Blog Archives

Sweet Darkness

9/28/2013

When I can't sleep...

When I want the beauty of solitude and stillness

5 am is a good time for me...

Here are images from the Hermitage on Beaver Run and from Route 62 near Killbuck, Ohio, of the Killbuck Wetlands, just waking up.
The KillBuck Wetlands receive the water from Nashville, Ohio to the west, some 30 miles away, as the land gently slopes downward toward the wetlands.

Here is David Whyte's poem "Sweet Darkness" which has invited me into a new place, many times.

But you really don't need the poem, just to ponder the photographs might carry you into new places, where laying down what no longer brings you alive, becomes a
"no-brainer."
What is compelling to you about these images?

Sweet   Darkness

When
your eyes are tired
the world is tired also.
When
your vision has gone
no part of the world can find
you.

Time
to go into the dark
where the night has eyes
to recognize its
own.
There
you can be sure
you are
not beyond love.
The
dark will be your womb
tonight.
The
night will give you a horizon
further than you can
see.
You
must learn one thing:
the world was made to be free
in.
Give
up all the other worlds
except the one to which you belong.
Sometimes
it takes darkness and the sweet
confinement of your aloneness
to
learn
anything
or anyone
that does not bring you alive is too small for
you.

                                               ~
David Whyte ~

What is compelling
to you
about these photographs?

1 Comment

Never Done That Before...

9/17/2013

1 Comment

"The Elder Trees: Poets and Mystics of the Forest" is now on exhibit at Martin de Porres Center through October 17. ( 25 classic photographs of arbors from over a decade, the oddest bunch of friendly giants you'd ever meet. There is also booklet some 27 pages long of my perspective on photography, and notes about each photograph, relating each to the spiritual life which is available to use beside the exhibit. )

Never Done That Before... had a video made in front of an exhibit that is so smooth and beautifully put together.
I hope you'll use this link and take a look: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D_OUMUTfEsM
Here is the address information:
            September 3 – October 17, 2013
Martin De Porres Center
2330 Airport Drive, Columbus, OH 45219
A reception will take place October 17 from 7 - 9:00pm.

The directions are easy: take 270 around the east side of Columbus, then the exit route 640 toward the airport.  Take the exit for Cassidy Road and follow it for about 3 miles. When it ends at a stop light, turn right and then an immediate right is the driveway to the De Porres Center. Drive in, bear left to the stop sign, turn right and opposite the front door (on the right) is a few parking spots for visitors (on the left) or keep going a tiny bit further and there are more visitor spots, and keep going, and there is a parking lot with a gate that keeps out the 64 wheelers.

The reception on the 17th of October will close the exhibit.  At 7:30 pm I'll be presenting with music/poetry/photographs, what the principles of classic photography are. I'll draw upon the photography of Dorothea Lange and Sam Abell, and Georgia O'Keeffe the painter who lived in Glen Falls NY and then fell in love with the desert above Taos, New Mexico. The principles for classic photography have changed my ability to see, to look, to wait, and move on. Sam Abell wrote that these principles are not only priceless for creating beautiful photographs, but one could base their life on them. Come and see how that might be true for you?

1 Comment

What If I walked around to the other side?

9/17/2013

0 Comments

The Light was harsh on a cluster of white birch, who were busily--peeling-1/8-inch-a-day-busy--just too bright and blinding to see the beauty of the white, glistening, silvery gleam of the bark. And then green lichens were adding their 2 cents worth... they were probably 70 years old... nature works more on hundred year increments, and million year increments.

With all this harsh, blinding Light, the question came out of the blue.... (actually from the tree)
What if I walk around to the other side? Flexibility, looking from a different perspective, having no judgment just walking around the tree 360 degrees. It was definitely the tree speaking to me: "Walk around to the other side. Show some creativity about where you stand. Does the Star stay in the same place in the sky all day long? Does the Earth refuse to rotate? Rotate your 'bod' around me," said the birch tree.

So NOT wanting to be the rigid "know-it-all" of decades ago, I took the suggestion/wisdom--and the whole idea was reinforced when the Birch Tree dared to add, "If the Earth could rotate its 'bod' completely and continually for 11.4 billion years, I could probably do the same around this beautiful Birch Tree in 10 seconds."

So here is the side in the shadow side of the Birch Tree( whose name "birch" is 10,000 years old ). I guess you could say the shadow side of this Birch Tree is sort of like the dark side of the moon: what we don't see, is often surprisingly elegant.
Moving very close to the tree to get the shadow side exposure acccurely, she and I created this striking display of beauty, that I could not have seen, had I not rotated my 'bod.'

The Star would have preferred otherwise, but I'm now an adult, and not a kid who does what everybody else says I should do... including the Star. The nerve of her!

The Star expressed her dispeasure by sending a blinding array of Photons all around the peelng birch... but it made no difference. I was shooting in manual, which also meant my camera was not impressed either. "The exposure is set for the shade, and that is that" ( that's what my camera was saying to the Star, with an edge of stubbornness ). How grateful I am that "manual" on my camera also stands for a healthy degree of stubbornness.

Back home at my PC I said into the air, "Sorry, Charlie, all that blinding light, (angry?) is going away. So I painted with a black brush. My brush can get as small as one pixel, but my preferred smallest size is 4 pixels. And going around the edges of the Birch tree, the blazing Light slowly... s-l-o-w-l-y became black.

So that's the story. In the ancient days, they used to conclude with a moral. The moral of this story is, if the Earth can rotate its 'Bod' completely in 24 hours, which is going P-R-E-T-T-Y fast, then I can rotate my 'bod' to the other side of a Birch Tree for a different perspective... or to the shadow side of an other person to see life from their perspective... and moving my 'bod' to do that, isn't such a big deal as I make it, compared to what the Earth does A-L-L the time.

S-S-S-O-O-O-, Slow down, go easy, rest when tired, look, I mean L-O-O-K, just take the next right step, not the 3rd or 4th, just the next right step.

I've got a lot of voices inside me, some of them have some good things to say. I pay as much attention to them as I can, and I educate the others. ( That seems to be the best way for those negative voices, not to get into a fight with them which I always lose, but educate them)

How are you coming with rotating your 'bod' and educating those negative voices?

0 Comments

Tree Roots, Wide and Deep

9/6/2013

0 Comments

Tree roots, deep and wide.

These tree roots are growing into the darkness without eyes to see what is ahead of them, drawn by the subtle mystery of Gravity to the heart of the Earth. Gravity, a mystery that holds all of us on the surface of the Earth, grounded perhaps, but this gentle force is more like a kindly luring of us closer to Earth’s heart.

And yet at the same time, the thickening branches have been stretching upward for a century and more.

The Star sends forth billions of photons of light energy in all directions into the universe. Most miss the tiny Earth in this Universe of billions of galaxies. Of those that arrive for this tree in particular, they are immediately absorbed and transformed into something new which never existed before, born all over again into colors by the tree and bark and visible roots which we and other creatures with eyes can see.

The Star, the Earth, and the Moon have an alluring quality which draws each closer to the other but also an opposing energy that keeps them apart, separate and distinct bodies of the Universe, much like the attraction and separateness of lovers. Imagine the joy of the tree as she receives the photons from the moon in the blacks and blues of night, whose photons have this alluring, drawing closer quality, and then the first photons of life and love from the Star, even before the Sky begins to be transformed into pinks and yellows. Such love from the Maker to create a universe that can as well create with rhythms and patterns our tiny minds cannot fathom, but we can express our wonder and amazement and joy. How do you experience the allurement of the sun and moon to draw closer?

John Holliger

0 Comments

Sweet Darkness

Never Done That Before...

What If I walked around to the other side?

Tree Roots, Wide and Deep

John Holliger

Categories

Archives