Connection pt. 1
06/06/2014
About ten years ago, I unconsciously began the difficult task of dismantling my life. I had up to that point, what by conventional standards would be considered a very successful life, long happy marriage to a truly good soul, an equally long and successful career, all (and more) of the standard accouterments that often come with success. One might naturally ask the question ........ why? Why risk all that by tearing it apart? To be honest, I'm still working on that one, but I will say that early on there were stirrings in some deeper undercurrent of my subconscious that were troubling me. Stirrings that over the years grew to become soul-sized. Indeed, affairs had become soul-sized, and thus the dismantling began and the arduous task of starting over. There are no road maps for this kind of journey, no field guide to help explain away the angst, doubts and fears that are a necessary part of this process. There is only putting one foot solidly forward in front of the next, feeling as you make your way through that Dark Wood in Dante's Inferno, where the straight way was lost.
What, you might ask, has any of this to do with photography? Nothing really, and yet everything. It's all about connection. From the first day of that great separation from the safe harbor of our mother's womb, we have all of us yearned for reconnection; that feeling of absolute belongingness to something. Photography, at least the way I go about things, requires that I slow down and really look at something; look at it long enough until I'm able to see it as something absolutely amazing, and there is the connection. I live my life in fleeting glances, and every so often, catch a sudden glimpse of magic that gives me that opportunity to stop. When I see the majesty of a hawk perched on a limb, or the absolutely amazing patterns in even the smallest details of nature, or even the kind gesture of a fellow sojourner towards someone else, it makes me feel alive. Of course, we need people to build and plan, design and organize our complicated social and political systems, but there is also a place for the mystical, the artists, poets and the like, to stop for a second the serious-minded and say ........ LOOK!
