Deep in the darkness

Beyond the surface

Traces of passed times remain

 

Our truest life is when we are in dream awake

Henry David Thoreau

 

Connections

Neurobiology teaches us that our little brains and thoughts are all about connections and pathways. Millions and millions of them. Some used, many idle and unused.
Strengthening existing used connections and pathways builds habits, triggers learned behaviors and automatism. Just flexing and strengthening our neuronal "muscles".

Bringing tenuous unknown connections to life, exploring unknown pathways and linking old with new in unsuspected ways; that we call learning, imagination, and eventually growth.

Do you see similarities with photography?

To me, it is so much the same as making and viewing "nice pictures" versus seeing and designing "meaningful images". Making or looking at a nice picture is like sitting into a deep soft chair. It is just comforting, strengthening old pathways by reminding of the thousand others similar pictures already seen and preparing to the next thousand same ones. It feels good, it feels home, but it is a dead end. Contemplating or creating an arresting meaningful image that challenges by its content or form is a completely different process. This lets you explore these tenuous connections and discover unsuspected new worlds, or more often experience the beauty hidden in old worlds by connecting old images and thoughts in unexpected ways, bringing to life hidden connections, preparing them to grow and be the footing stone for the next step in a continuous discovery of minds, perceptions and worlds.
To me, these days, it is this difference between just one more picture and a step forward in exploring the complexity of the world and the arcane of our little brains which keeps me going and excited about photography.

Another picture

An image

June green, exploding, lush from the rains of spring and early summer downpours

Soon will the search for every drop be on again

Run and bath into the morning dew

Before long will it be a melancholic thought of times past

In magical places

Beautiful spirits raise from the past

Extracting dreams from reality

 

 Thank you Mr. McLean

Unseen buds, infinite, hidden well

Under the snow and ice, under the darkness, in every square or cubic inch,

Germinal, exquisite, in delicate lace, microscopic, unborn,

Like babes in wombs, latent, folded, compact, sleeping;

Billions of billions, and trillions of trillions of them waiting,

Urging slowly, surely forward, forming endless,

And waiting ever more, forever more behind

Walt Whitman

I sit beside the fire and think
Of all that I have seen
Of meadow flowers and butterflies
In summers that have been

...

For still there are so many things
That I have never seen
In every wood in every spring
There is a different green

...

JRR Tolkien

Thoughts about the passing of time

"...logic is the very tool of oppositional thinking

and the answer, when it comes,

arrives not as logic but as a new way of seeing..."

David Fontana
 

Photographic painting

 

... and white Zen...