Contemplative Photography Workshop - the Final Day

After five marvellous days, the Contemplative Photography workshop has come to an end. I will need time to fully integrate the experience, but I feel privileged to have been taught by such an inspired teacher, Peter West Nutting, and to have shared the experience with such talented and welcoming fellow travellers. As always with peak experiences, I'm feeling contradictory pangs: I'm anxious to return home and reconnect with my loving Bill, while at the same time already missing the daily discipline and delight of the workshop.

I hope to blog more about the experience in the weeks ahead. For now, here are some initial thoughts on this final day's exercise.

Today's focus was to winnow down the photographs I recorded during the week to the three that best reflected the theme of the workshop. It was tough! With the help of my new Minneapolis friend, Kassie, however, I made the hard choices. I helped her do the same thing with her photographs.

Here are two quotations that frame the winnowing/discernment process:

"Essential to the practice of discernment is learning when to say yes and when to say no. In this way, we frame and give limits to how we devote our energy." - Christine Valters Paintner

"Discernment is a process of letting go of what we are not." - Thomas Keating

And here is today's poem:

The Ponds, by Mary Oliver

Every year
the lilies
are so perfect
I can hardly believe

their lapped light crowding
the black,
mid-summer ponds.
Nobody could count them -

the muskrats swimming
among the pads and the grasses
can reach out
their muscular arms and touch

only so many, they are that
rife and wild.
But what in this world
is perfect?

I bend closer and see
how this one is clearly lopsided -
and that one wears an orange blight -
and this one is a glossy cheek

half nibbled away -
and that one is a slumped purse
full of its own
unstoppable decay.

Still, what I want in my life
is to be willing
to be dazzled -
to cast aside the weight of facts

and maybe even
to float a little
above this difficult world.
I want to believe I am looking

into the the white fire of a great mystery.
I want to believe that the imperfections are nothing -
that the light is everything - that is more than the sum
of each flawed blossom rising and fading. And I do.


Here are my top three photographs. I hope you enjoy them.

Detail from the sculpture "Community" by Joseph O'Connell. The sculpture is in the entrance to the Benedictine Sacred Heart Chapel on the campus of the College of Saint Benedict.

Purple scarf in the College of Saint Benedict bookstore.

Shadow of the water tower at the western end of the college campus.

Contemplative Photography Workshop - Day 4

The theme of today's workshop was 'Simplicity', where we were to be mindful of focusing our cameras on one object without the background distracting from the image. It's harder than it sounds!

Here are the prompts that Peter used:

"The ability to simplify means to eliminate the unnecessary so that the necessary may speak."
(Hans Hoffmann)

"There can be great power in trying to say one thing well."
(Christine Valters Painter)

And here is today's poem:

Eyes
(Written in 2002 by the Nobel-Prize-winning Polish poet, Czeslaw Milosz)

My most honorable eyes. You are not in the best shape.
I receive from you an image less sharp,
And if a color, then it's dimmed.
And you were a pack of royal hounds
With whom I would set forth in the early morning,
My wondrously quick eyes, you saw many things,
Countries and cities. Islands and oceans.
Together we greeted immense sunrises,
When the fresh air invited us to run
Along trails just dry from cold night dew.
Now what you have seen is hidden inside
And changed into memory or dreams.
Slowly I move away from the fair of this world
And I notice in myself a distaste
For monkeyish dress, shrieks, and drumbeats.
What a relief. Alone with my meditation
On the basic similarity of humans
And their tiny grain of dissimilarity.
Without my eyes, my gaze is fixed on one bright point
That grows large and takes me in.

Here are the images I recorded that tried to accomplish the goal of simplicity.

Enjoy!

Contemplative Photography Workshop - Day 3

Today, Peter had us working on a 'wabi-sabi' assignment. According to Leonard Koren, the Japanese concept of wabi-sabi connotes a 'beauty of things imperfect, impermanent, and incomplete. It is a beauty of things modest and humble. It is a beauty of things unconventional."

As a group, the workshop participants walked in silent contemplation to the nearby water tower on the campus. Our challenge was to look intensely at the water tower and its surrounding farm buildings and record images that reflected wabi-sabi - "underplayed…modest…undeclared beauty that waits patiently to be discovered," according to architect Tadao Ando.

Here is the poem Peter used as a prompt.

You Reading This, Be Ready
by William Stafford

Starting here, what do you want to remember?
How sunlight creeps along a shining floor?
What scent of old wood hovers, what softened
sound from outside fills the air?

Will you ever bring a better gift for the world
than the breathing respect that you carry
wherever you go right now? Are you waiting
for time to show you some better thoughts?

When you turn around, starting here, lift this
new glimpse that you found; carry into evening
all that you want from this day. This interval you spent
reading or hearing this, keep it for life -

What can anyone give you greater than now,
starting here, right in this room, when you turn around?


I was intrigued by the exercise and loved the quest for wabi-sabi images. However, when I downloaded them later, I was disappointed. Most of the images were mundane and boring. Here are the only two that I really liked.

While searching for these images, I also recorded two others that did not fit into the parameters of the assignment, but I liked them anyway. The first one is of the shadow cast by the water tower we visited on the grass below:

The second is of the electric cart that two of the nuns used to collect lilies for the monastery. As the cart whooshed by me, both nuns smiled and waved, wishing me a good day. I love this image!

Finally, a 'just because' image. Late yesterday afternoon, a wild thunderstorm galloped through the area. As the sun was going down at dusk, the storm system was still clearing out. The roiling clouds were spectacular. Enjoy!

Contemplative Workshop - Day 2

It was another stimulating, energizing day in the Contemplative Photography Workshop that I'm taking at the Friends General Conference (Quaker) Gathering in Minnesota.

We have been talking a great deal about seeing the usual in unusual ways - seeing the "holy ordinary".

Today's assignment was to focus on bold, unexpected colours.


Instructions for Living A Life
by Mary Oliver

Pay attention.
    Be astonished.
        Tell about it.

Here are my astonishing images from today. Enjoy!

Contemplative Photography Workshop - Quaker Gathering

Today marks the first day of my five-day Contemplative Photography workshop at the annual Friends General Conference (Quaker) Gathering in St. Joseph, Minnesota, about ninety minutes west of Minneapolis. The workshop is being given by the very talented Quaker photographer Peter West Nutting. Twenty fellow travellers and I are experiencing a week of photographic heaven.

Peter uses poetry to inspire our daily exercises. Here is today's poem, "Mindful" by Mary Oliver, plus the photos I took in response to the poem.

Enjoy.

Mindful
by Mary Oliver

Every day
    I see or I hear
        something
            that more or less

kills me
    with delight
        that leaves me
            like a needle

in the haystack
    of light.
        It is what I was born for -
            to look, to listen

to lose myself
    inside this soft world -
        to instruct myself
            over and over

in joy,
    and acclimation.
        Nor am I talking
            about the exceptional,

the fearful, the dreadful,
    the very extravagant -
        but of the ordinary,
            the common, the very drab,

the daily presentations.
    Oh, good scholar,
        I say to myself,
            how can you help

but grow wise
    with such teachings
        as these -
            the untrimmable light

of the world,
    the ocean's shine,
        the prayers that are made
            out of grass?

Those Magnificent Young Folks in Their Flying Machines!

Last weekend, the Quinte International Air Show (QIAS) roared to life at Canadian Forces Base Trenton. And what a great show it was! When I was a kid, my dad and I regularly attended these shows at CFB Trenton. Both of us loved nosing around the aircraft and watching the aerobatics. Returning to this year’s air show – the first since 2009 – brought back many warm memories. Along with about 80,000 other people, I had a great time. The weather was perfect, the logistics were superb, and the flying displays were breathtaking.

I have always loved just being around airplanes. Never, ever to be a pilot, but simply to admire the design and the engineering, and to marvel endlessly about the miracle of flight. For me, watching a plane take off is literally awesome. When a plane flies over, I always look up!

With my new camera in mind, I had spent way too much money for the QIAS ‘Experience’, which allowed me to park on the base, enjoy a special preview of the show on Friday afternoon, and have access to a special viewing area directly across from where the Snowbird aerobatic team was parked. In other words, airplane heaven. Over my two days at the show, I took over 1,000 photos.

The photos I’ve posted below are not so much about entire airplanes, but more about the quirky design elements, the odd details, and the unusual bits that caught my eye. For more conventional photos of the aircraft, please check out my Facebook page.

Until next time – and I’m not exactly sure when that will be. I’m heading off to a weeklong workshop in contemplative photography in Minnesota at the annual Quaker Gathering. In the meantime, I hope you enjoy these images!

The Church of the Good Thief - Part 2: Act of Witness

Something didn’t feel quite right about yesterday’s blog posting. I couldn’t shake the sense that I had missed a really important point, a point that would explain the feeling that this marvellous old church in Kingston had summonsed me – twice within forty-eight hours – but for what?

In the midst of last evening’s feral rain storm, the penny dropped with dramatic clarity: I had been summonsed to be a witness. Likewise, my camera. Together, we had been charged with helping to tell the story of the Church of the Good Thief.

I don’t understand how this act of witness will play itself out, but I do know, with absolute clarity, that I had to be inside that church on Saturday morning and outside that church on Monday at dawn.

One thing this experience does clarify for me is why I have been so powerfully drawn to photography in the last eighteen months. When I wrote in another blog posting that my camera now feels like an extension of my soul, I was not being facile – I really meant it. I am being drawn to photography as an act of witness.

Thank you for reading my thoughts.

Until next time,

L