Context

Saturn eclipses the sun.   This image is in the public domain because it was solely created by NASA.  It was obtained from Wikipedia Commons.  Here is a link for more Cassini images.  Here is a link for excellent info on Saturn including a breakdown of the rings.

Here is a closeup, showing the the earth...

and here is even closer, so you can see the moon.

The image up top is a composite of 131 wide-angle pictures selected from 343 images that were taken over a period of four hours last July by the NASA’s Cassini Spacecraft.  (Only 343 pictures in 4 hours... that's how you know I didn't take them!) 

The craft is on the other side of Saturn...746 million miles from Earth.  I understand that the exposure has been brightened but the colors are natural....those that would be seen by the human eye.

The atmosphere of Saturn is lit up from behind, which is what makes it look like it was drawn with a protractor.  The light around the outside shows the edge of the rings.  The whole thing is more than 400 thousand miles across.  The earth is barely perceptible in the lower right corner of the picture.  Mars and Venus are in the upper left corner.  (This picture as well as all the others throughout this blog can be viewed in "light box".  It might help you see more of the detail.)  The earth and her neighbors look so small...like something a photographer would blot away if she were trying to clean up the dust in a picture.

I love these pictures but found them a bit beyond my ken.  I went for a walk with Wilson and Molly on Mansion Beach while I tried to think about it.  I worked on forming a concept or a feeling.  I began constructing it in my mind:   Me and Wilson and Molly on the beach...the beach on Block Island...Block Island on the earth...the earth in the solar system...the solar system in the galaxy…each new context nesting and dwarfing the one before.  I blew it somewhere between Block Island and the earth...lost any connection to what that could possibly mean.  It became like trying to understand how much bigger a number could get by throwing a thousand zeros on the end of it, and then a million more.

So then I thought… “Isn’t it something… that in the midst of all of that…I mean, in the midst of the whole kahoona, the only thing I really know is what I hear and smell and see right now?  Here on Mansion Beach in this little moment… here is what seems like everything.”

Then we went to the end of Corn Neck Road to Sachem Pond.  It had been grey all day and I didn’t expect any pictures but I went just to see what would happen.  I wouldn’t even have had my camera with me if I didn’t have a policy about it.  The policy is that I take my camera whenever I go unless it is raining so hard I would break it.  This is because without fail…something great will happen (This is a law of nature.) simply because I don’t have it with me. 

It was bleak and dull and getting darker.  There was some interesting light behind the clouds.  I didn’t think it was anything special but I finally realized and began to take many pictures, two of which are shown below.  I should have known better from the beginning.  It’s the photographer’s job to know this… to find and demonstrate the objective wonder in the ordinary things that are easy to take for granted. 

It has been proven to me so many times, that there is nothing that is not worth seeing…that there is beauty in things that I’ve seen once or a thousand times, in things I consider special and things I consider insignificant, on days with good and bad light. 

I think there is something fantastic about being a person… in a whole big universe that is also constructed in such a way that the thing I see right now is enough.  Enough… meaning each thing contains and is contained in everything.  Enough… meaning just as roomy no matter how big or small I go.  Enough… meaning just as much wonder or beauty in any size of anything.  Enough… meaning a whole world made in each center of perception... worlds and worlds in billions of creatures here and who knows where else? (In the moons of Saturn, perhaps?)

I know the universe is beautiful but I learned something else again this evening, and I’ll probably forget and learn it again and again…how beautiful almost nothing can be.

Looking northeast from Sachem Pond, across the grasses and a little patch of snow to Block Island Sound at dusk.

In the opposite direction... looking northwest over Sachem Pond with a little bit of red from the sunset.

Wilson and Molly and the Wind

I went out to the southwest corner of the island, looking for open space.  I had an ideal in mind...  wind and only wind, a sense of isolation, desolation even... no person and no creature... nothing but emptiness... all the way to Antarctica. 

I didn't get that.  I got Wilson and Molly, out and about for the first time after the blizzard.  Like cats on a keyboard, they wanted to be exactly where I was putting my attention.  They stayed in front of the camera, inserted themselves everywhere. 

I walked up the hill toward the stone wall... got beyond the dogs and their infernal footprints... got a cleaner shot... more like the ones I had planned.  

Wind and Snow.  I love it that the wind makes patterns in the snow just like it does on the ocean.  You know how the Polynesians can read the waves...find islands from thousands miles away?  Well look at the little grasses and the "wind shadows" they made.. 

Then I walked further and found the shapes the wind had made when it blew against and through the wall. 

Windbreak

 

I love this shot.  I love the barely perceptible patterns in the snow, the delicate colors at the beginning of sunset.

Wilson and Molly were right behind me...snuffelling their noses into the snow, grabbing each others' collars, rolling on their backs, wiggling their legs in the air.  So I'm not saying this image isn't true... it's just that it's not all there was in the landscape.

Some people say that there should always be a "heartbeat" in a picture.  Some animal or person... a way to relate the picture to another living thing.  But there is always a heartbeat - whether it is explicitly in the picture or not.  There is always the person behind the camera, and then, later on, there is someone looking at the picture, hopefully feeling that she or he can be part of it as well. 

I like to show the one thing I loved the most at the time I was taking the picture.  I like tokeep the extra things out of the way.  I find, after many years of living with my pictures, that I do better with the pictures that only say one thing.  A story telling picture..."Here's the church and here's the steeple... open the doors and see all the people." gets used up.  I think I know the story already and so I stop looking.  A picture that gives one thing... some light, some power, some feeling... I can live with that for a long time. 

That said, there is also a danger in reaching too far....getting all self-conscious and making everything too controlled and planned and precious, as if reality isn't good enough. 

Another view with colors from the setting sun.

More of the story.

It's so close to the Winter Solstice, the sun is setting almost as far to the south as it can at this latitude.  Montauk Point on Long Island is to the west.  It's there on the horizon.  And to the south, there is nothing until Antarctica, just like I said.  Well, nothing, except for Burmuda and of course except for Wilson and Molly, and their footprints...A little less perfection...a little more completion...a little more about all of the life that was there that evening.

Coming Home

Rough Ride

I have become accustomed to the journey between the mainland and Block Island.  And it’s a real journey - you don’t just pick up and go.  You check the weather and the ferry schedules and those are limited in winter.  You make a boat reservation if you are bringing a car or you go down and load a pallet with your belongings if you are walking on.

In any case, there are stages.  You drive and wait, you get a ticket, you load up, go on the boat and then ride, unload, reload and then drive again and unload again.  It takes the whole day and usually requires an overnight stay.  So you bunch everything together… visits and work and groceries and sometimes a Christmas tree or some cord wood or a piece of furniture so you don't just travel, you deploy.   And then you can always do something stupid, like let’s say, realize the moment the boat leaves the dock that you have forgotten your keys and you have to take a cab with everything and your two dogs and find a hotel for the night so that keys can be sent over in the morning.

Because the island is out in open ocean, if the wind is high enough the boats do not run, and in winter that happens about once a week, usually for one day, but sometimes for two or on rare occasions, for more.   So it is not in your control.  I actually like that… being back in a relationship with nature that is more like what people have lived in forever… but ask me how I like it if I am teaching on the mainland and have to leave four days early to be sure I get there.  Also ask me how I liked it the day the boat almost cancelled and the weather was bad but I really wanted to get home and I decided to go anyway.  Old seafaring salt that I am, I stayed in the car to keep the dogs from being afraid.  We had 6-8 foot seas but the bow reaches up and out beyond the waves, and that is where I was so it was more than that.  I can't even say.  We were rising and falling 10 feet?  12 feet?  It was too late to get out, as I could not have navigated the deck in those conditions.  So I was stuck, with nothing to do but pray for death as the bow lurched up, held and swung for a moment, and then fell and slammed into the water, hitting hard.  Cars bounced on their tires, straining against their emergency brakes.  Spray and green water came over the bow.  The steel hull boomed like a drum. 

You can imagine under those conditions what coming to a safe harbor feels like.  The boat turns and in bad weather that turn is something.  There is the last high swell and you ride it down and sometimes it feels like you’ve got to hit bottom and then you pass the breakwater.  The sea calms.  The boat stops slamming. 

When I came home last week the weather was snotty.  There were waves but nothing like that other time.  I unloaded the car, put the groceries away, cooked, and settled in.   My life is different here than it has ever been anywhere else.  I go out and take pictures with many open spaces, trails and fields and beaches open to everyone.  I feel safe out walking (after accounting for hunters) day or night, wherever I go. 

The sea changes quickly... waves one day and calm the next.  I took this picture the evening after coming home.  I worried about those ducks resting on the water at feeding time, wondered about the big fish looking up at all those tasty feet, but I told myself that like all things in nature, those ducks must know what they are doing.

It’s strange how I forget when I go away.  It’s like the mainland is different from here, and it’s changed in the fourteen years I’ve been on the island.  So I really do feel like I’m in another country.  So many cars, so many people.  (Sometimes I wave by mistake at the people in the other cars, like we do on the island.)  Stores are open all the time and filled with everything.   There is amazing fresh produce, amazing choices.   I go into a mall and it sparkles and my mouth hangs open.   I have to switch channels and the island and my life here disappears.  And then I have to switch channels to come back so it has taken a few days but my life has reassembled and it feels very good. 

I was out taking photos with a friend the other night, and we both took a series of long exposure pictures.  This is a 30 second exposure taken in the "early" dark, the waves blurring into smoke.

Home is a place of course, but there is also a way to come home to yourself, to define and protect your life like the ocean defines the boundaries of this island, and maybe deciding you can do that and then learning how is a most important journey.  And guess what?  I’m leaving again on Monday.  Bill is arriving after four weeks working in Southeast Asia and we’re going to see our children.   So I’ll be changing channels again, but I’ll be taking my cameras with me.  I’m hoping to go with my family to take some pictures of fine old trees and Bill will be with me and we’ll all be together and that will be home also.

I took this picture the same night I took all those sitting ducks. 

Listen to What I Tell You

Stony Beach, Port Maitland, Nova Scotia

I called Register.com yesterday. I picked this registrar for a reason.  They have an office in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia, not far from my family’s house.  My family has had a tiny house in Port Maitland on the Bay of Fundy for almost 30 years. 

You really need to go to Nova Scotia.  This is why.

  1. Nova Scotia is very beautiful.
  2. The people there want you to come and will be extremely nice to you.
  3. The ferry out of Portland, Maine, which hasn’t run for several years, is going to start up again in the spring.  It will go directly to Yarmouth.  Happiness.
  4. You will have peace and quiet.
  5. The air is clean.  The water is clean.
  6. You will be able to eat Rappie Pie.  Just kidding.  Rappie Pie is terrible.  It is made out of potatoes that have been grated and squeezed in cheesecloth and cooked with chicken broth and turned into a pie filling.  Let me just say that if you like poi or boiled okra you will like Rappie Pie.  What you really need to eat are the best scallops in the world.  We get ours in Saulnierville, at the fish market.

 And, you should take up photography.  And, this is why.

  1. When you call Register.com and talk to a wonderful person named Julie, you will be able to say so much more than “have a nice day”.  You will be able to send her a photograph of Port Maitland Beach and promise her that your next blog post will be about Nova Scotia.  It will make both of you a little bit happier.  (As an aside, please read the comment posted by this same Julie - Julie Saulnier-Spurr to be exact.  She is a proud Acadian and she loves Rappie Pie.)

Up on top is a picture of the stone beach near our house in Port Maitland.  Off in the distance is our land.  My 84 year-old mother and I got ourselves out to where I took this picture by thinking that it would be so much easier to keep walking and cut across the neighbor’s yard than it would be to turn back, which did not turn out to be the case.  It was pretty far.  Those are very tippy rocks.  My retired air force colonel brother and his wife and their son staged a rescue but we didn’t need it.  We were almost to the neighbor’s by the time my brother came bounding along.  We were fine.

This is a picture of the tea colored marsh that feeds into the north end of Port Maitland Beach.

Foggy Morning, Port Maitland, Nova Scotia, August 2013.  When I went back to this picture, I remembered that morning all over again.  I like to look at my pictures many times.  I need to.  I don't necessarily get things right away.  I like to know a place the way I know a person...  in a relationship…  over a period of time. 

I think Nova Scotia is where my parents spent the best years of their lives…  They were retired and we were grown.  For the first time…they had time.   Dad fished.  They did projects in the house.  The children and their spouses and friends and grandchildren came and we did our signature things… walked and explored the land, mowed the lawn, making it bigger and bigger, drove around, slept like cordwood where ever we possibly could, ate scallops, usually every night, painted rocks with little scenes… It was a big event if someone drove down my parents’ road.  They would run to the window to see who it was.  Their bedroom was not much bigger than their bed, but it has French doors and the wind from the ocean is always blowing.  You can always hear it.  My mom still sleeps in that bedroom, preferring it greatly to the much bigger new bedroom downstairs.

I could have picked so many pictures to show you about Nova Scotia.  There are quaint little cottages, colorful fishing boats sitting high and dry on account of the enormous tides, but I wanted to show you what is most important to me…. the quiet and the coolness and the simplicity and the space (outdoors) for everyone.  What a relief.

At the End of the Day

Taken on Great Salt Pond, November 4, 2013. 

 

On Block Island in the off-season, the gas station closes at three and sometimes two in the afternoon.  I was there at five of the hour.  I waited.  The attendant came out on the dot and said the pumps were closed.  I said, “I have been waiting.”  He said, “I didn’t see you.”  That was Cliff, Jr.  I was so mad I came back the next day and ordered one dollar of gas, just to be annoying.  He said, “I won’t sell you one dollar of gas.”  I said, “Then alright, two.”  He said, “That won’t get you very far.”  Which was technically correct because his is the only gas station on the island.  I got my gas, and when I had gone the distance that less than half of a gallon will take you I had no choice but to ask my patient husband to go and get some more.  Eventually, I had to go back, hoping Cliff wouldn’t remember, which was unrealistic, given the size of our island, but he never said anything and I didn’t either.

He was watching the Red Sox game last week.  People in his house said they could hear him shouting at all the big moments.  His wife went to bed and he stayed up to watch the replays.  In the morning she found him dead in his chair.  He was 50 years old.  He has left two young children. 

I went to the funeral yesterday. I think the whole island came.  The school bus was there, having brought all the children from school.  All his buddies were there.  They said he was generous, that he'd help them when he was tired, that he never wanted any thanks for anything.  His grave is in a little valley, and all the people, they just filled that valley.  On the way out I stopped at other graves.  People can still leave things for their people in our cemetery.   There were candles and seashells and notes, and toys and other things.

I went out last night to take pictures.  It was a little cold.   It was getting dark, so I got my tripod and did longer and longer night-time exposures.  I kept thinking of Cliff.  The tide was coming in… sliding in on such a quiet night.  Every so often I would look down and see my feet were standing in water.  I used my new wide-angle lens. Every lens is like a language.  It sees things in a certain way, different from other lenses, and different from people.  The same goes for these long time exposures.  They catch the little light that we can barely see and multiply it over and over. 

It was good to give my mind a rest.  I could look through my camera, listen for birds, breathe the cool air, hear the waves from the other side of the island, watch Wilson and Molly play all around me and wait for the light to change. 

This is for Cliff, Jr.

The Important Questions

“When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child;  but when I (grew up) I put away childish things.”  1 Corinthians 13:11.

I hope to take them out again.

When I was a child the days were long… I remember knowing I had the long, delicious, fascinating day ahead of me.  I could run to the barn, sit on the stonewall counting cars with my brother, sit in the sun on the cellar door, chase the chicken, torment my sister.   That was only the morning.  I could have the best lunch.  My favorite - Lipton’s Chicken Noodle Soup.  I could play the piano and watch Captain Kangaroo on TV.  My very big brother would come home.  (I was impressed.  A man of the world who could manfully go out and manfully return from Kindergarten.)  I could play chess with my brother and fight about it, or marbles and fight about it, or play fireman, or go up in the big pile of sand that my father had dumped by the barn.  We lost a box of army men in there.  I still wonder where they are.  I was given a musical bear and couldn't understand why my father was mad when I performed surgery to find out where the sound came from.  (It was after all, my bear.)  Then my grandma, the love of my life, would come home from the sewing factory.  I could sit by the table and watch.  Flour with a little well in the center into which she dropped egg yolks.   Then came noodles.  A miracle.  Then my Dad would come home.  Hooray!  All six of us children would run to the door to be greeted and swung in the air.  I remember the day… I took the sorrow bravely…philosophically…when I was told I was older than the others and too big to pick up.

What I remember are the days of wonder.  I knew I was living in a miracle.  I remember all my senses awake.  My blanket had a satin edge.  I held it to my cheek when I was falling asleep.  This was not a little thing.  I remember discovering that soft edge and loving the feel of it…how perfect… how necessary…. so good to fall asleep with my blanket.  I remember the apple tree.  I smelled it and the blossoms were awesome.    And in play…. my brother and I went outside and came to our front door pretending to be other people.  We fooled our mother.  We really fooled her.  And one spring I heard rumbling in the sky.  Probably thunder.  My mother said it was spring rolling round.  Check.  That made sense.  Spring rolls around.

A baby was born in October, and we saw him just after he was born.  So there he was - that little guy, the beginning of a person.  His father sang a soft low song to him, a made up, simple song:  “doo, dee doo dee doo dee doo.”  He rooted toward the sound.   He was nothing really… just a little hamster… but a magnet for wonder and love.  We couldn’t stop looking at him, couldn’t stop holding him, our love pouring into him, making him human.  I watched him when he decided to cry but had forgotten how to do it.  His face turned red, he made all the crying faces and then he found his breath, his sound and then he cried and cried. 

I say this because I’m trying to know the process of creation.  I’m trying to see the things I can’t see because I’ve become immune to their wonder:  the baby made, the child made, the world made.

It’s hard for me…as an adult… to say it and return and revise it again and again… and try and try and then oh hell, I just say it and those are the best things, the most direct, the most true…as simple as they actually are.

So there is something about a deliberate return to life as a child…when it just happened to me, through me, for me… there was no distance between the impulse to life and the life that I demonstrated in my body.

The foundation of making anything is trust… even if it is the trust of taking something for granted.  I sit down to write with the beginning of an idea and an impulse… and then the thoughts form, the words come.  I don’t know where it is going but it goes.  I just start to drive.  A turn comes and I take it, and that starts to shape a direction and then I take another turn and then another and then I’ve got something I can recognize and it begins to tell me what it is. 

I talked to a friend this morning.  She said the people who create things are wonderful.  She said they have courage and energy.  That made me think perhaps the act of creation itself gives the energy, and the courage comes, exactly in step.  Each unfolding of creation is exactly the same as the edge of growing courage to be known.  Some people I know are buried in snow.  I know the life is in there.  I want to help to dig them out. I want to dig myself out.  There is always a little hunger and an impulse. We have to follow that impulse….even if we can barely feel it.   If we do, it will feed itself, it will catch fire, do wondrous, unexpected things. 

The Important Questions

How did he learn to cry?

Why do we love him when he can’t do anything, is so inconvenient, is not even funny, doesn’t know us, and won’t let anyone sleep?

What made the silly song his dad made up, made him turn his head, made his mother find his name?

What is the growing edge of anything?

The world breathes, moves, loves, comes, grows, gives and lives in the now and now.

How do I get close to that, get into that, despite the fact I’m already in deep, already breathed by it and carried inside it all day long?

I am alive.

How do I remember?

Return

Have faith

Return

Again and again to

know.

I’m already a child again. I’m not too big to feel, to be, to see, to say, to learn, to make, to wonder.

 

 

 

Reflections

Evening, Mansfield Hollow, Connecticut, June 17, 2011.

Today I walked with a friend and I said some things I was feeling.  She said, "exactly".   And she said how she was feeling and I said it was like that for me also.  It was like we were reflecting each other.

I have heard it said that people need to be seen into existence.  I think that means we can't know who we are in secret.  We also say that we "see each other through" things.  Isn't that true...isn't that interesting, how we reserve this phrase for what we do for each other at the most difficult times in our lives? 

I wonder if the water and the sky are friends for each other, if they know themselves better by knowing each other.   I hope so.  They are both so beautiful; it would be a shame if they didn't know it.  Perhaps they say what each of them sees in the other ... that they have a place... they belong right here... that they are not alone.   A friend can help with all of that.

Carrying Water

This is a poster of a painting by Amado Pena.  It is named "Peoplescape One".   

I have a poster of an American Indian woman carrying water in the desert by Amado Pena.  He was kind enough to give me permission to show it to you.  His beautiful work can be seen at his website and you can view it here  (www.penagallery.com). 

I have loved this poster for thirty years, and for the longest time, could not have told you why.  The answer has been slowly unfolding in my life, especially as I have become a photographer.   My photographs are like the water.  I just work on the habit and craft of going out to get them.  And then I made the book, and now I am making this website...  just the ways to carry my pictures. 

There's a lot of water in the world... a lot of juice and flow and energy and beauty and movement.  Those of us living on the ocean and in the desert know that water is life.  I think it's our job and very great joy to carefully build our own containers and to stay with it until we know how to hold and carry this most precious thing, each in our own way,  to each other. 

Blue and Blue, taken in the early morning on September 26th, 2011 on Block Island off of Mansion Beach.