Precious silence often accompanies a fresh and heavy snowfall. The contrast between it and the sounds we normally tune out, calls our attention to it. We go outside to watch and listen closely. We even seem to breathe easier as the snowflakes make a barely perceptible sound. Before the shovels and snowblowers come out, before the […]
Where peace precipitates the power of potential On the evening this photograph was made, the dominant sound in this airport parking lot was birds—a stark contrast to the busyness and clamor of cars, shuttle-busses and conversations that once pervaded it day and night for several years. The difference between the activity then and the serenity […]
How we define it moves us in that direction Personally, spiritually, professionally, economically, socially, and politically we’re all climbing ladders toward “success.” What prompted the selection of this image for contemplation was hearing someone in a television commercial ask, “What do all artists seek?” His answer: “Recognition.” Ugh! I couldn’t let that go. Did Michelangelo […]
The chambered nautilus is a creature that inhabits the Pacific and Indian oceans, today between depths of 600 to 1200 feet. Appearing in the fossil record before fish, dinosaurs and mammals some 500 million years ago, they grew up to 20 feet long! The spiral occurs as walls are formed to seal off and […]
Realities that appear separate are one One of the benefits of a photographic image is that it presents us with a moment, a fraction of a second that holds us there so we can reflect and appreciate the subject matter—and possibly some significance it might have. The live scene or situation in front of the […]
How life moves in sustainable ways From universe to “nanoverse,” one of nature’s most common structural features is “branching.” Networks of all kinds, physical and intellectual, are grounded in a pattern that chemists refer to as “child” (smaller channels) and “parent” (larger) branches. At the human level we see it in living systems—the brain, arteries […]
Energy is vibration. It’s largely invisible, but when energy takes a form it’s always geometrical, prescribed by the fundamental laws of physics including gravity and the three Laws of Thermodynamics: 1. Conservation of Energy: Energy cannot be created or destroyed, just changed. 2. Entropy: Matter dissipates; disintegrates. Entropy either stays the same or gets bigger. […]
Children are influenced most by what they see Joseph Chilton Pearce, a respected author on the subject of brain development, wrote that a child’s capacity to operate in the world is determined entirely by the models he experiences in everyday life. He observed that all human intelligences—music, math, art, logic, mechanics, even emotions and intuition—are built into […]
It abounds when and if we look for it Sunlight reflecting off sink fixtures Whenever I hear “Beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” I take it to mean that some people find […]
Life before and after them In the summer of ’76, the year Linda and I were married, we went to the Cayo district in Belize so I could better appreciate where and how she’d lived for a year, teaching English to high school students under the auspices of the Papal Volunteer’s—the Catholic church’s version of […]
Contemplative Photography 