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| Jenness Island Spring |
While it may
seem counter-intuitive to get so worked up over such a seemingly boring subject,
I have been fired up by David Hinton, a translator of classical Chinese
philosophy, whose new book, Existence: A Story, makes the case that
outer and inner are one.
As an added
gift, his book has helped connect me in a profound way to a series of
photographs I have been working on.
Hinton begins by
reminding us of a fundamental difference in how East and West see the world. Descartes
determined the current focus of western philosophy by stripping away everything
that could be doubted until he found what he believed was the beginning place:
“I think, therefore I am.”
Conversely, to
ancient sages in China, the beginning point of existence is found in the
immediate experience of empty awareness, which underlies both the thinking mind
and our identity as a person.
“Vast and deep,
everything and everywhere: existence is alive somehow – and magically,
mysteriously, inexplicably alive. Nothing holds still…This is the most
fundamental nature of existence; and…it appears everywhere.”
Of particular importance to me was Hinton’s description of how a sect
of Buddhists, starting around the year 700, discovered an unique method to
access this “all-encompassing generative presence”: They did it by meditating
on mountain landscape paintings, seeking to lose themselves
in the misty, shifting configurations of the brush strokes.
Reading about
how they meditated on misty mountain paintings, gave me the sudden insight that
I have recently been doing something similar. But, in my case, I was losing
myself in foggy island photographs, rather than swirling mountain paintings.
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| Jenness Pond Summer |
My particular
focus of meditation is a small, unnamed island on Jenness Pond, a close
companion since before I was born. Taking the longer cosmic view of an ancient
Chinese sage, my island has been a cog in the whole evolution of our Planet
Earth in which, in some vital sense, I have always been a part.
When I meditate
on my island photographs, I find myself starting in the present and then
drifting back in time…
I still pass by
my island almost every day, driving or during my evening walk, always smitten
by her shifting transformations. I have passed by her almost daily for all my
71 years except for years away at college, my sabbatical in Vietnam, and a few
years living here-and-there before building my house on land my parents gave
me.
Growing up, my
island was a constant feature. I not only walked by her daily to catch the
school bus, but often played and fished by her shores, once even falling
through new ice, foolhardily trying to skate by her too soon. When very little,
I remember my father shooting two black ducks in her shallows. I think I even
have a bodily memory being jostled by the rutted dirt road, riding by her while
still in my mother’s belly.
Time frames shift…
I watch Jenness
Pond fill like a schist bathtub as the last ice age recedes; I see the first
pioneer species of plants take root; I smile as the first snapping turtle
shoves herself clumsily up on a rock to sunbathe…as the first blue heron spears
a fish…the first indigenous people gather clams in the shallows of my island.
Just as David
Hinton suggests, by meditating on these images, the external world exposed in
my photographic prints join seamlessly with the internal world of my mind: Inner and outer –past and present – become
one.
I now understand
the truth of something Jackson Pollack once said: “I don’t paint nature, I am
nature.”
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| Jenness Pond Winter |
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