Category Archives: Spirituality

Sycamores in the mist

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When we lived in Maine we loved the large birch trees with their peeling white bark.  Here in Indiana we don’t have much in the way of birch trees, certainly nothing to rival those in northern New England.  But we do have sycamores.  Their bark peels too and underneath the peeled bark the ‘skin’ of the tree is often white, or near white.  In the summer they are beautiful trees that don’t stand out too much from those around them, but come winter, it’s a different story.

We had some mist yesterday morning and it was too good an opportunity to pass up.  Sycamores in the mist!  In some respects that is about like trying to find our white dogs in a snow storm but not quite.  The sycamores stand out from their neighbors and the mist wasn’t that heavy.  In fact it was rather light but there was enough to make it interesting.

The mist provided a lovely indistinctness to the trees, a softness that seemed to make the trees want to be seen more as contrasting colors than as textures.  I was happy to oblige. 

Some treatment (but not a lot) in Photoshop gave it a story book character.  If you said you saw Hansel and Gretel among the trees I would be ready to look.

I’ve always wanted a painterly effect and this provided it.

And when the mist was lifting, there was more texture evident.

If I’ve learned one thing about photography this year, it is that good shooting is available in just about any weather.  There is always a gift for someone who will just be open to it and  look for it.  I all but bolted out the door to go shooting and my wife smiled and made a comment about the six year old going to the park.  Guilty as charged and proud of it.

Art and spirituality

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If you are serious about your photography or any other creative hobby – passionate about it – you are likely treating it as a way of expressing yourself, as an art form. As it turns out, interest in art is often closely related to interest in spirituality as is evident in the work of Robert Wuthnow, a Princeton sociologist.

Wuthnow has done extensive work on spirituality and art. His book “All in Sync.” describes the results of a large study in which he looked at how music and art enrich the spiritual lives of people who are interested in art but are not professional artists. The major conclusion is clear: there is a strong relationship between spirituality and art in the population at large; the more interested one is in art, the more likely one is to take spirituality seriously.

Wuthnow’s principal measure was the individual’s score on the Artistic Interest Scale. Respondents were rated by the interviewer on this scale which had been developed by Wuthnow. The more artistic activities in which the interviewee participated, the higher the score. Playing an instrument, writing poetry, singing etc. were among the activities contributing to the score. Here are some representative results: the higher the score, the more likely it is the individual will

  • Pray
  • Include music or art as part of prayer
  • Seek the guidance of a spiritual director
  • Participate in services to the community such as feeding the homeless, helping those leaving prison make the transition to the larger community, helping children who are behind in school, etc.

These are correlational results and we cannot tell whether an interest in spirituality causes people to be artistic or that an interest in art leads to growth in spirituality or that both are caused by some third factor. For our purposes it is enough to say that interests in art and spirituality are related. If you are passionate about photography or whatever your art may be,  you are likely to be interested in spirituality as well.

So this strong relationship between photography (art) and spirituality we have noticed in us as individuals,  is there for many others as well.  Maybe a blog like this one, which stresses this relationship, was a good idea after all.

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If you are serious about your photography – passionate about it – you are likely treating it as a way of expressing yourself, as an art form. As it turns out, interest in art is often closely related to interest in spirituality as is evident in the work of Robert Wuthnow, a Princeton sociologist.

Wuthnow has done extensive work on spirituality and art. His book “All in Sync.” describes the results of a large study in which he looked at how music and art enrich the spiritual lives of people who are interested in art but are not professional artists. The major conclusion is clear: there is a strong relationship between spirituality and art in the population at large; the more interested one is in art, the more likely one is to take spirituality seriously.

Wuthnow’s principal measure was the individual’s score on the Artistic Interest Scale. Respondents were rated by the interviewer on this scale which had been developed by Wuthnow. The more artistic activities in which the interviewee participated, the higher the score. Playing an instrument, writing poetry, singing etc. were among the activities contributing to the score. Here are some representative results: the higher the score, the more likely it is the individual will

  • Pray
  • Include music or art as part of prayer
  • Seek the guidance of a spiritual director
  • Participate in services to the community such as feeding the homeless, helping those leaving prison make the transition to the larger community, helping children who are behind in school, etc.

These are correlational results and we cannot tell whether an interest in spirituality causes people to be artistic or that an interest in art leads to growth in spirituality or that both are caused by some third factor. For our purposes it is enough to say that interests in art and spirituality are related. If you are passionate about photography you are likely to be interested in spirituality as well.

A dreary day?

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The forecast today was for partial sun.  Wherever the sun was, it was somewhere else.  But fog came up about 10:00 and it looked interesting. 

David Ward, an excellent British landscape photographer, identifies three elements of a good image – beauty, simplicity and mystery.  The fog was simplifying the image and adding mystery to it.  A little work in Photoshop helped bring out the feeling of the day which wasn’t quite so evident in the original pixels.

There were surprises, too, both for me and these white tailed deer. 

The fog was the initial attraction but it was lifting and the nearer subjects were were speaking their own quiet messages.

To the eye, a ‘dreary’ day looks so flat but the colors are more saturated and even if the trees do not cast visible shadows, the leaves still reflect more light on one side than on the other.

These were the gifts of the day.  It wasn’t too cold and certainly not too warm and the light was just right.  A good day to be alive.

A simple spirituality: Part 3

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In my last post I introduced the basis for my own spirituality as I understand it.  I would like to say this is what that spirituality is, but I’m still discovering new aspects of it.  Here are the basic tenets:

  • God is the original creator and continues to create.
  • Everything is part of God, God is in everything, everything in the Universe is therefore connected.
  • We humans, as part of God, participate in creating.
  • The consequences of our actions are far broader than we can see.

I’ll develop these ideas over future posts and today I will start with the last, concerning consequences of our actions.  It begins with this: we were on our way to Maine for the wedding of the daughter of friends of over 40 years.

These friends were originally from Tennessee but have lived in Maine ever since we have known them.  Tennessee is still in their voices.  We stopped for dinner on the way up and my wife Ellie wanted to get a small gift for Mary Lee.  She saw a t-shirt with the inscription ‘GRITS  Girls Raised In The South’ and bought it.  Mary Lee liked the shirt but with all the activity around the wedding, it was quickly forgotten.

Our friends go back to Tennessee every year and we make it a point to get together for a couple of days.  Some years after the wedding we were together and Mary Lee asked if we had any favorite Southern women writers.  We mentioned Bailey White but didn’t come up with others.  Then Mary Lee said ‘Oh, let me tell you what this is about.’  She had been walking down the street in Brunswick ME wearing the GRITS t-shirt.  A woman came up to her and said that she was raised in the South too.  Well, one thing led to another, and out of this came a kind of support group of several women raised in the South.  They have lunches, a book group, etc.  All of this out of the choice of a simple gift.  Who would have known?

On another occasion, Ellie, our friend Joyce and I were coming back from a trip and stopped in Berea, KY, a community strong in arts and crafts.  We were wandering around a gift shop and since we were the only customers in the store, the clerk wasn’t busy and there was an appealing dog there, I asked the clerk if she minded if I photographed the dog.  She said sure, go ahead.

I offered to send her pictures via email but she said while her husband did email, she didn’t.  The way she said that suggested that she didn’t want to ask her husband to bring the pictures up for her.  I asked if I could send her prints and she gave me her address.  I sent off a couple of 5 X 7s and forgot about it.  Several weeks later I got a thank you note in which she said that she and her husband were now divorced and that Aris, the dog, was one of her few friends.  Who would have known?

A simple spirituality: Part 2

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The roots of our spiritual lives run deep.  In my latter years, I find connections among interests and events throughout my life that I was not aware of.  I will talk about my history here in hopes that it will encourage you to do the same.  You may be surprised at what you find.

I was born at the outbreak of World War II, in 1939.  My father went off to the Navy toward the end of the war and my mother, brother and I lived with my father’s parents for awhile.  I was six years old and in the first grade at school.  In those days parents were more trusting and didn’t worry about children being abducted.   I walked to school by myself.

School was about 10 blocks from home and a park, four blocks long, was along the way.  Since the park offered piles of leaves to kick, buckeyes to pick up and shine on the side of my nose, a fountain and a pond with frogs and goldfish as well as a woodland fragrance that had more come hither to it than an expensive perfume, I was detained on my way to school.  Since I went home for lunch and then back to school, well, four trips a day by the park was more temptation than an inquisitive six year old could deal with.  There were conversations at home about being late to school.

There was nothing wrong with school, I just found the park more interesting and for that matter, more nourishing.  I find it interesting that for most kids the park was usually just a place to pass through but for me it was a destination.  I felt more alive there, more in tune with something larger than myself.  To this day if I am sitting in a boring meeting or just need calming down I go back to the park in my head.  It has a connection for me that it took many years to recognize as spiritual.

One of the reasons recognition of the connection as spiritual was delayed is that I grew up in the ‘40s and ‘50s in mainline Protestant churches where the emphasis was on personal salvation and doing good works for other people.  There is a lot of good in that, it isn’t to be slighted, but the implicit assumption at the time was that the Earth, our planet, is here as a stage on which to live our lives as people to be saved.  No particular intrinsic worth of the planet was explicitly recognized: animals are nice but they don’t have souls;  trees need to be harvested for building houses; beautiful property needs to be developed; strip mining isn’t a great idea but it is efficient, etc.  All this proceeded, I think, out of the assumption that we are at most indirectly connected to the rest of Creation.

About 30 years ago my wife, our two children and I were members of a church in New Jersey.  One Sunday a student pastor was preaching and asked the question ‘do you love God?’  The only concept of God I had was as a rather moody authoritarian father figure and it was difficult to think of God in loving terms.  The question resonated with me but didn’t get a good answer.  However, it did stick.

About 15 years ago I read three books that reframed my spiritual journey.  Actually there was more to it than that, I found I could actually have a spiritual journey.  This was exciting.  One of the books had been suggested by the patent attorney at work.  It was ‘The Dream of the Earth’ by Thomas M. Berry. Another was Matthew Fox’s ‘Original Blessing’,  recommended by a wise pastor friend.  I found Sallie McFague’s ‘Models of God’ through a TV interview she did.

It wasn’t so much that the books by Berry and Fox imparted a lot of new information.  What they did more than anything was bring to the surface ideas that I wasn’t aware that I had and give them a coherent framework.  After reading them I had the beginnings of my own cohering view; it wasn’t yet coherent but it was making progress.  Without going into a lot of detail – for all I know these books would be of no interest and something else might be far more appropriate for you – here is the outline of that view which you will see is an expansion of what I said in my last post:

  • God is the original creator and continues to create.
  • Everything is part of God, God is in everything, everything in the Universe is therefore connected.
  • We humans, as part of God, participate in creating.
  • The consequences of our actions are far broader than we can see.

‘Models of God’ was downright exciting in that it offered many ways of thinking about and addressing God.  McFague offered the possibility of thinking of God as Father, Mother, Lover, Friend etc., take your pick of these or something else entirely.  All of these models and more are offered in the Bible.  The power of this approach is suggested in a couple of examples.  Suppose you have had a difficult time with your father.  Would you find it easier to address God as Father or perhaps as Mother?  As another example try the following exercise.  Imagine God as a strict authoritarian and then imagine God as an understanding mother.  Write prayers to each and compare them.  If you are like several people who did that exercise, they will be dramatically different prayers.  How you think of God affects how you address God and perhaps where you see signs of God in the world.

With these books as backdrop, my experience in the park was more understandable; I was going to church.  I’ve been to places of great beauty including Rocky Mountain NP, Great Smoky Mountains NP, Yosemite NP, Glacier NP, Yellowstone NP, Grand Tetons NP, Custer State Park in South Dakota, the Badlands and many others.  They all share the ambience of holiness for me.  Now that I had different ways of thinking about God I could answer the question about whether I love God.  I do indeed.  And beyond that I could begin to understand what those connections that form sometimes in photographic moments are – they are connections back to God and God’s creation.  They are spiritual.

Once I became aware of the possibility of spirituality influencing photography I was very gratified to see how many other photographers had something to say that was in one way or another related to the same point.  I’m sure many of them would not see the relationship between photography and spirituality exactly as I do, but I think you will see some similarities:

Minor White:

When you approach something to photograph it, first be still with yourself until the object of your attention affirms your presence. Then don’t leave until you have captured its essence.

Robert Adams:

‘Why is photography, like the other arts, that kind of intoxication?  And a quieter pleasure too, so that occasionally photographers discover tears in their eyes for the joy of seeing.  I think it is because they have known a miracle.  They‘ve been given what they did not earn, and as is the way with unexpected gifts, the surprise carries an emotional blessing.  When photographers get beyond copying the achievements of others, or just repeating their own accidental first successes, they learn that they do not know where in the world they will find pictures.  Nobody does.  Each photograph that works is a revelation to its supposed creator.  Yes photographers do position themselves to take advantage of good fortune, sensing for instance when to stop the car and walk, but this is only the beginning.  As William Stafford wrote, calculation gets you just so far – ‘Smart is okay, but lucky is better.’  Days of searching can go by without any need to reload film holders, and then abruptly, sometimes back in their own yards, photographers use up every sheet.’  Robert Adams ‘Why people photograph’, Aperture, NY, 1994, pp 15-16.

There is an old Buddhist proverb to the effect ‘When the student is ready, the teacher will appear.’  It took this student (often called a late bloomer) a while to get ready, but the teachers, he finds, are there in abundance – White,  Adams and many others.  They are there for you too.

A simple spirituality: Part 1

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With the recent snow fall, I’ve been out shooting every day.  Snow does something special with common, everyday scenes.

If I had been out with one of my photography friends, it may well have happened that I was the only one to see this.  My friend would likely be shooting something else, equally compelling to them.  What is it that causes us to make one photograph and not another?  I’ve been out shooting with several friends and it is a routine topic of conversation – we all shoot in the same area and come back with different sets of images.   John Kennerdell, writing in The Online Photographer said:

‘My experience has been that we don’t choose our best subjects. They come to us, insistent and demanding.’

Your best subjects will be different from my best subjects.  What is insistent and demanding to one of us may not be to the other.  For each of us there is a connection that forms with a subject that we choose or perhaps it chooses us and that connection can be quite insistent.  The connection to the scene above yelled at me when I was taking the dogs for a walk a few minutes earlier and wasn’t going to settle down until I came back and did what I was supposed to do.  This sort of thing is quite common in the arts.  I’ll bet you have experienced something similar to that.

I suppose we could leave it that there is a connection of some kind and not look further into the nature of that connection.  It seems to me though, that there is something deeper going on here, something I would call spiritual and my intention for creating this blog is to explore that spiritual element.  I have found that I am in good company with that interest.  Minor White, for example, says

‘No matter how slow the film, Spirit always stands still long enough for the photographer It has chosen.’

I have been a spiritual seeker for many years.  I started out in a pretty conservative Protestant church and over the years have come to a broader view of spirituality and religion.  I still go to church but the source of my spiritual thinking is as much the world as it is the Bible.  Without getting into too much detail, the following summarizes the important part of my beliefs that relate to photography:

  • God is in everything, everything is in God
  • Everything in the Universe is connected

So what does it mean to go out and make photographs?  For me photographing God’s creation is recording some faint trace of God.  This doesn’t make every trip out with a camera a solemn occasion.  It fact it is usually a freeing and joyous experience, sometimes tinged with a bit of humor.

Meister Eckhart, a German mystic and theologian of the late 13th and early 14th centuries, seems to be speaking directly to me when he says

‘This then, is salvation: to marvel at the beauty of created things and to marvel at the beauty of their Creator’

Pete Myers, a photographer writing on the Luminous Landscape website, seems to be echoing Meister Eckhart when he says

‘When I am out in the field photographing, I enter what for me is a ‘sacred space.’’

It would be unwise to overinterpret what Mr. Myers says.  He may disagree with the thrust of this blog post but he does go on to say that he is there to be open to the moment and be absorbed in the beauty of it.  For me, it is indeed a sacred space.  It is God’s creation and one of our joys in life is to appreciate it.

More on this later.

This is turning into a favorite place

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My friend Becky and I went to Fort Harrison State Park the other day to see what there was to see and photograph.trees_7880_2

I find that sometimes it’s good to go out with someone else; each of us sees things the other doesn’t.  This doesn’t mean, though, that we end up shooting the same scenes.  Sure, there are some shots that are very similar to one another but the majority aren’t.  We could be standing side by side and the shots would still be very different.teasel_7765

The conversation was good and the shooting opportunities were plentiful.  It is always a source of wonder to me that what I bring back from one of these jaunts is nothing like what I would have anticipated getting.  So I usually just don’t try to anticipate.  Great encouragement for living in the moment.trees_7635_3

It is in those moments in the present that the connection is felt.  After a while the dialog with Becky drops off to brief exchanges as we walk from one place to another and the dialog with the scene picks up.  I have no idea what the content of that dialog is, it obviously isn’t words.  But it is there and it is in the connection.  I’m coming to think that these felt connections are traces and hints of our spiritual identity making contact with the world.  It is something to celebrate.backlight_7800_2

I have/had trouble praying

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From the time I was small, I’ve had a problem with prayer.  As long as I stick to standard prayers – the Lord’s Prayer and some other memorized prayers- I am alright but as soon as I go off into prayers for specific people or situations I get stuck and my mind wanders.  But that isn’t quite true, my mind also wanders during the Lord’s Prayer, any prayer or any time for that matter.rock_5343_2s

I got into a conversation about this with three of my friends, all of them solid church goers and dedicated contributors to the community.  All four of us admitted to problems with prayer.  All of us are men and one of us is a minister.   Now that I think about it we never did pursue that problem very far, perhaps none of us knew quite what to do.

Some weeks later and in a different context the minister friend recommended Barbara Brown Taylor’s ‘An Altar in the World:  A Geography of Faith.’  Ms. Taylor had been an Episcopal priest for several years before going into writing and teaching full time.  She had been named by Baylor University as one of the 12 most effective preachers in the English speaking world.  I had been prepared to take her seriously anyway but that pushed her book to the top of my reading list.  The deeper I got into the book the more interesting it got.  And then there was this:

‘I would rather show someone my checkbook stubs than talk about my prayer life.  I would rather confess that I am a rotten godmother, that I struggle with my weight, that I fear I am overly fond of Bombay Sapphire gin martinis than confess I am a prayer-weakling.  To say I love God but I do not pray much is like saying I love life but I do not breathe much.’  (p 176)

Now she really had my attention.  And to cap it off a few pages later she took her cue from Brother David Steindl-Rast, author of ‘Gratefulness, The Heart Of Prayer’, in suggesting that

‘Prayer…is waking up to the presence of God no matter where I am or what I am doing.’  (p 178)

Alright!  Prayer isn’t just a recitation of fixed passages or verbal requests for God’s attention.  I knew that all along but for a truly outstanding minister to admit she has trouble praying, as I suspect many of us do, was quite a revelation.  But she went further than our little group of four men had gone by pointing out that just being aware of the presence of God no matter what we are doing is a form of prayer.  And_there_was_light_7289_7289_2

If we are wiping a child’s nose, running a backhoe, mowing the lawn, watching a ball game, helping out in a soup kitchen, playing with the dog, any of these activities – and are aware of the presence of God, we are praying.  I think that would include the activity of photography.

A definition of spirituality

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In the last post I asked the question whether my experience of photographing two Canada geese coming together on a spring morning could be described as ‘spiritual.’  People use the term spiritual in many different ways so before going much further it would be useful to have a working definition of the term.

Canada geese at dawn

Canada geese at dawn

What the word “spiritual” means for you is unlikely to be exactly the same as what it means for me for a very good reason – we are different people.  Start with this definition of spiritual identity:

‘the pattern of beliefs, attitudes and feelings about the Sacred and the world – a pattern that defines who you are at the profoundest level.’ (From Skylight Paths, Who Is My God?: An Innovative Guide to Finding Your Spiritual Identity, Skylight Paths Publishing; March 2004, p5)

Beliefs, attitudes, feelings about the Sacred – a defining pattern.

This definition looks very much like the definition the American Psychological Association gives for personality:

‘the unique psychological qualities of an individual that influence a variety of characteristic behavior patterns (both overt and covert) across different situations and over time.” (From http://www.psychologymatters.org/glossary.html#p)

The APA definition explicitly ties personality to behavior, the definition of spiritual identity implies behavior.

Some could go on for years making finer and finer distinctions between these two definitions but at a practical level they strongly overlap. Work the term “Sacred” into the APA definition and the definitions are indistinguishable in a practical sense. Our spiritual identity and personality, to the extent they are even different from one another, are entwined and an attempt to pull them apart would do damage to both. Our personalities are all different, our spiritual identities are also different. An attempt to offer a more precise definition for spirituality that works for everyone is not a fruitful exercise because the form spirituality takes depends so heavily on the individual.

Our definition describes spiritual identity.  I am going to treat spirituality as the way that identity manifests itself.  Here is where things get a bit complicated because spirituality is just one of the factors contributing to the choice of what we photograph and how we photograph it.  A shooting agenda (I’ve got to get a picture of sunlight dappling the leaves in fall color), responding to the influence of other photographers  (I’d like to do one like Freeman Patterson does it), other things being on our mind (my 401K is going down the tubes) and other factors contribute as well.  We will have more to say about this in future posts.

This is all wonderful stuff but what does it mean for us as photographers?

Here are some implications:

  • If you and I go out to shoot within the same two acre plot, we will come back with different images.  We are different people, we see the world a bit differently and our photographs are different.
  • Whatever we do, whether it is eating breakfast or looking for that next great photographic inspiration, will involve our spiritual identity to one extent or another.  After all, it is part of who we are.
  • We often aren’t even aware of the spiritual component in our everyday lives, let alone in our photography.  It may be crowded out by agendas and other competing factors or we might not even be aware of a genuine spiritual impulse.  By tying spiritual identity to the Sacred and not God, the door is open for people who aren’t religious or perhaps don’t believe there is a god to be included in this discussion.  Just about everyone holds something sacred and that may be the touchstone for those peoples’ spiritual life.  In a later post we will talk about ‘The Little Book of Atheist Spirituality’ by Andre Comte-Sponville.  Comte-Sponville provides a fresh understanding about how atheism, for some people at least, can be compatible with a spiritual life.

    Reflection, Fall Creek Gorge, Indiana

    Reflection, Fall Creek Gorge, Indiana

I don’t know that many will agree with my definitions of spiritual identity and spirituality, I offer them here as a place to begin and as a reference point for what, at least, I believe.