The Religion of Ordinary Life...

And some, like me,

are just beginning

 to guess at the

 powerful religion

or ordinary life, 

a spirituality of

 freshly mopped

 floors and

stacked dishes 

and clothes blowing

on the line.

- Adair Lara

    Next month it will be 10 years since I received my grant to go to the Western Isles of Scotland and renew my passion for photography.  What an interesting journey it has been in those 10 years! For the past 3 years I have been recording that journey on this blog. This image of a clothes line on South Uist is so exemplary of that initial trip, when I was fully immersed in the monochrome image.

    What hasn't change in those 10 years is my equally passionate engagement with the commonplace.  The "religion of ordinary life" as Adair Lara calls it.  Now, I no longer need to travel great distances to practice my "religion"...it surrounds me everyday.  

   It isn't just my ordinary life that fascinates me but the ordinary lives of the birds and squirrels, the trees and pond, the flowers and grasses by the roadside.  It is the ordinary life of the natural world around me that draws my lens and my heart.

Look at the trees, look at the birds, look at the clouds, look at the stars... and if you have eyes you will be able to see that the whole existence is joyful. Everything is simply happy. Trees are happy for no reason; they are not going to become prime ministers or presidents and they are not going to become rich and they will never have any bank balance. Look at the flowers — for no reason. It is simply unbelievable how happy flowers are. ~Osho

   

Another Wu Wei Winter...

Be Still

 Be Present

 Be Patient 

The Three Be's of 

Contemplative Photography 

 It seems to be shaping up to be another Wu Wei Winter for me.  The storms, frigid temperatures, wind chills in the -25 degree F range as well as achy joints (Hmm...is there a correlation?) have kept me in-doors the last couple of weeks.  Good time to practice one of my favorite photographic sage exercises, Wu Wei.

   Wu Wei is literally translated into "doing by not doing" or sometimes as "effortless effort".  For me, it means photographing only what comes to me.  In this case, it was a plump wild turkey!

   What has changed this winter though is my willingness to embrace the abstract elements of my subject and apply a more painterly and color focused approach to this south end of a north bound bird.  I loved the patterns and colors of the overlapping feathers.

   Then I was blessed by a visit from a barred owl.  In all the years I've lived here, one has never come this close to the house and stayed for so long.  I watched him watch me for a few minutes.  That was a real treat! Now that I think about it, an owl would be the perfect metaphor for my three B's above!

   I may not be able to get to the pond for the time being but clearly my experiences at the pond over the last nearly seven months have gotten to me!  If you want a quick brush up on the Characteristics of a Photographic Sage, including the practice of Wu Wei, here is a link to all the relevant posts.

The Characteristics of

 the Photographic Sage

Beauty in the Commonplace...

   If there is a recurring theme on this blog, it is finding beauty in the commonplace.  After my post of November 29, 2014 I felt the need to look closer to home for the beautiful.

   The day I made this photograph of my crab apple tree, which is 15 feet from my back door, it was pouring rain. The raindrops glistened like little diamonds on the branches.  I thought it quite beautiful.

   Edgar Allen Poe defined Art this way...

...the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through 

the veil of the soul.

   I always found that a wonderful definition and in many ways my efforts at contemplative photography are very much in keeping with this sentiment.  Nature, for me, is divine presence whether it is in a magnificent cloudscape or tiny raindrops on tree branches.  There is an essential sacredness in all living things.  Photographing it in all its manifestations is my passion.  

   You might like to read some back posts on this subject...

The Sacredness in the Commonplace

A Brief Moment of Illumination...

   I was reading in my sitting room recently and I caught a soft glow out of the corner of my eye.  It was the diffused light illuminating a single catkin of the pussy willow branch.  It appeared almost like an aura around the catkin.  I'm not sure why it totally fascinated me, (I did put it on my daily photo journal) but I sat transfixed, gazing at it for several minutes.

Whatever we look at today,

may we see it with fresh eyes.

- John O'Donohue

   It just faded away as the light shifted.  Such a simple, brief moment of illumination...the catkin's 15 minutes of fame...its moment in the spotlight.  It was such a lovely sight.

   I'm trying new things with my camera...trying to see things more softly and gently.  Not the tack sharp, high contrast reality that use to be an obsession with me way back when.  I wanted a more ethereal look to balance the extreme simplicity of the image...a glowing presence that spoke more of the spiritual nature of light than its physical reality.

   This moment of awareness brought me face to face with an idea of where I may be journeying with in my camerawork.  That remains to be seen but I do know that 2 or 3 years ago I would have never even considered making an image like this let alone having the experience of it effect me so much. Heck, up until 2011 I didn't even make color images!

   Every artist must experience this kind of evolution of expression otherwise they stagnate.  This is what the whole photographic process has become for me...a slowly evolving and awakening journey...one image, one reflection, one day at a time.  Always trying, as John says, to see with fresh eyes.  And, I might add, with a gently embracing heart.

Seeing the Ordinary...

" It takes a lot of imagination to be a good photographer.  You need less imagination to be a painter, because you can invent things.  But in photography everything is so ordinary, it takes a lot of looking before you learn to see the ordinary."

-David Bailey

   So much of my thinking and my camera work is directed to the sacredness of the commonplace; seeing the extraordinary in the ordinary objects of daily life.  This is the very essence of the contemplative photographic experience for me. David Bailey really says it so well.  It truly takes a lot of "looking" before you can see the ordinary for more that its superficial quality.

   In Japanese aesthetics, there is a wonderful term for this way of perceiving the world around you.  It is called Wabi Sabi. It involves seeing the rustic beauty and serenity in objects that are weather beaten and aged.  You look beyond the surface quality to access the wisdom in the object's imperfections.  I was thinking about that when I came across this old door at Glastonbury Abbey recently.  For me, this image is a mixed metaphor.  The "X" denotes exclusion, do not enter, stay back.  It is a universally applied symbol.  The door, however, is slightly ajar and one can just see the tiniest hint of light from a window deep within the shed.  

   I stood and looked at that door for quite awhile. The rough weathered wood, the peeling paint, the "keep out" X.  We all face these kinds of road blocks in our lives, when it is easier to turn away that to pry open the door and enter.  So much easier, as photographers, to stick with the "pretty pictures" than to focus our lenses on the derelict and abandoned.  But as this image implies, there may be much that can be learned with struggling to open those doors.  

Photographing the Familiar...

"Photography deals exquisitely with appearances,

but nothing is what it appears to be."

Duane Michals

     When I first studied photography in the mid-1970's, it seemed that many of the great photographers traveled to far away places or chose striking landscapes to document in their photographs.  Their images all had an element of the exotic about them - at least it seemed so to a young woman from rural New England.  I think I was a bit like Dorothy in the Wizard of Oz in the beginning, running away from my ordinary, exhaustively familiar life to find meaningful images.  And like Dorothy, I eventually came to realize that everything I could hope to find "out there" was in my own backyard all the time.  I learned to embrace the familiar.

"The diameter of a circle..."

   My series First Person Rural - a portrait of a Maine town was an attempt to photograph the familiar; the people and places in my own backyard here in Maine.  It is my series Rural Geometry, however, that I want to refer to in this post.  The entire series was created over several years in the tiny village of Tamworth, New Hampshire.  I have been visiting Tamworth for nearly 30 years, mainly to attend the summer theater productions at the Barnstormers or to have dinner at the old inn.  When I began my work as a contemplative photographer in 2005 I decided to re-visit Tamworth with my camera and try to see it all anew. I didn't try to over think it, I just walked around the village and let the buildings invite me in.  Later, I discovered a wonderful book, "The Old Way of Seeing" by Jonathan Hale. It gave me a whole new appreciation of the proportions and beauty of rural 19th century architecture.  I often find books that support my photographic work in some way, enriching it and bringing additional clarity to my vision.

"Three squares and a right angle."

     After several visits, I laid out the photographic "rough drafts" on my dining room table and spent several hours studying them.  What became clearly evident was that all of my images focused on specific geometric elements of the buildings; I rarely photographed a whole building. From then on I would visit Tamworth from time to time searching for these geometric forms; sometimes they were in the building itself and sometimes the shadows cast by the building and sometimes, like the image to the left, both!  It became a kind of a treasure hunt for me.  The series concluded with an exhibition at the Tamworth Lyceum in November, 2011.  

     The point of all this is to say that nothing is so familiar that we can not see something new in it.  It only calls for you to create a new frame of reference.  I could visit Tamworth over and over and as long as I changed my frame of reference, I would get a whole new series of photographs.  Just photographing in different seasons opens up all new possibilities as the image below demonstrates.  This particular photograph started a whole new series I call "Winter Etchings" which I'm still working on.

"Hexagons - positive and negative"

     There will come a time when all my traveling will become more problematic and I will probably stick closer to my home in Maine rather than jetting off to distant lands.  It's good to know that my work as a contemplative photographer needn't end just because I let my passport expire.  I once heard of a woman who followed her cat around her house and made photographs from the cat's viewpoint! (Watch out Emerson!) I will just photograph the familiar, the everyday, the close at hand and like Dorothy I will be able to say, "There's no place like home!"