Say something to us we can learn

By heart and when alone repeat.

Say something! And it says, "I BURN". 

                                 - Robert Frost, from Take Something Like A Star

 

When Frost ruminated upon the nature of a star in an immortal poem, lobbing into oblivion man's natural yearning to know the unknowable, he tapped into an infinite desire. Frost could have just as well been 'taking something like a soul', probing and inquiring into one's own nature, into our personal quests to know oneself and to understand why we do what we do. Of course it often seems that the mere act of this contemplation is enough to obfuscate the essence of that which we seek to learn, in a perverse rendering of the observer effect. Sitting here, pondering said questions, you can see I am at a tremendous loss.

I seek, I climb, I travel, I challenge, I go alone, I endure, I capture images, I write.   

This is what being at a loss will produce, a skeletal framework. Of course there's a little more flesh on these bones, but that's the heart of the matter.  

Sometimes I try to show places as they've not been seen before, to compel people to act - whether it is to preserve or eradicate. 

Sometimes I try to go places that people rarely venture, or go at times when they are least visited, and shoot the uniqueness along the way. 

Sometimes I just try to capture light for its own incomprehensibly-travelling-at-186,000-miles-per-second sake in an attempt at what I might call 'art proper'. 

Sometimes I shoot something simply because it appeals to my eye, or to my lens, as I imagine all photographers do. But again, asking why I do what I do is asking for a wordy, troublesome mess. As is often the case Tennyson put it better, and not a little more succinctly: "That which we are, we are". 

And that which I photograph, you see.

 

 

 

 

Other Favorite Quotations:

 

 " . . . The true harvest of my daily life is somewhat as intangible and indescribable as the tints of morning or evening. It is a little star-dust caught, a segment of the rainbow which I have clutched."  - Henry David Thoreau

 

"To take the trail and not look back. Whether on foot, on snowshoes or by sled, into the summer hills and their late freezing shadows - a high blaze, a runner track in the snow would show where I had gone. Let the rest of mankind find me if it could."  - John Haines

 

"By way of the understanding he achieves a far-reaching emancipation from the shackles of personal hopes and desires, and thereby attains that humble attitude of mind toward the grandeur of reason incarnate in existence, and which, in its profoundest depths, is inaccessible to man . . . . it seems to me that the path to genuine religiosity does not lie through the fear of life, and the fear of death, and blind faith, but through striving after rational knowledge."  - Albert Einstein

 

"Now I see the secret of the making of the best persons, 

It is to grow in the open air and to eat and sleep with the earth."  - Walt Whitman

 

"Leave it as it is. You can not improve on it. The ages have been at work on it, and man can only mar it." - Theodore Roosevelt

 

"It is surprising how much our souls are alike, at least in the presence of mountains. For all of us, mountains turn into images after a short time and the images turn true. Gold-tossed waves change into the purple backs of monsters, and so forth. Always something out of the moving deep, and nearly always oceanic. Never a lake, never the sky. But no matter what images I began with, when I watched long enough the mountains turned into dreams, and still do, and it works the other way around - often, waking from dreams, I know I have been in the mountains, and I know they have been moving - sometimes advancing threateningly, sometimes creeping hesitantly, sometimes receding endlessly. Both mountains and dreams."  - Norman Maclean

"The luxuries of civilization satisfy only those wants which they themselves create."  - Apsley Cherry~Garrard

"I grew up exuberant in body but with a nervy, craving mind. It was wanting something more, something tangible. It sought for reality intensely, always as if it were not there . . . But you see at once what I do. I climb."  - John Menlove Edwards

 

"I cannot now tell exactly, it was so long ago, under what circumstances I first ascended, only that I shuddered as I went along (I have an indistinct remembrance of having been out overnight alone), - and then I steadily ascended along a rocky ridge half clad with stinted trees, where wild beasts haunted, till I lost myself quite in the upper air and clouds, seeming to pass an imaginary line which separates a hill, mere earth heaped up, from a mountain, into a superterranean grandeur and sublimity. What distinguishes that summit above the earthly line, is that it is unhandselled, awful, grand. It can never become familiar; you are lost the moment you set foot there. You know the path, but wander, thrilled, over the bare and pathless rock, as if it were solidified air and cloud. That rocky, misty summit, secreted in the clouds, was far more thrillingly awful and sublime than the crater of a volcano spouting fire." - Henry David Thoreau

 

"A voice said, Look me in the stars

And tell me truly, men of earth, 

If all the soul-and-body scars

Were not too much to pay for birth."  - Robert Frost

 

"The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and science. Whoever does not know it and can no longer wonder, no longer marvel, is as good as dead, and his eyes are dimmed."  - Albert Einstein

 

"There is a kind of river of things passing into being and Time is a violent torrent. For no sooner is each seen, than it has been carried away, and another is being carried by, and that, too, will be carried away . . . . Therefore make your passage through this span of time in obedience to Nature and gladly lay down your life, as an olive, when ripe, might fall, blessing her who bare it and grateful to the tree which gave it life."  - Marcus Aurelius

 

"Still, the last sad memory hovers round, and sometimes drifts across like floating mist, cutting off sunshine and chilling the remembrance of happier times. There have been joys too great to be described in words, and there have been griefs upon which I have not dared to dwell; and with these in mind I say: Climb if you will, but remember that courage and strength are nought without prudence, and that a momentary negligence may destroy the happiness of a lifetime. Do nothing in haste; look well to each step; and from the beginning think what may be the end." - Edward Whymper

 

"Or Time and Space,

Or shape of Earth divine and wondrous,

Or some fair shape I viewing, worship,

Or lustrous orb of sun or star by night,

Be ye my Gods."  - Walt Whitman

 

"Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world's great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs. I am haunted by waters."  - Norman Maclean

 

"But we know little until tried how much of the uncontrollable there is in us, urging across glaciers and torrents, and up dangerous heights, let the judgement forbid as it may."  - John Muir

 

"I wished to acquire the simplicity, native feelings, and virtues of savage life; to divest myself of the factitious habits, prejudices and imperfections of civilization; . . . and to find, amidst the solitude and grandeur of the western wilds, more correct views of human nature and of the true interests of man. The season of snows was preferred, that I might experience the pleasure of suffering, and the novelty of danger."  - Estwick Evans

 

"Nature was here something savage and awful, though beautiful. I looked with awe at the ground I trod on, to see what the Powers had made there, the form and fashion and material of their work. This was that Earth of which we have heard, made out of Chaos and Old Night."  -Henry David Thoreau

 

"What a fraction of infinite and gaping time has been assigned to every man; for very swiftly it vanishes in the eternal; and what a fraction of the whole of matter, and what a fraction of the whole of the life Spirit. On what a small clod, too, of the whole earth you creep."  - Marcus Aurelius

 

"Now I re-examine philosophies and religions,

They may prove well in lecture-rooms, yet not prove at all under the

spacious clouds and along the landscape and flowing currents."  - Walt Whitman

 

"I am satisfied with the mystery of the eternity of life and with the awareness and a glimpse of the marvelous structure of the existing world".  - Albert Einstein

 

"High upon the mountaintop

Where the eagle builds his nest

I shall go wandering

Trying to put my mind at rest

And I shall never cease

Until the day I die".  - Eric Clapton