Tag Archives: Kentucky
Cumberland River, foggy morning
Red River Gorge, Kentucky
Several members of our camera club went down to the Red River Gorge a few weeks ago. We had beautiful weather and many of the leaves were still on the trees.
If the weather had been like that of the previous week – rain, rain and more rain – we might have spent a lot of time indoors playing checkers or something. But the weather was a gift.
I don’t think this fellow caught anything but then I don’t think he cared.
We spend a lot of moments thinking about the future or the past. With a scene like this there is a strong call to stay right here in the present.
I’m ready to go again.
A simple spirituality: Part 3
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 definition of spirituality
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
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
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.
Photography and something more
I was in position. The digital camera lens and sensor were both clean and the battery was fresh. The camera was on the tripod, ISO was set at 100 and the camera was ready to take up to five pictures per second just by holding down the button. The camera was focused on the male Canada goose in the foreground.
The technical side of the job was done and it was time to just be in the present and enjoy what the day had to offer. There was a delicate scent of spring, the sound of birds calling and the promise of warmer weather in the softness of the breeze.
I had my hopes. We had seen a female goose come join the male the day before. Maybe she would be back. It was time to wait. If I didn’t know what would happen, it was at least a great day to be outside and see what was going on.
We were staying at Natural Bridge State Resort Park in Kentucky and in the mornings we would go over to Mill Creek Lake. It was late April and the trees were budding. The first few mornings were fine but not particularly noteworthy as far as photography was concerned.
This morning was misty and the sky above was clear. The possibilities were improving.
The male goose called and around the bend came the female who surprised us by settling on the water about 40 feet away rather than coming directly to him. Off he went to join her.
All I had to do was push the button and watch. I got in 14 shots between the time she arrived and they were together. That coming together of two instinct-driven gorgeous birds will be with me for a long time. This was far better than anything I had hoped for!
There was a real rush in this moment. The lake with golden mist was an outdoor cathedral and the geese were participants in a ritual that goes back to the beginning of life as we think of it. I had prepared as well as I knew how so I could just be there and not worry about what the camera would do. I would have been grateful to just be present to see this. To get the pictures as well was a blessing, ‘a good measure, pressed down, shaken together, running over (Luke 6:38).’ The moment was touched with something beyond the ordinary. Would it be correct to describe it as spiritual?
The central theme of this blog is that spirituality and photography mutually nourish one another. Spirituality can enhance the experience of photography and photography can strengthen spirituality. The result, for me, is a greater awareness of beauty and mystery in the world, a greater appreciation of God and God’s creation, a greater sense of connection to it all.
We’ll talk a lot more about this over time and I hope that as a result you may find posts and articles of interest to you. I won’t say I have answers to the important questions; I’m a seeker and at best I am simply more aware of the journey and the joy of being on it than I have been in the past. Join me!
Spirit and Seeing 