JULY KRAG PEAK BASIN | RELATIONAL RESONANCE

WHEN HOW YOU GET THERE, IS MORE THAN HALF THE POEM & HALF THE PHOTOGRAPH

"Silence was never written down."
Italian proverb

One great privilege of my minimal-carbon-footprint, no-car,
no-snowmachine lifestyle, is that I tend to disappear without
a trace into the landscape. It takes me a long time to get
places. (Every single photo and poem is the PHOTOWEEK
collection is interconnected by this movement of walking, or
biking, or skiing. Every single one.) Friends with snowmachines
and cars frequently tell me, "I can be the 15 minutes!" Well,
that's true. But I always tend to answer, "You, are not there.
Your car is, but not you."

I really believe that we were not made—this marvelously
subtle instrument which is a human being—to be moving
at 100 km through the world. If we do, we do not really see
the reality of the world, but rather something more like an
illusion, a kind of film or projection of that reality. And this
projection is, in my opinion, as full of noise and distortion,
as it is full of tacit and arbitrary bias and assumptons..

That is why I choose to walk.

Does this make a difference in how I write and make
photographs? I think it does. But that is not why I do it.
I do it because it is ethically the right thing to do. I do it
because the land is, as living presence, the love of my life.
I want to hear every Spirit Thrush. I want to smell every
fragrant Mountain Balm. I want to get every bit of tension
out of my body as I slowly lug a pack full of gear up and
up and up to what I know is sacred ground, a place, like
the great visionary Bucky Fuller used to say, "You can
feel the Earth turn."

That is why I choose to walk.

RELATIONAL RESONANCE

The beauty of resonance is that, because it is essentially
a movement of relationship, you cannot isolate it in thought.
Once relational resonance is isolated in thought, it is gone,
and, instead of the essential living movement, we are left
with mere static objects or things. A glass of water is not
the flowing movement of the stream.

IT'S A GIFT TO BE SIMPLE

See the glistening ripples and waves of the morning water,
reflections, nodes in triangles of relationship between you,
the ripples and waves, and the sun. Perhaps that is all we
are, just so many sparkles—shimmering, in an infinite
web.

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