treading lightly

When there's sun, light falling on things must catch me up a hundred times a day. One can see masterpiece compositions with just a gaze round the yard, or a simple walk around the neighborhood. When morning sun is falling across branches of a tree, or early twilight light falls across the corner of the stove, harsh and gentle at the same time across my grandfather's teapot, I often wonder how other people don't get caught up, too. But I don't hold any weird pride in my perceptions, as some do on such matters... Because these breathtaking displays, these unsurpassingly gorgeous sights go with the territory of earth and sun. Just as we are all fortunate for carbon-based life, and all the riches of vegetation, and water and air, etc.-- just as equally, we are fortunate for the jarring beauty of lightplay as we walk the earth.


So often, I try to photograph such images just as they are, and it just doesn't work. Like these railroad track scenes. Today is an exhilarating day - altho it's January, the sky is blue and the sun on your skin warms you so it feels like spring. It's the kind of day when you walk around without your shades on because it feels so good to have sun on your face. You can't breathe enough of this wonderful air. And these tracks caught it all - spring in the midst of winter, traveling when the rest of the world is immobilized, walking on the edge of dreamtime, the magic of tracks that will lead you into another reality. Something tugging on you, opening the doorway to ... But the photos came out a little colder, a little starker... as usual, a nice image but a creation unto itself and not the one I was trying to get. So some I stylized, casting them moody to the extreme of fantasy or impressionist. Light was hitting the lens; I just let it to see what it would do. I can't decide which I like best, or whether I should give it another try.

(When I was a young teen, there was this drawing of a fence on the beach, casting a shadow, the lines bobbing over the sand. I thought that was the most aesthetically profound thing. I really wanted it, could have and should have stolen it. I did find a similar scene in a magazine and framed that for my wall. These days, my favorite photographer is Deborah DeWit Marchant. Our eyes must be the same make.)

I've always been drawn to the aesthetics of certain structures. There must be a name for it. I like natural scenes with splintery and weathered objects, lightplay of course, geometry of lines, and objects such as

fences
rails
doorways
windows
floorboards
holes in trees
cave openings
horizons

...these tracks, for instance. I wonder what that is. I think there's a word for it in earthy mythologies/religions... I seem to remember some term in magic (magick?) for doorways as places where the worlds meet. Perhaps the theme here is miniscus?

Maybe the brain is wired for this concept not only through infastructure, but through ages of collective consciousness on the end-of-life 'light at the end of the tunnel.' Come to think of it, I guess life starts alongs those lines, too...