What had to happen for these leaves to be photographed?

Trees have long thoughts, long-breathing and restful, just as they have longer lives than ours. They are wiser than we are, as long as we do not listen to them. But when we have learned how to listen to trees, then the brevity and the quickness and the childlike hastiness of our thoughts achieve an incomparable joy.

                                                                  Hermann Hesse

This is one of the first photographs I made as a student at RIT (Rochester Institute of Technology), not as an assignment, but attempting to explore how the light without could reveal the light within. I felt that the black and white photographs of masters such as Ansel Adams, Ed Weston and John Paul Caponigro pointed to or evoked sensibilities beyond and deeper than representation. They not only increased my appreciation of subject matter, they helped me see deeper into essences through the patterns in creation.

My photographic contemplations usually begin with an evoked feeling or question. With respect to Leaves By Lamplight, the question that comes to mind as I write is one of the most common because it can be asked of every photograph irrespective of subject matter — What had to happen for this subject matter and image to exist? And that includes the circumstances that gave rise to them. What had to happen for me to be wandering the streets of Rochester, New York in the dark, with a 4×5 camera and tripod, looking for something to photograph?

The answer, of course, is EVERYTHING! Everything since a speck, tinier by far than a grain of sand, dramatically burst forth and expanded to become the cosmos that we know—all of space-time with its invisible fields of energy and clumps of matter, the galaxies, stars and planets including their patterns of organization, 13.7 billion years of evolutionary unfolding, the position of planets with respect to the Sun, the cooling of the Earth and the shifting of the continents, the unbelievably precise conditions to produce the water and atmosphere that gave rise to living organisms, all of human evolution and technological development up until that cold September night in 1962 when I made this photograph. Had any one of these events, elements, object or process varied even slightly—including my birth and life experiences up until that moment—the tree, the lamppost and the above image would not exist.

According to cosmologist, Brian Swimme, if the rate of the expanding universe had been slower by even a millionth of one percent, it would have collapsed. Conversely, if the universe had expanded faster by even a millionth of a percent it would have expanded too quickly for structures to form. So if the unfolding of the universe had not occurred exactly as it has, this image, the photographer and you the reader would not exist.

It’s a humbling perspective that leads me to appreciate that those of us alive today stand as the pinnacle achievement of the evolutionary process, the result of countless lines of ancestors going back to just a few individuals in Africa more than 40,000 years ago. They survived to reproduce. And we are the result of their success down through the ages. Now, we are the leading edge of the future, determining what we will become.

So in this image I see evidence of the perfection and success of being itself—ALL being, as it happened and as it is. Though we humans may be imperfect in our becoming, we and everything around us is perfectly being what it is and doing what it needs to do. Here and now, in and through us, the universe with all it’s blessings and blemishes is, in us, reflecting upon itself, coming to self-knowledge—the Love that we are—through infinitely diverse and creative expression.

Just as Morning Glory blossoms attract hummingbirds to extend their line, the young leaves on this particular tree in Rochester, New York attracted a young college student many decades ago to stop and notice them. Due to the law of attraction they captured me and it turn I captured them. Part of the wonder is that, although those leaves are long gone, they are still present and operating in my life—and now, because of their presentation here, beyond it.

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My other sites:

David L. Smith Photography Portfolio.com

Ancient Maya Cultural Traits.com: Weekly blog featuring the traits that made this civilization unique

Spiritual Visionaries.com: Access to 81 free videos on YouTube featuring thought leaders and events of the 1980s.