Every once in awhile two or three things happen close together in time and they work together to set off a train of thought. 

I was reading William Bridges’ ‘Transitions   Making Sense of Life’s Changes’ and ran across a quote from Carl Jung’s ‘Modern Man in Search of a Soul’ where he is talking about a man in the second half of life:

Fully aware as he is of the  social unimportance of his creative activity, he looks upon it as a way of working out his own development.

I’m pretty well into the second half of my life and that struck home;  pursuing creative activities is very important to me and I hadn’t thought of it before as a way of understanding who I am.

The second thing that happened was a repeat of a conversation between Terry Gross, host of ‘Fresh Air’ on NPR and Johnny Cash who was talking about recording songs.  He said

I would  keep trying it and do take after take until it felt comfortable with me and felt that it was coming out of me and my guitar and my voice as one.  That it was right from my soul.

Right from my soul.  Creative activity as a way of working out my own development.

I devote a lot of time to photography and Photoshop and I really don’t feel complete if I’ve been away from it too long.   My wife, who this weekend is off to quilt camp, feels the same way about her quilting.  Are these our mirrors inward?  Perhaps.  I do know that I am coming to see photography as a path in a spiritual life.

Creativity can come in at any stage of the process of making a picture.  Sometimes it is simply seeing something interesting.

Sometimes it comes about accidentally.  This one benefited from unintentional camera shake.

Sometimes it is developed in Photoshop.  As an example, I started with these two images:

and

I had originally intended for them to each stand on their own but that didn’t work out so I combined them and did a little work with Photoshop to produce this:

I have a strong feeling that if creativity, especially in the second half of life, is a way of working out one’s own development, then photography can be the torch that illuminates the way.  At least it does for me.