Dawn and dusk

Yesterday I traveled on our island ferry both at sunrise and sunset and realized once again how productive of interesting photographs these moments can be when many simply put their cameras away . Perhaps they are working from older 'rule of thumb' understandings that a well exposed photograph needs plenty of light, preferably from behind the photographer. With digital cameras however one can venture deep into darkness or peer straight into the light source and just generally mess around with older standard practice. The results can be exciting and expressive.

 The morning sun peers over the hill and lights 
the shore but keeps the boat in shadow.
 How rich that first light is!

The glare of morning light invades
the shadows at Indian Point and Russell Island

The ferry trip tonight lasted from sunset to well into darkness
 but the Samsung digital mini camera just kept right on working!

 The above two photographs were taken with the zoom function 
and as the ferry is vibrating the photos are fuzzy.
 But I find them very expressive.

  In the photograph below the actual light was almost non existent but I exposed for the sky and got a beautiful image of Fulford Harbour and what it feels like to be chugging back to my home island at the end of a stressful day.

The Spring visit.

'Great photographs show not only what something looks like but also what it feels like for the subject at that particular moment.'

Stephanie Sinclair, National Geographic photographer

This is Spring break time in the school calendar and as usual we have had grandchildren staying with us. A time for which we have prepared in advance and now set aside our normal retirement days of frantic activity and focus on our children, once removed.

We walk along the beach at Indian Point one cool, windy, damp day, build and sail boats in the pond and have boat races in the stream, explore Ruckle Park and fly kites at Burgoyne Bay before taking the ferry to deliver children home to their parents. Tiring days, but with so many valuable interactions.

For me it is also an opportunity to record these moments with my camera, to capture not just the facts but the feel of childhood as well.

Some images are 'set pieces' – I pre-planned certain compositions - and others just happened and I was prepared to leap.

Rivers of Canada . Our heart-held land.

Rideau River

In a recent conversation the song my wife will be singing with her choir came up for discussion - “ Little Rivers of Canada” ( 'All the Little Rivers' by Larry Nickel *). We listened to it once more but in truth this song has been invading my mind for the last few months as Heather practices and tries to memorize all those RIVERS. I love it though, as I love so many songs about the Canadian experience of our relationship with the land.

Now, I was born in England, emigrating as a child of four to the Canadian West Coast with my family just after the Second World War, and some part of myself remains British. In that relationship is a love of that half imagined landscape experienced mostly through the creative works of poets, artists and writers, but I have also been grafted onto my new home. I imagine that this is the common experience of so many of us who now proudly identify as Canadian.

We have had an influx over the past few months of many people from war torn Syria and oh, how they must be missing their familiar hills, streets and rivers even as they bless the roof over their heads and freedom from the sword of immediate death and destruction hanging over their heads. But the feel of Canada, this vast landscape, will slowly seep in and provide a strong bond.

Songs like Ian Tamblyn's “Woodsmoke and Oranges “ ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xvTpQAfwDUM )evoke the spirit of the rugged North Shore of Lake Superior, or of course the music of Gordon Lightfoot or Stan Rogers...., there is a long list of musicians, writers, painters and poets. Our mind-image of the landscape has been shaped by all of them over the years so that it is impossible to separate the real from the imagined. It is a joint enterprise, the land and it peoples, and for those of us who travel or live abroad these are the images that we identify as home.

*The song was adapted from the poem by Bliss Carmen

“Rivers of Canada”

All the little rivers that run to Hudson's Bay,

They call me and call me to follow them away.

Missinaibi, Abitibi, Little Current--where they run

Dancing and sparkling I see them in the sun.

hear the brawling rapid, the thunder of the fall,

And when I think upon them I cannot stay at all.

And many verses more.

Daffodil and Narcissus.

'Tis the season and spring flowering bulbs lead by daffodil and narcissus are springing up everywhere. After their long winter sleep they rise once more from their cold bed beneath the earth. No wonder the English word Daffodil has its origins in the flower of the Ancient Greek underworld, Asphodel ( though by some to have originally been the white narcissus).

 It is so easy to photograph a field of yellow or a bunch in a vase on the table, in fact Spring is a challenge because all this new growth and flowers pull me towards yet more repeating images in my digital library. Enough already! I decided to push daffodils a little, photographically speaking, with the underworld in the back of my mind.

Bold Bluff: the hike.

The hiking club found a grey but dry moment between rainy days and hiked from the head of Burgoyne Bay along the southern shore to Bold Bluff in Sansum Narrows. ( You can Google Earth this you know). The trails were running over and very mushy but the twenty or so folks splashed (and talked), clambered over fallen trees ( and talked) and climbed up mossy rock faces ( and talked some more, between gasps and puffs). Not bad for a somewhat elderly crew! ( myself included).

This talky-walky hiking in a natural setting still seems a little strange to me, but I can see its value for this chatty crowd of Saltspring islanders. Some members are newly arrived and here is a chance to get to know their new home and neigbours, and for others it provides a chat hiking-line for old friends. Listening in to the many strands of conversation up and down the line, I am struck by the intellectual topics that get aired. What a clever bunch!

Exercise in the open air, exploration, and talk time!

The Blasted Heath.

“We have met the enemy and he is us.” 

from Pogo, by Walt Kelly

On Vancouver Island, as in places even nearer home, there are areas that clearly show the truly negative impact of human beings. High on a hillside was a very large expanse of chewed-up landscape, seeded and taken over by an invasive species, broom. Scattered around were old burn piles of what had once been forest and meandering amidst all this were bulldozed roads scraped down to the hard underlying clay hardpan which defied even broom to make a start. On a wet February day the place spoke so eloquently of rape and abandonment that I decided to document the true nature of the place instead of lifting my camera lens to encompass only the more palatable distant mountains as I had done on my last visit.

To document something requires searching for a truth and to begin with my first impressions were all negative. I noticed the Scot's broom of course, but also some stunted willows, brambles, the occasional alder, and in the midst of all was a bright yellow gorse bush. A couple of cottontail rabbits hopped out of sight in the dense broom thickets, and a flock of robins flew in and out of a young alder. The rain blew sideways in the gusting wind and the surrounding mountains were hidden in low clouds. An untidy, rough, useless sort of place waiting to be turned into building sites.

But then I began to see things differently. The gorse bush was in full bloom, the robins were chattering among themselves and I began to notice the persistence of nature in reclaiming this difficult landscape. The same willows that I had seen growing in the gravel bars of the Englishman River down in the valley below were staking a claim here too amid the clay and boulders, and the Himalayan blackberry vines reached out purposefully toward the mossy tracks. This place with it's many invasive species co-existing with the hardiest of native ones was not simply a place to hate. While one could rightfully decry the logging companies and land developers who caused this slowly healing scare, the ability of nature to resettle even the toughest places was to be praised and appreciated.

In a little while Spring will be in full career, the broom will make this a sea of sweet smelling yellow, alive with bees. The robins and many other birds will be nesting, hawks will drift watchfully overhead and those rabbits, the bane of gardeners, will be happily raising more families deep in the broom. If I can see 'invasive species' but also see beauty in this landscape, the beauty of survival and new life, then perhaps I can also have some compassion for the destroyers of the original forest, for the families cruising for home-building sites in their SUV s, and ultimately for myself, yet another representative of an invasive species.

Working in silence.

Yet another aircraft buzzes overhead unseen in the fog but, busily at work on my woodpile, I chop steadily through the intrusion. Soon there is no sound but the thump of the splitting maul and the cracking of the big rounds from the tree I felled a few weeks ago as they turn into firewood. I pause to ease my back and listen to silence. Then I hear the rhythmical beat of wings through the misty treetops and the passing croaks of a raven. From a distant foggy tree another answers back. I am tempted to add my own comment in raven talk but then think better of it. My chopping, my chainsawing is the equivalent of the passing aircraft - human generated noise. Silence, the inner thought of the real world, is precious.

creator or Creator? Hafiz sets us straight.

                 What you conceive as imagination

Does not exist for me.

Whatever you can do in a dream

Or on your mind canvas

My hands can pull - alive - from my coat pocket.

From 'Imagination Does Not Exist' by Hafiz

When we use our imagination to dream up a new concept or a new art work we are acting as if we think like God ( or our version of that). The creator, little me, feels close to the Creator, big. And there is a lot of truth to that because so often the imagery that comes through our hands and onto the page seems guided by something outside of our conscious, personal mind. The 'Muse' we say and by giving it a name we can assign a human category to the mysterious.

We might even theorize about the act of creation or make a set of lessons around a creative set of ideas (Ten steps to being an artist), but in the end creation just seems to flow from our finger tips and slide shyly through some back door of the mind.

Hafiz sets things straight when he points out the difference. We can imagine, but the Creator does not rely on human ideas, religious or otherwise. Reality, this living world, is what is created, what is Creation, not a set of concepts and images.

Valentines Day. Aurora leads another Pacific sunrise and we experience yet another 'significant moment' over a cup of tea at the changing of the watch.

Dawn arrival at the Marquesas islands. 

While hiking up Mount Maxwell on Saltspring Island the other day I was asked by a fellow climber for a story about 'a significant moment' associated with our sailing across the Pacific Ocean. I answered with the tried and true of many sailors; that of the tremendous uplift of dawn arrivals, of sighting the peaks of the Marquesas islands after a month at sea. But then, I was asked, what else?

This time I described our watchkeeping routine, where I woke at dawn and made tea and then relieved my wife Heather from her four hour stint. As we sat in the cockpit we would discuss the wind, the course, the number of squalls during the night and then sit quietly and watch Aurora ( the dawn) spread her grey veils across the sea's face, the mists coalesce into clouds and finally the sun himself bring colour to the masts and sails and paint the grey sea surface a deep mid-ocean blue. We did this every morning at sea and it was a valued moment in our relationship.

“Yes, yes, OK,”said my hiking companion, “but what about those deeply significant ones”?

“I just gave you one”, I replied, and then had to somehow explain that this dawn moment, the shared 'cuppa' and simple talk was the stuff of life and much more meaningful and long lasting than any adventurous 'sailor/ storm' moments could ever be.

“Did you talk about the big stuff? Life! Death! Clinging on by your finger nails in thunderstorms?”, he said, still looking for the blood and guts of the adventure.

“Nope! Just the usual everyday stuff that two long-married folks share while on the adventure of their lives, looking out for each other and their daughter Anne still snoozing down below in her berth, recognizing figures in the clouds, planning the day ahead and discussing the next landfall.”

Our relationship that we were tending every dawn was the basic unit that we then came to recognize in the whole ocean, the planet and the universe. The world did not simply come to us in exciting moments of significance, it was there all the time and was best understood in the form of relationship. If I had anything to pass on to my fellow hiker it was that.

The Stream: learning about it is complicated enough, but recognizing our biases, how we think, is just as important as the information we collect.

As I walked past our little stream that rattles and splashes down the hillside at this time of year I was thinking about music (It was music to my ears). If I concentrated on sound rather that seeing ( my dominant way of perceiving the world) I could hear a complex blend of notes: high trills, lower rushing noises, and so on, and if I took the time to walk along the stream these all changed in type and intensity. Not only was what I was observing a complicated visual pattern but the sounds produced were equally interesting. A sound-scape and landscape. One could imagine that this was music, or that music had some of the qualities contained in this natural phenomenon of time and space
.

What I questioned however, was how I was receiving and processing the information coming from the stream. How much was my mind's habits of filtering and categorizing influencing what I was defining and describing? Because we all have the experience of stereotyping. We get through a complex world of events and situations, not by deeply questioning but by a set of shorthand ideas. In our families, relationships, work and in the natural world that we inhabit we are often on autopilot. We carry a pack of ideas around and apply them appropriately as the situation seems to suggest. So much for the independent, thinking individual. More likely, even the 'individualist' simply selects a variant of acceptable differences, a cultural subgroup, and tags along. Humans are great imitators.

And yet, surely scientists are trained to think outside the box? Very rarely I suspect. They are conforming to a special set of ideas too, use a certain tool set, and very few will make the leap to a new set of relationships, something truly original.

But back to the water flow which was producing a stream of information for me to process. Most of the time I will simply not notice the stream, visually or audibly and step over it, my mind on other things, but if in this case I began by thinking about it in terms of music, then I would still be selecting certain aspects of sound that fitted into that category and ignoring the rest.

But obviously there are also a large number of other ways I could be thinking about this stream: as a flow with all sorts of eddies and falls, as a place for certain bugs to live, as simply a narrow ditch carrying off the extra winter run-off from the hill and road surfaces on the slopes above, to name but a few.

I could also think of the stream creatively as a metaphor for the passage of my own life, or to be really fanciful, imagine what it would be like if I were only a couple of inches high and being swept down through the rapids. I could actually use the sounds, falls and eddies to make music or paint a picture that used the dominant forms and colours and captured the movement.

All these ways of observing and recording, of thinking sideways, of making new structures suggested by the stream use different approaches, different sets of imagery, sounds and words. Mostly we specialize in only a very few ways of relating to the enormous flow of information that surrounds us on a simple walk beside a stream. Perhaps we think in practical terms, or scientifically or creatively, but not all at once or in a coordinated sort of way.

All this is to say that understanding the world is not only complicated by its sheer complexity, but by the tools we use to understand it by. Knowing about the words we use and the ideas that stand behind them is equally important. We know but darkly. Reality is elusive.

............................................................................

Annie Dillard's 'Pilgrim at Tinker Creek' might be worth checking out. I wrote about my experience of reading it in Dragongate a couple of years ago (June 14^th, 2014).

On a clear day you can see forever. Flat water and a flat Earth at Burgoyne Bay!

I walked at Burgoyne Bay this morning just before the return of heavy rains once more and explored some high trails below the peak of Mount Maxwell, camera in hand. Scattered across the steep tree-covered slopes were many conglomerate boulders, some bigger than houses, that had chipped off the cliffs above. I walked under low cloud, a rising wind sighed in the tree tops and creeks roared in full spate  down to the bay far below. Eventually I arrived at the granite headland at the northern entrance to Burgoyne Bay and then began to walk back to my car waiting at the head of the bay just as the first raindrops of the deluge began. To this point it had been a normal, solitary exploration. Then things began to take a more technicolour turn.

A young man, maybe in his thirties, sat beside the trail and asked if he could walk with me. What I did not understand then was that I had been seized upon by the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge’s poem who 'stoppeth one of three'. He turned out to be a flat-earther and his role for the next half hour walk was to convince me that this 3D. round earth idea that so many of us share was a result of brainwashing by a massive financial/ governmental conspiracy. Now, I can be pretty sharp sometimes, so I realized that I needed to tread carefully as this person was in the grip of a powerful delusion and would cling to it, perhaps fiercely, if I outright laughed in his face. Besides, I will talk to anyone and I was interested in his belief processes. It is not so long ago after all since Galileo came close to being burned at the stake for saying that the ( round) earth revolved around the sun. Human beings have shared varied sets of beliefs over the centuries and have defended them to the death.

OK, so we got down to the nitty-gritty when I used the example of being on the open ocean with a circle of tossing waves visible from on deck of about three miles radius before the curvature of the earth hide the rest, and the freighter that came up OVER the horizon showed just its masts and funnels at first. No, no, he argued, it was just the vanishing point. If I used binoculars or a telescope I would see the whole boat! Presumably if I looked far enough the rim of the flat earth would show up - on a clear day you can see forever. And the sun was small and circled around, sometimes it was even in the clouds. Well, you can see that either he or I was employing some pretty creative thinking and I appreciate that in people. Unfortunately he was also getting more and more excited. He knew that I and so many others languished in the grip of a powerful delusion that he had been struggling to correct for a long time, so I backed off in friendly sort of way and it all ended peacefully as I dropped him off at the main road.

But here is the thing, we mostly share a set of common beliefs about the composition of the world and humankind’s place and function upon it. As Kenneth Clark says, a civilization falls apart when its members no longer share a common world view. Most of us presently accept a round earth, gravity, and so on because it seems to explain a lot and it works. Once though, that was heresy. So it pays to listen carefully to seemingly odd ideas, they may simply be an older order on replay, but on the other hand they may contain the germs of a future one.

                                  

                                   .................................................

Something I skipped carefully over is the whole issue of mental illness, and I do not mean to make light of it. Was this man temporarily in the grip of drugs, an irrational episode..... ? What I thought of was the internet and the whole area of conspiracy theories. It was more real for him to believe that the whole space program ( with those fabricated round earth photos) was a multi-trillion dollar con job. But whatever his constructed version of reality, it may have been a last ditch effort to keep his mind from spinning completely away. Looked at that way, he needed to keep his ship, if not on an even keel, at least still swimming.

Later.
Listening to NXNW this morning on CBC radio I was treated to June Goldsmith's explanations of Chopin. Not only did I receive a deeper understanding of his music ( and music in general) but perhaps more importantly it set me off on a thought journey of my own. Since last weeks encounter with the 'Flat Earth' person on my walk along the shore of Burgoyne Bay I have been thinking about how our minds get organized: what gets attention, becomes a dominant way of thinking and behaving, and what gets dropped through lack of use. We may be aware that 'genius' personalities are somehow so often very specialized, but never make the leap to think about what passes as normal. With the flat earther it was not difficult to recognize aberrations in his thinking, but what about my own? After all if I could question his thought processes, then I should become more aware of my own. That is the value of challenges*, they make us question and that is the first step in creating something new, in reality or in thought.


*“The meeting of two personalities is like the contact of two chemical substances: if there is any reaction, both are transformed.” C.G. Jung 

Robbie Burns Day.

'My love is like a red red rose' is a favourite poem from the Scottish Bard. Real love lasts forever, it says, and this beautiful piece is part of a large and continuing body of love poetry that follows along the same lines. And naturally enough. Imagine winning a life partner with “ My love is conditional on good behavior and will alter with the circumstances.” Not only not very poetic but it seems so practical and realistic.

Perhaps we should see these kind of poetics as similar to the mating dance of many birds. Its all about attracting a mate, and wishing that this might be the one that lasts. Burns wrote hopeful poems for a string of 'true loves'.

But then, this poem has outlived generations of lovers and we can still feel it in our hearts. Here's to you, Robbie Burns!

O my Luve's like a red, red rose
That’s newly sprung in June;
O my Luve's like the melodie
That’s sweetly play'd in tune.
As fair art thou, my bonnie lass,
So deep in luve am I:
And I will luve thee still, my dear,
Till a’ the seas gang dry:
Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear,
And the rocks melt wi’ the sun:
I will luve thee still, my dear,
While the sands o’ life shall run.
And fare thee weel, my only Luve
And fare thee weel, a while!
And I will come again, my Luve,
Tho’ it were ten thousand mile.
                            Robert Burns

Hikihg up Mount Tuam. Choosing camera compositions

Another hike with a large group, this time in an ecological reserve at the south end of the island. We will hike up the rugged side of Mount Tuam and our leader says the hike will be 'shortened' because we cannot pass some trails when they are washed by streams too wide and deep for hopping across. We climb steeply up moss-covered rocky outcrops and through arbutus, cedar and fir forest. The sound of rushing water echoes up from the deep ravines that score the flanks of the mountain. We climb over and crawl under windfalls and wade through wet salal.

Finally we wander up to a spectacular falls that surges and crashes down a rocky, moss-covered cliff. Out comes my small camera ( I have stopped trying to carry my heavy expensive Nikon) and I try to catch the feeling. Falls are dramatic, but like any other subject matter one still works with the fundamentals of what the camera can best do technically and what I can think of in terms of camera angles. There are the safe and traditional ways and the more original ones. Here, I settle for some standard shots.

Later, and further up the mountain, I notice another photographer beside some interesting boulders snapping a photo of the group and turn and take his photo also. Later I will take another look at this snatched image and recognize that I have collected something of interest - to me at least. Unlike those at the falls, this one presents some unusual challenges. I have placed three forms side by side - boulder, boulder, man - , so there is a repeating, but broken pattern and the trees in the background provide a steady repetition of forms and textures. It is the assumption that the human figure is not the dominant subject, that it is shoved off to the side and seems ridiculous in its posturing in comparison to the enduring beauty of rocks and trees, that makes this image worthy of consideration. Something is being communicated that goes beyond the 'beautiful' and while I have my own ideas about what those may be ( including my own role as 'Photographer') this image is open to the individual interpretation of every viewer.

We look to the arts to provide a commodity (beauty), and usually that is conventional in subject matter and composition, but Art's other role is to provide questions and challenge our familiar assumptions. Usually we react with anger or rejection to any new ideas that upset our equilibrium so no wonder most art we see does not challenge but seeks to please.

Cutting down and chucking out.

Every year I cut down a couple of trees to provide all our next year's firewood. This is a time of tension for Heather, (will Bill survive the logging yet again?), and she is correct to fear an accident because while once this was a regular activity, now it happens but once a year, especially with big trees that stretch their length a hundred feet or more with a mighty thump. Cutting on a rocky slope added some extra challenge today, but down they came and here I am writing about it. Tadaa!

Later. After taking a selfie of myself beside my mornings work( A ten second timer shot. I had to run like mad to get into position) I found Heather beside the front door disposing of her splendid gingerbread church. Sad, but then, she already has plans for next year!

Should old acquaintance be forgot?

 I found a video hidden away in a box yesterday that I had never viewed before and I watched it with rising tension. In 1999 ( how old that seems already) we were scarcely launched on our sailing adventure in our wooden schooner 'Shiriri' when off the coast of Cape Mendocino, California, we were caught in hurricane force winds and immense, closely packed waves. To cut that story short, we lost our steering and were eventually hauled in by the US Coast Guard ( bless 'em). They took a video of their rescue and we received a copy. After a couple of week in Eureka repairing our ship we continued on our way. From then on we knew that our boat was very strong and that any weak links were due to our own frailty. Sometimes, experience is hard won.

This evening I experimented with re-photographing off the TV screen as the DVD played. Stopping at 'pause' gave sharper but coarser images while softer ones resulted when I just snapped while it played. Those softer ones caught my interest. I thought of the British artist Turner with his powerful swirls of colour and ill defined forms. Somehow these caught the feeling of those moments: exhaustion, focus on the job at hand, the immense power of wind and waves, and combined with all this a heightened awareness of the beauty of the ocean.

Looking back, we were privileged to have experienced these moments. Being on the edge of the precipice, struggling with our family to make it through, has sharpened our appreciation of the world. A part of the ocean in those moments remains in everything to this day. Hard won, but gold.