Travelogue – What I saw on my recent trip around the sun

I had thought of turning the gray day photo series into a video. After spending much of an evening futzing with the software and trying different things, I gave up and posted them as stills. (FB 11.13.17)

I don’t really know how to incorporate the element of time into photos like these. I am already aware that two dimensional photographs capture primarily color and line within a frame. It’s mostly about the light. And it is about people, places or things. That a photo manages to convey some of the emotion of a moment sometimes happens. But things happen in time.

I spend a considerable amount of my time looking at the natural world. I am interested in questions of beauty. But now my choice of words still somehow misses the mark. But I am not surprised by that.

What surprises me is how I feel sometimes as I am moving along with time. And if I can’t put everything into words or an image, well, isn’t that what I want? I want to be splashed in the face by color. I want to trip over a line I didn’t foresee. And it’s okay that I didn’t see love coming. Life truly is better this way.

For me, at its root, art is an attempt. A piece of writing or a photo – art - captures something. But it is because the world – and life – is so rich – so vast and random and ordered and intricate – so infused with beauty (I will use that word) – that almost anyone can point and click and reveal a bit of the essence of everything.

But doing art, or making photographs in this instance, is for me, primarily about ‘seeing’ – more clearly and more deeply. And about remembering. Making what I see a part of who I am.

I am on a bicycle these days. Trying to heal an injured foot. Cold gray days are less inviting when you have additional wind resistance. But I ride at a pace that sometimes seems just too fast. I miss walking. But with a little excuse, I can always slow down. If I choose, I can always get off the bike and try to take a photo. Catch something. As I look around to try to compose the elements within the screen on my camera, I begin to slow down in my mind. Or maybe I’m hurrying forward into some mystery.

Time indeed has an objective sense. Time began – along with space - at a beginning billions of years ago. Spacetime. And the pace of everything has proceeded steadily forward ever since. Call it: linear time. Psychological time is something else. Our perception of time seems almost immeasurable – at times. Certainly, quantitative analysis only takes me so far. And our words reflect the reality of time ambiguously. I didn’t really capture time. I took snapshots of it in passing. Or I tried to. Time is elusive.

I can tell you that I took the first photo in the series at about 3:30 in the afternoon. It was November 13th, 2017. I rode along familiar ways – to the Kaw River Bridge - and then, back towards home. It was a gray day. That is, the skies were cloudy all day. Just another day in Kansas.

And then I parked my bicycle on our back porch at about 5. Getting dark already. I had clicked the shutter on my device camera something under two hundred times. I rapidly deleted close to half of them after uploading them to the computer, and then, looking more carefully, I selected through what remained in the evening. I cropped and sometimes adjusted color or contrast. Now I have 27 pictures to show for my time. The public library, the river, Central Middle School and my neighborhood are featured. And a hawk.

But I wasn’t counting the shots as I took them. And I had nearly forgotten time when I was within that extended moment. That is, I wasn’t aware of the passing minutes. And I was trying to take photographs of a different aspect of time. The change of seasons. But I was only partially thinking about all of that. I saw. I clicked. Somewhere in all of that was how I felt during that period of time.

Some of that feeling is reflected in these words. And some snapshots of what I experienced tethers fragments of what I saw.

But the natural world wraps around me. With sound and sometimes smell. And touch. Never a still moment, but everything is there within the continuity of time. And yet I like how with a camera you can freeze a moment and then look more carefully at various elements.

But if I can tell you in a few words about how I saw the leaves in the late afternoon as I rode along the levee - leaves brown and curled, gathered in shallow drifts against the white limestone rocks. I am still leaving almost everything out. The boulders have shape and texture – and they are only white-colored relative to the river – which is gray – but not really. The river reflects the sky. And gray is not the true color of a subtly varied sky. And in these words we are still only beginning to think about light and stuff.

Writing is also an impressionistic medium. I state the obvious. But those words –  describing the brown leaves – surely they were dry and crinkly if I had stopped and grabbed a handful in my hand – that is what I saw as I rode along the levee. The gravel was tan. Maybe a light reddish tan.

I geared down as I rode onto the bridge. The incline is slight to look at, but I still took the lowest gear. And it is hardly important to mention that I took some care not to ride with my handlebars too close to the railing on the bridge. Or that the tiny signal bell next to my left hand tinged on its own when I rode over the edge of the bridge back onto the sidewalk – made of concrete which had been poured down onto the very earth itself. Troweled smooth. Now the side walk was rock hard.

The ‘ting’ just reflected an insignificant bump in an otherwise continuous sidewalk. And I had also seen a man standing, about my age, a little shorter, pausing, leaning against the railing. I had seen him nearly about in that very place the day before. Does it matter that I have included that detail?

I constantly look for significance for myself. What matters to me? When I am out in the world, trying to pay some deliberate attention to things, my conscious awareness of that question is only a small part of it. My entire being – the being that is underlying my consciousness senses the world around me. A small part of me searches.

I think that it goes something like this: I’m in some sort of process of solving a puzzle in my mind. My mind and the minds of each of us have been shaped by the natural world over time. Millions of years of it. Our conscious awareness is a relatively new thing – certainly mine seems new – or maybe old – depending on your perspective. I am sixty-one years traveling around a five billion year old sun. And every year, summer turns to fall. And so our minds contain patterns from all of that shaping of everything - over time. I am looking for how I fit.

And the sun and blue skies. The rain and rivers. The trees baring their branches and the leaves drifting against limestone boulders. All of it - and much more – form various kinds of patterns that I see – color and line – shapes and textures - that our human minds and bodies somehow recognize. Even when we are unaware of most of it, our mind is looking for a good fit. And when a piece settles into place, we say, ‘isn’t that pretty.’

But I surely oversimplify. That in any given moment I might think some bit of yellow leaf against a gray sky is appealing to me – well, sometimes I do say so. Things catch my attention.

Life goes on. Sometimes I want to catch hold of the tail and fly. But it’s only like that sometimes. And, like a tourist, I want to take pictures to remember my trip.

Oh! And did I tell you how when I approached the corner of Rhode Island and Seventh Street I heard this cacophony of chirping. And when I followed my ears, I saw this large tree across the way, birds all over the place in and across the top of a very large, bare branched tree. Like Kentucky Coffee Tree seed pods, the birds looked to me. But they were singing. Probably starlings. But it was the sound that caught my attention. And then I saw them.

Does it matter? Not much. Except that each cheep and chirp, one after another, on top of each other - hearing it, seeing it - mattered almost as much as anything matters – for those few moments of time. I have remembered it. But only for a little while.

And then I turned down Seventh. If I ride – if I ride past Connecticut, the curvature of the planet becomes apparent. I coast. Gaining a little speed. Sometimes I lean into the wind just because I can. It feels fast. I am riding through the sky, the wind rushing past my face. And when I reach the bottom of the hill, I swoop with some gracefulness around the corner onto New Jersey Street. And then I start pedaling again as I work my way up, away from the river.

The significance of things is not fixed in time. You catch only moments for a moment and then you are sweeping on past, on your way to looking for more moments that will matter to you.

But you want to share moments. You want to share your life. And I want to be part of everything – and part of you.

So art is something of a fitting process. One part.  I had a camera full of snapshots of my experience of an afternoon. I had already lived the moment. I had already experienced seeing things fall into place in my mind. I can’t possibly explain how that all works. I can hardly make what mattered to me matter to you. But I might try.

And yet, a picture will sometimes connect the dots. A dot in my mind and a dot in your mind. A tree full of starlings singing. All together a cacophony – or a symphony. Or maybe just a tune. If you are a starling. Or human.

And I’m only now mentioning music. Of all of the arts, music probably matters most to me.

Sometimes I get beyond music as background noise. And then music matters.

And so, here I have cobbled this whole thing together after all. Words, photos, music. The 27 stills are stitched together into a little more than two minutes of silent video. Time has been distorted. But I hope that by putting the photos into a form that just allows them to blink past you as moments, one after another, a little like the way a yellow leafed tree goes past the corner of my eye on a bicycle, you will see something that matters to you. Just ordinary beauty, perhaps.

And perhaps, something of time.

What if – and I am just letting my imagination wander – what if time is more than linear time? What if time is some kind of spirit-being? Human beings used to think that way. Some still do. As if there are spirt-beings within everything – shaping matter and energy into significance. What if? And what if my own spirit-being is somehow part of it all? And there is significance?

It is only a way of looking at things. And you might find different pieces of something like a puzzle fitting in your mind as you walk or bike along the same paths that I have taken. This collage of sorts shows the world as I saw it. But somehow, it seems as if we are working on the same puzzle together.

And this is now my simple suggestion. I have picked a few songs that I like from the soundtrack of the TV show, Northern Exposure, to accompany the slide show. In linear time, they won’t quite fit, but maybe they might go together. Or not. Just add a little randomness. Maybe you prefer silence. But go ahead, if you want to. You'll have to navigate between different windows - a little back and forth from my blog over to YouTube, but you can do it. Click on a YouTube song link in the list below (get past the ads) and then, in a new tab, click on the link to my stills/YouTube below, expand the video to full screen, and then just listen and watch for a leaf before it falls.

The map is not the thing, but sometimes the map is its own thing – a little bit of art.

Walk to the river.

The phrase means what it means – for me or for anyone else. Actual and metaphorical. Walk in time with the music. Okay, now I’m just getting a little too ambiguous. One yellow leaf at a time. Except that it’s not like that - in time.

Walk to the river

Theme from 'Northern Exposure'

Etta James - At last

Chico Street Man - Everybody be yo'self

Magazine 60 - Don Quichotte

Nat King Cole - When I grow too old too dream

Bailero - Chants d'Avergne


YouTube link: Gray day photo series - Slideshow


* I retook some of these photos on a blue sky day, two days later. They can be seen for comparison on my Facebook page, November 13, 2017, in the comments associated with individual photos. Except for the bright blue sky, the colors look more vivid on a gray sky day.