "Play always has a sacred place-

some version of a playground-

in which it happens."

      If you love what you do then it is never work...that's how I feel about contemplative photography.  I play with my image making and while that might imply that I don't take it seriously, nothing could be further from the truth.  A deeply playful attitude allows for what Ackerman describes as "a state of optimal creative capacity."  If your mind is not obsessed with rules and "rightness" then it can be open to experimentation and the spontaneous.

   While it is true that I photograph in the city and other built environments, I am most at home in the natural world.  I feel more confined by rules in the city and I feel the freedom to play in the landscape...the landscape is my playground.

   "Players like to invent substitute worlds...Make-believe

is at the heart of play, and also at the heart of much of

what passes for work.  Let's make-believe we can shoot a

rocket to the moon."

   What has make-believe have to do with contemplative photography, you may well ask?  It is, I'd respond, at its very core.  Through make-believe we can imagine that our images are more than merely documents of the real world...in fact, we can imagine another reality that lays beneath the surface of what we see.  We "make" our photographs and then "believe" what we discover within them.

   So this weekend go out and find your playground.  Experiment, explore, play around with your camera.  If you would like some instruction in the process of photography as play, give a small camera to a 5 year old and sit back and observe. Take to heart (and apply it to your camera work as well) Plato's admonition...

"Life should be lived as play."

  

Walking Meditation...

   I've often talked about photography as a contemplative practice and the role meditation can play preparing the photographers mind but as a meditation practice in and of itself?  Of course, there are many ways people meditate and the state one reaches while meditating can also vary from person to person.  Henry Thoreau practiced walking meditation on the shores of Walden Pond.  I've always wondered what his photographs would have looked like if he'd had a camera.

   Photography has a wonderful way of focusing ones attention which is a primary goal of meditation.  When Thomas Merton received a gift of a camera from a friend he wrote...

A Thin Blue Line Separates Us - Scotland

 What a joy of a thing to work with...

the camera is the most eager and helpful

of all beings, all full of happy suggestions.

"Try this! Do it that way!"  Reminding me

of things I have overlooked and cooperating 

in the creation of new worlds. So Simply.

This is a Zen camera!

   When pulled forward by your camera to look into the spirit of the world around you, it becomes a form of walking meditation.  This meditative state can get you in trouble sometimes as it did for me in Scotland at the time I made this photograph.  Fully engaged in my walking meditation I wandered oblivious to my direction, so involve was I in moment.  When I finally came "out of it" I was completely lost!  It took me over an hour to find my way back to where I had left my car.  I think I should title this image, "Out in Left Field"!  But despite these occasional "strayings", I wouldn't give up my walking meditations. 

   Thomas Merton began exploring photography as a contemplative practice in the early 1960's at the Pleasant Hill Shaker village just an hour away from his home at the Gethsemane Abbey in Kentucky.  I will very shortly be able to walk in Merton's footsteps when I visit the village  later this month.  It is a sublimely peaceful and beautiful place...a perfect place to employ photography as a meditation practice and I probably won't have to worry about getting lost this time!