When I first read the Esselen creation myth, I was mystified, unsure of the meaning of the story and unsure how to begin to figure it out. Three core elements of the tale kept my attention: flood waters end one age, so beginning a new age, a trinity of characters, Eagle, Hummingbird and Coyote, together survive this flood and human struggle with procreation is dramatized. Taken at face value, the tale is an exploration of humanity's deepest concerns of the creative and destructive forces of nature and man’s struggle with the procreative and self-destructive forces within all humans. Viewing these elements through Matthieu Pageau's framework of cosmic symbolism presented in The Language of Creation (2018), reveals a sophisticated encoding of metaphysical truth about the nature of reality and humanity.

Pageau's work on biblical cosmology shows how traditional narratives operate through what he calls "the language of creation" - a symbolic grammar that reflects the fundamental structure of existence. This grammar includes several key patterns:

• The tension between 'space' (ordered stability) and 'time' (transformative chaos)

• The necessity of proper mediation between spiritual and material realms

• Cosmic hierarchy

• Macrocosmic and microcosmic representation

These patterns appear in the Esselen creation myth. Consider its opening: "When this world was finished, the eagle, the hummingbird, and Coyote were standing on the top of Pico Blanco. When the water rose to their feet..." Already we see the tension Pageau identifies between spatial order, the mountain peak and temporal chaos, rising waters. The trinity of characters represents different modes of hierarchic mediation between these realms - the eagle as heavenly authority, the hummingbird as messenger, and coyote as earthly agent. The myth drives toward the essential problem of regeneration: how will life begin again? This question haunts all post-diluvian narratives.

I’ll assume that the reader is familiar with neither the Esselen creation myth or Matthieu Pageau. Some context is then needed. First, historical context.

The Esselen inhabited the Santa Lucia Mountains and Big Sur coast for over 6,000 years, speaking a distinct Hokan language. Their creation myth survived despite the profound cultural disruption that began in 1602 with Sebastian Vizcaino's exploration and intensified in the 1770s with Junipero Serra's mission system.

From the Esselen Tribe's website:

"This was the beginning of a transformation of the Esselen culture, as the people were gathered up and taken in to three missions: Mission Carmel, San Antonio Mission and the Soledad Mission. These missions were strategically placed in a geographical triangle around the Santa Lucia Mountains, the ancient homeland of the Esselen’s. The missionaries were here to save the souls of the heathens, as they called us. In this way they hoped to take the land for the Spanish King, Carlos III. This had severe consequences for the Esselen and other tribes that called these mountains their home."

You can read the full Esselen Creation Myth as recorded in 1907 on the Esselen Tribe website here:

https://www.esselentribe.org/history

Within a few decades, virtually all Esselen people lived at the missions where a cascade of infectious disease decimated the majority of the tribal population.

In 1910, UC Berkeley anthropologist A.L. Kroeber recorded the creation myth from discussions with surviving members of the Esselen Tribe. This recording of their creation story represents a preservation of ancient spiritual wisdom that survived multiple waves of colonization, including both Spanish missionary efforts and subsequent Mexican land grants that left the Esselen people dispossessed of their ancestral lands.

But what does the creation myth mean? How do we approach the story with respectful curiosity? How do we interpret the story?

This is perhaps a hazardous endeavor that risks reading into the text contemporary perspectives foreign to the ancient context of this story and others. In today's world we are embedded in a culture where the materialist, scientific, rational process is a default academic approach to uncover truths, truths that are relative, discursive, contingent and carefully qualified. The materialist, scientific method is utterly different from and often contemptuous of spiritual perspectives.

Pre-historical oral stories are vessels that preserve and transmit wisdom of a spiritual nature. Creation myths make no attempt to elucidate the material properties of water or explain material causality. Creation myths are, we might say, metaphysical by nature, having to do with the meaning of materiality and expressing a spiritual narrative about the fundamental nature of reality and what that means for humanity.

How to understand them? Many different approaches to the texts are possible. Evolutionary, psychological, Freudian/Jungian, anthropological, and critical (cynical) theories and many more are all possible to employ. While perhaps each of these perspectives, particularly those articulated by those of Jung and Neumann, are useful, many are reductive and contemptuous and hostile and dismissive of the uniqueness of particular creation myths while also recognizing universal patterns that provide explanations and connections and meanings.

An obvious problem with the scientific, rationalist approach to understanding the Esselen creation myth, is that creation myths are spiritual cosmologies. Creation myths are encapsulated understandings of the origins of the world and how to relate to the world and each other. Creation myths communicate the core elements of faith and reason that form societies of people, binding them together with a shared purpose and ethical system. This is utterly different from the scientific perspective which seeks to understand mechanics and facts instead of metaphysical meaning.

There is a modern rational tendency to separate reason from imagination and fact from value. Spiritual cosmologies, with all their factual flaws, offer a vision of the universe that unites fact and value, reason and imagination, the spiritual and the scientific.

Creation myths are a testament to the shared human desire to know. They are an example of a developed metaphysics rooted across all cultures and ages. Creation myths represent the human quest to understand our place in the universe. How do we act in the world and why? The Esselen creation myth offers a model of the world and a model of humanity's role within the world. To see this requires us to adopt a spiritual and symbolic perspective. If we are successful, consistent patterns of symbology will be seen. Layers of meaning will align. If we, even temporarily, approach creation myths with a spiritual lens, putting down our telescopes and microscopes, I believe that we are then approaching the text on its own terms.

Matthieu Pageau put forth a range of interpretations of biblical cosmology in Genesis which promises an enriched understanding of all ancient texts and a recapturing of cosmological narrative structures.

For Pageau, a creation myth is not merely a primitive attempt to explain natural phenomena, but rather a sophisticated encoding of metaphysical truth. Unlike modern scientific explanations that focus on mechanical causality, these myths reveal how spiritual meaning manifests in material reality and what it means for the human.

Consider how Genesis of the Bible opens:

"In the beginning, God created the heaven and the earth."

Pageau reflects that this statement is about the fundamental duality that structures all of reality - the joining of spiritual meaning, heaven and material expression, earth. This pattern repeats through many creation myths because it reflects the basic structure of knowledge itself.

Consider the nature of the written word, which Pageau suggests is a microcosm of cosmic human mediation, or proper joining, of heaven and earth, spiritual meaning and earthly matter. Just as God, in Genesis, created the universe, joining spiritual truth with physical reality, humans create written language by joining abstract meaning with concrete marks. Abstract meaning exists in the human mind while physical marks are made on a page and these marks are organized by rules, grammar. The organized marks host and express the meaning. Just as in Genesis, where God breathes meaning into matter through creation, humans breathe meaning into marks when writing.

With this symbolic perspective, every act of writing recapitulates the cosmic creation of human mediation between spirit and matter.

If we see writing as cosmic mediation we may also grasp humanity's broader role in creation. We are meant to be like words - properly joining spiritual meaning with material expression through conscious mediation. Whether through writing, speaking, building, or creating, our purpose is to help heaven and earth properly unite. The written word serves as both example and instruction - showing us through its very form how to fulfill our cosmic role as mediators between spiritual and material reality.

Just as the written word mirrors the union of heaven and earth, narrative structure also reflects the fundamental patterns of cosmic mediation. Stories are bridges between worlds. The elements of a given story are selected and ordered, and with character and conflict, communicate a message, a meaning. Stories mirror the cosmic dance where spirit becomes matter, heaven touching earth through narrative expression.

In crafting stories, with heroes and villains, triumphs and trials, we humans give form to the formless, making tangible the truths that undergird existence. Each tale becomes a microcosm of the universe's own story, where meaning and matter intertwine. Stories are doorways through which the infinite steps into time, allowing us to touch transcendent truths through the clay of words. In this way, every storyteller becomes a cosmic translator, every narrative a testament to humanity's role in bridging the seen and unseen realms of being.

This explains why similar story patterns appear across cultures. They don't just reflect psychological archetypes but encode the fundamental pattern of reality itself - the proper relationship between the metaphysical and physical through conscious human mediation.

I find Pageau’s insights to be illuminating of biblical cosmology and ancient cosmology. The Esselen creation myth provides an occasion to test these perspectives and see what is revealed. In the next series of essays I will offer a reading of the Esselen creation myth using cosmic symbolism as a lens. My hope is to respectfully engage with one ancient cosmological text alongside reflections with another ancient cosmological text.

One might argue that applying Pageau's framework, which focuses on Biblical stories, to Native American mythology imposes Christian patterns on indigenous wisdom. However, this misunderstands the nature of cosmic symbolism. These patterns emerge not from Christianity specifically but from the fundamental structure of human knowledge and experience. When multiple traditions reflect similar patterns - like floods giving way to dry land, or failed meditation leading to chaos - this suggests universal truth rather than cultural misappropriation.

The key is recognizing that while expressions differ, the basic patterns of reality - the relationship between spiritual meaning and material manifestation, the need for proper mediation, the tension between order and chaos - appear across cultures because they reflect the structure of reality itself.

The validity of an interpretation emerges from its ability to illuminate the text's own internal logic rather than imposing external frameworks. When we find similar patterns across cultures, like the flood in the Esselen myth echoing the flood in Genesis and elsewhere, this suggests we've touched something fundamental about human understanding of reality and human history.

The Esselen myth, read through cosmic symbolism, reveals a sophisticated metaphysical understanding of proper and improper mediation between spiritual and material reality. Far from diminishing the unique cultural indigenous expression, this approach reveals a profound wisdom about the human condition and our cosmic role as mediators between heaven and earth.

The Siren Vase, an Attic red-figure stamnos, presents a striking scene of primal human drama from Homer's Odyssey. The central figure is Odysseus, strapped to the mast of his ship, hands bound behind him, face shown in profile, defiantly turned upwards. Swirling around this stoic figure, bird-women perch, watch, fly, their mouths open in song, their hybrid forms defying natural categories. Dutifully engaged rowers pull their oars directed by the steersman. The artist presents a moment of epic mythology, and a central paradox of the human condition - the tension between wisdom and desire, order and chaos, civilization and nature.

The Siren Vase exists simultaneously as a physical artifact, cultural document, and philosophical meditation. By freezing a moment of human tension in ceramic form, the Siren Vase achieves a kind of aesthetic stasis, a still point in the swirl of history that we may benefit from. Using this opportunity to reflect on the meaning of the scene, The Siren Vase can be interpreted on multiple levels - artistic, mythological, cultural, psychological and philosophical. To contemplate the vase is to feel the pull of history's tides and the depth of the human collective psyche.

The Object

The artistry of the vase itself is consummate.

Standing in the British Museum, 13 inches tall, and 12 inches wide, the vase is made of clay, thrown on a potter's wheel and fired in a kiln. It was likely produced in the Attica region of ancient Greece, in an Athenian workshop around 480-470 BCE, at the height of the Classical period. The red-figure technique, an innovation of the late 6th century BCE, involved painting figures with a slip placed on the vase that turned black during firing, while leaving the background color of the clay exposed. This technique allowed for greater precision, fluidity, and expressiveness compared to earlier styles. The overall effect is one of vivid storytelling and decorative beauty with crisp precise black lines. In the context of art history, the Siren Vase represents a high point of Classical Greek ceramics, exemplifying the technical refinement and narrative sophistication of Attic red-figure pottery.

As a stamnos, it would have served a practical function in the symposium, the ritualized drinking party central for elite Greek male society. The choice of this particular form for the Sirens scene may be an artistic reminder of the dangers of overindulgence. 

The Object as Metaphor

When we read the Siren Vase metaphorically, we observe humanity’s struggle to impose order upon chaos—a struggle that begins with the vase’s very creation. The potter's shaping of formless earthen clay mirrors broader human attempts to shape and control and protect ourselves from chaotic indifferent nature. As the vase undergoes the firing process, we see another metaphoric layer: raw clay, soft and mutable, transforms through fire into permanent form. The artist's application of the red-figure technique then imposes visual and narrative order onto this stabilized form, capturing wild mythological forces within the limited space of the vase. This layered ordering continues through the vase's utility: physically, it contains and controls wine, that most chaotic of substances; psychologically, it helps process and contain human concerns we all must confront together and alone through artistic representation; culturally, it preserves and transmits crucial wisdom across generations; and artistically, it renders the explosive power of myth in carefully balanced visual form. The vase thus becomes not just a container of wine but a container of meaning - a physical demonstration of how human craft transforms raw material into cultural technology. 

In this light, the vase itself represents humanity's broader project of engaging with chaos through the binding forms ritual of art and science and story. Like Odysseus bound to his mast, the wild clay has been disciplined through human craft into permanent cultural form.

The Story

The potter’s choice of scene for the vase, from Homer’s The Odyssey, reflects the significance of the story for the ancient Greeks.

The Odyssey was one of several foundational texts that formed ancient Greek culture. It served as entertainment, education, and moral exemplar and significantly influenced literature, art, and philosophy. The Odyssey is an archetypal story, The Hero's Journey, as explained by Joseph Campbell in The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

The Hero's Journey represents the universal pattern of human transformation through trial, epitomized in The Odyssey's epic narrative of return home from war. Here is a much abbreviated retelling of the story:

After fighting in the Trojan War for ten years, Odysseus sails to return home. The gods, particularly Poseidon, make his journey treacherous, and what should be a short voyage becomes a decade-long ordeal.

Before encountering Sirens, Odysseus visits the witch-goddess Circe, who tell of dangers along his route home. She informs him of The Sirens, mysterious creatures whose enchanting songs contain all the knowledge of the world, past, present, and future. But, their music is fatal; every sailor hearing their song becomes so enchanted that they crash their ships on the rocks trying to reach the Sirens, where they perish.

Circe gives Odysseus a crucial choice: plug his ears with wax along with his crew or find another solution if he wishes to hear their song. Odysseus devises a plan: he orders his crew to plug their ears with wax and tie him firmly to the ship's mast. He commands them not to untie him no matter how much he begs or threatens when under the Sirens' spell.

The Siren Vase captures the moment where Odysseus strains against his ropes, enchanted by the Sirens' promises of ultimate knowledge, while his crew, deaf to the song and their captain's pleas, row forward. Above them, the Sirens sing their deadly song.

The Sirens are not merely temptresses offering knowledge - they are chthonian forces promising a dissolution of the self through pleasure. Their song offers not just wisdom but ecstasy, not just knowledge but transcendence:

‘Come hither, as thou farest, renowned Odysseus, great glory of the Achaeans; stay thy ship that thou mayest listen to the voice of us two. For never yet has any man rowed past this isle in his black ship until he has heard the sweet voice from our lips. Nay, he has joy of it, and goes his way a wiser man. For we know all the toils that in wide Troy the Argives and Trojans endured through the will of the gods, and we know all things that come to pass upon the fruitful earth.’

Their words promise glory while their nature promises obliteration. The bones that litter their island tell the true story: they offer a death that men rush toward willingly, a destruction they embrace with joy.

Significance and Parallels to Today's World

In capturing this specific moment from the larger epic, the vase condenses the hero's journey from abstract pattern to concrete choice. The Sirens episode is a microcosm of heroic transformation.

This enticement of knowledge of “all things” is reminiscent of the Biblical Serpent enticing Eve with promises of becoming like God, “knowing good and evil.” Both Sirens and Serpent emerge as hybrid beings straddling divine and mortal realms. Their voices carry similar promises and the desire for transcendent knowledge and the risk of death parallel the Odyssian themes.

The Sirens still sing. Their song echoes through our screens, our feeds, our endless streams of digital distraction. Like the bones that littered their island, the casualties of our own Sirens surround us, lives lost not to physical death but to the subtle and not-so-subtle-at-all dissolution of attention, purpose, and connection.

Social media applications require containment to prevent losing endless personal time into a bottomless pit of distraction. The Siren Song of modern technology and scientific advancement promise unbounded power and human leverage. Artificial Intelligence systems promise not just knowledge but wisdom, not just data but judgment, singing their own version of the Siren song: "We can know all things, predict all things, optimize all things."

What will life be like if the human being is removed from the struggles of everyday life? If food, shelter, and safety are secured through technology, what sense of meaning will provide orientation for our souls?  Like Odysseus straining at his ropes, we find ourselves simultaneously drawn to and terrified by the promise of machines that will surpass human reasoning and human abilities.

Like Odysseus bound to his mast, we navigate a world of constant sensory allure through our screens and devices. Modern man must choose between full engagement and strategic self-restraint. Addiction abounds with new technologies. Gaming, entertainment, social media and adult content all sing songs of enticement with “sweet voice” and promises of momentary joy. The hollowed-out bodies of those who succumbed to the enticement of Sirens are ever-present. To some degree, we are all hollowed out by technology Sirens, and cautious use is increasingly recognized and discussed. Just as the vase's creation transforms chaos into cosmos through disciplined craft, we too must develop cultural practices that allow us to hear the Sirens' song without being destroyed by it.

Our current technological Sirens sing with ever-growing power and omnipresence. But as our power grows, the question becomes: is our capacity for innovation surpassing our wisdom?

The Siren Vase challenges us to reconsider the relationship between myth and reality, art and life. It suggests that the great themes and archetypes of the past are not dead relics but living presences that continue to shape our world in ways that may inform us should we pause and attend.

Conclusion

The Siren Vase is a testament to the artistic capacity to render the human drama in its complexity, to give shape to the ineffable, and to bridge the distance between the personal and the universal. By freezing a moment of supreme tension in ceramic form, it demonstrates art's capacity to contain and transmit crucial wisdom about the human condition. Like Odysseus bound to his mast, we must find ways to hear the songs of knowledge while remaining anchored to wisdom and stoic restraint.

Memory is the bedrock of identity and of civilization itself. Paradoxically, we find ourselves in an era when surrounded by many treasures of human knowledge made readily available, we are forgetting more and more. We are facing a curious crisis: the Information Age is becoming the Age of Forgetting.

Increasingly, it would seem as though with all our advanced technological systems for storing and referencing knowledge, the information age is becoming an illiterate age too. We live in an era where information is available at the click of a button. Yet, with all this knowledge, reading literacy is in decline, particularly among the young.

In a recent article in The Atlantic titled The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books, we learn that many professors at our most elite universities are encountering fresh students “overwhelmed” by the expectations to read books:

“Dames’s students now seem bewildered by the thought of finishing multiple books a semester. His colleagues have noticed the same problem. Many students no longer arrive at college—even at highly selective, elite colleges—prepared to read books.”

These students, accustomed to the fragmented and instant gratification of digital media, find themselves bewildered by the discipline of sustained reading. Primary school students struggle with reading comprehension, while college students, many from top-tier institutions, find themselves ill-prepared for the intellectual labor that their predecessors took for granted. What does it mean that in an age of knowledge, where entire libraries are digitized and available at our fingertips, so few are equipped to truly learn from them? It is not information they lack, but the ability to engage with it deeply, face to face. Reading ability for students in primary education also has seen significant decline over the last few decades and attention spans continue to wane.

Focus is an increasingly rare skill.

Professor Jonathon Haidt writes and lectures extensively about the challenges he observes in his classrooms at NYU with “coddled” students who demand protection from ideas that challenge their sensibilities and the challenge of teaching students with ever limited attention spans. The role of smartphones, ever present connectivity, and social media platforms are contributing to both a crisis of attention span and a crisis of courage that threatens the project of primary and higher education.  

The result? 

A narrowing of intellectual horizons and a retreat into echo chambers of thought. Students, conditioned by the quick consumption of social media, find it harder to engage with complex, uncomfortable, or slow-moving ideas. The immediate access to information has, in many cases, become a barrier to wisdom rather than a bridge.

It is no coincidence that these trends align with a decline in reading skills and focus. Reading deeply, after all, requires sustained attention, a willingness to wrestle with ideas over time. It demands that the reader engage with the material not as a passive consumer but as an active participant. Yet the tools of our age encourage the opposite. Instant access, notifications, and the constant hum of digital distraction work against the very habits that foster deep learning.

Academia in large part avoids teaching close reading in favor of jargon filled pre-determined postmodern analysis obsessed with identifying the oppressor and the oppressed, which has further distanced students from meaningful engagement with texts. These trends, alongside the rise of identity politics and critical theory-heavy approaches, contribute to students’ struggles with reading dense material. As literature departments lean into theoretical frameworks, the basic skill of "reading" in the sense of deep comprehension and critical thinking is often neglected. When you already know the “right answers,” why spend the time to fully become introduced to an old idea?

The crisis in literacy echoes a broader question: how does humanity transmit wisdom forward while staying connected to the sources of that wisdom?

This is not a new problem. The concerns of educators today mirror concerns that have persisted throughout Western Civilization. The threat of human forgetfulness and in-attention are recurring themes stretching back thousands of years.

Ancient Egyptians and ancient Greeks feared how the use of the written word might result in a loss of wisdom. Stretching back to the inception of the written word, a tension persists between information and wisdom, between learning and understanding, forgetting and knowing.

In the pages of Plato's "Phaedrus," Socrates cast a skeptical eye on the practice of writing, sharing a myth about Thoth, the Egyptian god credited with inventing writing, who presents his creation to King Thamus. Thoth eagerly believes he's offering writing as a tool to store wisdom and memory. 

But King Thamus voices reservations:

“…you who are the father of letters, from a paternal love of your own children have been led to attribute to them a quality which they cannot have; for this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories; they will trust to the external written characters and not remember of themselves. The specific which you have discovered is an aid not to memory, but to reminiscence, and you give your disciples not truth, but only the semblance of truth; they will be hearers of many things and will have learned nothing; they will appear to be omniscient and will generally know nothing; they will be tiresome company, having the show of wisdom without the reality.”

These Socratic concerns about the positive and negative effects of technologies can certainly be understood by anyone alive today. It’s not hard to extend these concerns to artificial intelligence and other such knowledge systems and tools.

The Rosetta Stone serves as a symbol of this struggle to present ideas and project them into the future. Discovered in 1799, this massive granodiorite rock slab, standing nearly four feet tall, over two feet wide, and weighing 1,680 pounds, bears inscriptions in three languages: Greek, Demotic, and Egyptian hieroglyphs. Its very physicality speaks to humanity's desire to pass forward knowledge; the ancient Egyptians chose this immensely heavy, durable stone because they understood the precariousness of memory and the need to reinscribe important truths.

Created in 196 BC during the Ptolemaic dynasty, the stones were commissioned by a council of priests to commemorate King Ptolemy V Epiphanes and was meant to be displayed in every temple across Egypt as a form of royal proclamation. The mandate for multiple copies across temples reveals a reality of our human condition that important ideas require repeated presentation to be remembered. Though its original decree celebrating the first anniversary of Ptolemy V's coronation is now unimportant politically, its true significance emerged centuries later.

The stone's trilingual inscription, with its hieroglyphs lightly incised on the polished surface, allowed scholars to bridge the gap between Ancient Egyptian and modern language, unlocking the secrets of a long-forgotten culture and history. At the time of its discovery, no one had been able to read Egyptian hieroglyphs for centuries. While scholars could understand the Greek section of the text, the real challenge was unlocking the meaning of the hieroglyphs. The stone’s rediscovery allowed modern scholars to recover an entire civilization’s lost language, opening up centuries of Egyptian history to scholars. In this sense, the Rosetta Stone is not just a tool for decoding language; it is a symbol of the human capacity to recover lost wisdom.

The Rosetta Stone reminds us that knowledge, languages and cultures, if not actively preserved and integrated, will be lost to time. Wisdom is constantly being lost. There are no guarantees that any idea will survive into the future.

Today we face a barrage of media competing for attention, much of it visual, all fragmented. Want to learn about the Rosetta Stone? No problem. Many pictures, videos, articles, historical readings and interpretations are available. But, perhaps those memes your friend sent will get looked at first, and then perhaps you are caught in a doom scroll and with it the great ideas are doomed by distraction.

We live in a culture overwhelmed by visual stimuli, which diminishes our capacity for the kind of focused attention that reading requires. This fractured attention is part of the crisis, as traditional forms of deep, focused reading become increasingly rare. Reading is not just about decoding text but engaging deeply with ideas, something that digital culture undermines by privileging speed and surface-level engagement.

It’s not hard to think that contemporary technology may create people with shallow knowledge that seem informed when they've only scratched the surface of true understanding.  Without experience that comes from dialogue and a challenge to our ideas, understanding remains superficial.

So, how can we continue to transmit deep intellectual traditions in an era that increasingly prizes immediacy and utility and political correctness over contemplation and understanding? Is the Rosetta Stone worthy of our attentions at all? This is not an easy set of tasks, but it is a necessary one.

If we are to combat the crisis of attention in modern life, we must instill within ourselves a sense of the continuity of knowledge. Just as the Rosetta Stone connects ancient Egypt to the modern world, we ought to remain connected to the rich intellectual heritage of centuries past, which is our heritage. If we are to foster a culture capable of engaging with the important ideas and questions of history, issues that shaped civilizations, that define our understanding of justice, beauty, and truth, we must hone our capacity for attention, focus, dialogue, logic and intuition. Humans need to engage our attentions with the meaningful. True learning requires active participation with ideas, contending, wrestling, pushing.

There is a need for wisdom, a wisdom that comes not from mere information, but from a deeper engagement with the world through open dialogue, careful study of the past and to acknowledge that forgetting ideas is much easier than keeping them alive.

The myriad of ways that knowledge is lost to time are all reasons to pursue knowledge in the past, present and future. 

Palacial tombs, pyramids, mummies, statues, obelisks, gigantic artfully designed monuments, all erected to confront death and guide life. Death and the potential for eternal life and beauty are at the center of ancient Egyptian culture.

How ought one to live? How ought one to die? Imperfect answers regarding how these questions were addressed are found in the assorted artifacts left behind.

Egyptian artifacts are fascinating to me. As a child, I visited the Rosicrucian Egyptian Museum in San Jose, CA seeing mummies, a mock tomb, jewelry, everyday tools, ritual objects, writing implements, textiles, cat statues, many cat statues, architectural models and more. It was a visual feast. Ancient Egyptian aesthetics went far beyond the essential needs of sustaining life. The craftsmanship, the artistry, the monumental stonework all speak to an awareness that order, beauty and justice are important concepts that inform all others.

The Bust of Nefertiti is one such artifact that reflects the pursuit of idealized aesthetics and authority. It is an example of human effort to construct order and beauty from the chaos of the desert. It captures the essence of a civilization's art form and its pursuit of immortality. Some things are more beautiful than others and some ways of living are more beautiful than others. Represented by this stature is hierarchy, and judgment.

The Bust of Nefertiti dates back to the 14th century BC, during the reign of Pharaoh Akhenaten. Crafted with exquisite skill, the bust epitomizes sensory allure with smooth facial features, elongated neck, and high cheekbones. Her expressive, painted eyes and the ornamental headdress crowned with vibrant lapis lazuli captivate the viewer. The bust’s intricate design showcases mastery in craftsmanship. Nefertiti's features are rendered with delicate precision, from the subtle arc of her brows to the defined edges of her lips. The use of color and symmetry reflects meticulous artistic effort. The artifact is an ancient imagining of grace and dignity.

The bust's serene visage, with its almost perfect symmetry, evokes an ethereal presence; the delicate contours of Nefertiti's face seem to breathe life into the limestone and stucco. The vibrant colors—a testament to the enduring brilliance of ancient pigments—illuminate her exquisite features, with red-painted lips hinting at a mysterious smile. Her elongated neck and regal blue crown form an arresting silhouette that draws the viewer into a contemplation of her enigmatic smile and noble bearing. Despite the empty left eye socket, there is a haunting completeness in her gaze that transcends the boundaries of stone and paint.

The intricacy of the Bust of Nefertiti is evident in its harmonious proportions and the delicate craftsmanship of features such as individually applied eyebrow hairs. Layers of stucco of varying thickness present a textured canvas for the vividly painted surface, resulting in an aura of lifelikeness evident today thousands of years after its creation. The choice and application of pigments were performed with precision, utilizing mineral-based hues that have withstood the test of time. The combination of symmetry and detail speaks to the mastery of the artisans who transformed raw materials into a reflection of elegance and power.

Nefertiti's iconic blue crown, adorned with a golden diadem and uraeus, symbolizes her royal status and divine status. The bust's regal portrayal, combined with traditional Egyptian collar and facial features, positions it within the canon of pharaonic art. The subtle smile and serene gaze amplify her enigmatic appeal, distinguishing the bust as a quintessential representation of Egyptian royalty.

Symbolically, the bust embodies feminine beauty, political strength, and spiritual devotion. Nefertiti’s visage goes beyond mere likeness; it is a study of perfected human form. Her serene demeanor testifies to strength found in composure and the mystique of the feminine form. Nefertiti's mythic stature as both queen and high priestess is central to her legend.

Ritually, the bust holds significant ceremonial value. It represents the rites and cultural veneration of the divine and sovereign in ancient Egypt. The people of Egypt shared a common orientation upward to the divine through the heads of state provided for a stable and long-lasting social order.

Lost for centuries, it was unearthed in 1912 by German archaeologist Ludwig Borchardt in the ruins of Tell el-Amarna. This pivotal moment reintroduced the forgotten queen to contemporary consciousness. Advanced technologies, like radiography and digital imaging, have deepened our understanding of the bust’s construction and materials. These techniques reveal the artistry and realism achieved by ancient craftsmen, highlighting their sophisticated craft.

A surprising outcome of the bust’s rediscovery is its influence on modern beauty standards and its impact on social imagination, becoming an aspirational icon.

Through such artifacts, we see that conceptions of life, death, right, wrong, order, and beauty, require judgment and discernment that develop overtime and remain relevant thousands of years into the future.

Aesthetic judgment exists alongside ethical judgment. This was more clear to the ancients of Western Civilization than modern and post-modern thought. Each informs the other. “Ethics is language of obligation, aesthetics is language of sensibility” (David Bently Hart, Your Are Gods).

It seems to me that to attain beauty in life requires judgment and discernment, a hierarchy of aesthetic taste. Judgment and taste develop a language of aesthetics that allows for refinement that leads toward the beautiful. This is the artist’s way. Attaining life after death also requires good judgment, standards, a hierarchy of morality, and a notion of a final judgment. This is the moral path.

An encounter with beauty at once grounds us to the present moment and lifts us towards the transcendent. Witnessing beauty reminds us of the joy of existence in the midst of all manner of human suffering. Beauty also requires us to ascribe and describe the qualities of beauty. This dialogue with beauty, ourselves and others contains within it an implicit promise that the beautiful is possible to recognize and realize both in life and within ourselves.

Our ability to see beauty or its absence doesn’t require extensive education. In fact, these days, the more formal education one receives, the more complexified the notions of beauty become, and the more obscure and distant the experience of beauty becomes. Beauty itself is often criticized for being a foundation of hierarchy, judgment, and oppression. The current obsession with Marxian notions of equity and inclusion fosters a desire for the destruction of hierarchy. Modern art is filled with such artifacts.

For example, the New York Times reported one such illustrative story in 2016:

“Two California teenagers who recently visited the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art were less than impressed by some of the exhibits and wondered if they could do better.

And thus a scheme was hatched: They placed a pair of eyeglasses on the floor, stood back and watched as, within minutes, visitors regarded their prank as a work of art, with some even taking photos of the fake installation.

"Is this really what you call art?" Kevin said in an interview over the weekend.”

The clarity of the teenager’s (aged 16 and 17) understanding of the purpose of art is a clear example of how the “uneducated” may well be more in tune with beauty and its place in our personal and public lives than many museum curators.

One of my favorite paintings of the 16th century is perhaps one of the strangest.

Hans Holbein the Younger's painting "The Ambassadors" from 1533 is a masterpiece of striking complexity with rich meticulous detail and symbolism, that encapsulates the turbulent historical and cultural milieu during the Reformation. The painting features two prominent French diplomats, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve. At first glance, "The Ambassadors" appears as a standard double portrait, but upon closer examination, it becomes a rich tapestry of Renaissance humanism, religious tension, and a reminder of mortality—a memento mori.

Historical Context

16th century Europe was a time of burgeoning humanist thought and seething with religious upheaval. Martin Luther's Ninety-Five Theses (1517) ignited the Protestant Reformation, challenging the Roman Catholic Church's hegemony and leading to seismic schisms across Christendom and political alliances.

Holbein’s patrons, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve, epitomize the Renaissance polymath, and their inclusion in the painting visually articulates the multidimensional pursuits of Renaissance scholars. The two figures appear almost as bookends to the composition. Dressed in opulent fabrics with expressions both confident and contemplative, Jean de Dinteville and Georges de Selve stand in contrast to each other. De Dinteville, on the left, projects an imposing, worldly presence complete with a ceremonial dagger and fur-lined cloak. De Selve, more somberly attired in clergy garb, reflects a quieter, perhaps introspective strength. Their poses – one slightly leaning against the table, the other standing erect – visually embody the balance and tension between action and contemplation. De Dinteville, represented in resplendent secular attire, alludes to worldly authority and political acumen, while de Selve, cloaked in ecclesiastical garb, symbolizes spiritual introspection and moral integrity. Positioned between these figures is an assortment of objects, each meticulously chosen to reflect the scientific and religious tensions of the age.

Symbolic Elements and Christian Controversies

The array of objects placed on the shelves between the ambassadors form a still-life assemblage speaking to the intellectual zeitgeist. Instruments like the lute, celestial globe, sundial, and a polyhedral sundial signify the period's enthrallment with knowledge—astronomy, geometry, and music. However, the intimation of theological disputes subtly pervades these elements.

The navigational instruments such as the quadrant, the torquetum, and the polyhedral sundial embody the Renaissance spirit of geographical and astronomical exploration. These instruments highlight Europe's ever-expanding maritime ventures and the new avenues of trade and exploration opening up in the early 16th century.

Similarly, the books and celestial sphere positioned between the two figures symbolize the intellectual pursuits of the age. The lute and other musical instruments on the table evoke the harmony of the cosmos and the human endeavor to find order and beauty amidst chaos.

The lute, with its broken string, symbolizes the discord wrought by the Reformation. This rupture in harmony can be seen as an allegory for the fractured church, beset by doctrinal discord and schismatic upheaval. The book of hymns captured in the painting further underscores this theme, with open pages suggesting the liturgical divergences and the shifting landscape of religious authority.

Memento Mori

The most curious element in the painting is perhaps the most significant, a “memento mori," a reminder of mortality embodied in the anamorphically distorted skull that juts out at the painting's foreground.

At first glance, the skull appears as an indiscernible smear, a bizarre anomaly. However, when viewed from a particular angle, it becomes a viscerally stark and clear reminder of death. The skull operates on two levels—it serves as a philosophical memento mori and exemplifies Holbein’s command over perspective. Its anamorphic nature critiques and plays upon the Renaissance fascination with perspective, optics, and the visualization of knowledge. Through this device, Holbein not only wields the technical prowess to manipulate form and space but also proposes a meditation on how perspective mediates our understanding of life and death.

Perspective as Mediator of Knowledge and Life

Holbein’s strategic use of perspective illuminates the dual process of acquiring knowledge—the empirical and the interpretative. The painting's anamorphic skull is a visual metaphor underscoring how knowledge is oftentimes contingent upon one's vantage point. Just as the skull, is perceivable only from a specific angle, knowledge too is subject to our perceptual limitations and orientations.

The deployment of linear perspective in the painting and meticulously detailed objects underscores our desire and attempts at creating a rational Apollonian ordering of our existence. The juxtaposition of this with the skull's skewed representation infers the limits of this rationality confronted by the Chthonian certainty of earthly death. The figures of Dinteville and de Selve are embodiments of Renaissance humanism, representing intellectual, diplomatic, and spiritual power. However, the memento mori undercuts these displays of human achievement, exposing the vulnerability that underlies their façade.

Hans Holbein's "The Ambassadors" is a masterful interplay of humanist intellect, religious discord, and a reminder of our mortality. It visualizes the nuanced tension between the empirical pursuit of knowledge and the theological ruptures of its time. Through the innovative use of perspective and symbolism, Holbein offers a reflective commentary on the pursuits of truth, faith and the persistent shadow of death, which hovers just beyond our conscious sight.

Engaging with this painting, we are invited to ponder the convergence of worldly knowledge and existential truth, perspectives that transcend the frame. Holbein’s painting encapsulates the ‘rituals of power,’ while simultaneously exposing the fragility and temporal bounds of that power. Not offering a solution to the philosophical and biological tensions it portrays, and instead highlighting the unsettling complexity of reason, faith, life and death.

Holbein's work is a beautiful and surprsing exploration of the ways in which we seek to order our world, even as it reminds us of the impermanence that shadows human venture.

Take these questions and meditate on them through an artistic medium and you are an artist engaged in the discovery of meaning for oneself and for the world.

Institutions for sorting, presenting, organizing, and preserving works of art emerged out of educational institutions and become autonomous, funded through public grants and private donations. Many museums, galleries, and private collections function apart from any broader educational structure.

Governments and wealthy patrons are the primary funders of the museums and galleries open to the public. Education systems too are now severed from their birthplace within religious organizations. While religious schools remain an important part of the scholastic landscape, public and private schools both function autonomously from the religious understanding from which they came.

Historically, art-making was embedded within human culture and tradition, fully integrated into cultural and religious systems. Generally, no art was made for the sake of art.

For example, for the Indians of California, the crafting of objects that we now consider collectable art works, such as baskets, jewelry and textiles, were mostly used to support daily life. The art of living and the crafting of objects were fully integrated. A beautifully made object was a useful and well crafted object. Clothing, jewelry, basketry, drawing, and painting, were all fully integrated with a theological understanding of the world and the human place within the world.

Beautiful craftsmanship reflected the participatory integrated vision of humanity that the Native peoples lived. Their craftsmanship of objects extended far beyond the mere making of the object itself. Take basket making for example. Making a basket required much work over many years of tending and active management of the landscape to produce reliably harvestable material. To engage in basket making, was to engage in a fully integrated skillful management of land and plant life alongside the skill of assembling and weaving a robust, useful basket that was also beautiful.

Textiles, tooling, hunting, fishing, home making all were part of a way of living that integrated skillful management. This tending and management of the landscape for the purpose of supporting human life, and the life of the earth, flora and fauna, resulted in a world of great beauty.

Our current official understanding of wilderness takes none of this pre-historic human participation with the natural world, that is well documented and recorded by history, into account:

A wilderness, in contrast with those areas where man and his works dominate the landscape, is hereby recognized as an area where the earth and its community of life are untrammeled by man, where man himself is a visitor who does not remain. An area of wilderness is further defined to mean in this Act an area of undeveloped Federal land retaining its primeval character and influence, without permanent improvements or human habitation, which is protected and managed so as to preserve its natural conditions and which (1) generally appears to have been affected primarily by the forces of nature, with the imprint of man's work substantially unnoticeable; (2) has outstanding opportunities for solitude or a primitive and unconfined type of recreation; (3) has at least five thousand acres of land or is of sufficient size as to make practicable its preservation and use in an unimpaired condition; and (4) may also contain ecological, geological, or other features of scientific, educational, scenic, or historical value. - THE WILDERNESS ACT, 1964, signed into law by President Lyndon B. Johnson

This legal understanding of wilderness utterly denies the testimony of Native Peoples in California and beyond.

Tom Little Bear Nason, Chief of the Esselen Tribe of Monterey suggests an entirely different vision of the landscapes of North America:

It's sometimes difficult for me to talk about the loss of ancient forests in Big Sur, products of thousands of years of care by my People, all occurring in my lifetime, on my watch. The Ancestors cannot be pleased. I have seen old-growth ponderosa pines, incense cedars, Douglas firs, and Santa Lucia firs disappear from whole valleys because of damaging wildfires. My grandfather and my father warned the Forest Service repeatedly that this would happen unless fire was returned to the land.

You would think that after so many firestorms raging through Big Sur in recent decades, and all the lost homes and forests, that our community would try a different approach, one that is more open to fire, working with fire not against it. But fire is still being suppressed throughout most of our region. Between the many locals that understand the importance of healthy fire but don't have the means or knowledge to put fire back on their lands, to those who hold onto the wilderness ideology that any intervention by humans is a crime against nature, who is left to take the lead?

Looking into the canopies of old-growth Redwood is a spiritual experience. To consider that these forests are the work of human hands that respected and loved the natural world and respected and loved the human as well is to reject the official, legally defined notion of wilderness.

For centuries, religious understandings and religious institutions guided education and artistic endeavors as part of an integrated social order.

Now, we have museums where art objects sit behind glass, no longer objects that humans use to support life.

Art-making is separate from supporting life. Now art-making is meaning making rather than a fully integrated practive of the human endeavor to support human life and the life of the world.

Now we support the needs of sustaining human life in ways that are separate from beauty, separated by the abstractions of modern life and contemporary mechanization.

Last weekend I was walking along a riparian corridor and noticed a few tiger lily flowers. I stopped to take a picture.

I saw something beautiful and stopped to capture that beauty and share it with others.

For the people that lived in and tended to the Santa Lucia Mountains, this flower represented far more than simply an object of beauty. The bulb of the tiger lily were food. For Native Peoples, cultivating thriving beds of tiger lily was a way to support the life of the human. The beauty of the flower is something we share with people going back thousands of years. But the full value of this plant to regular people is largely lost.

With The Wilderness Act, the riparian corridor I walked is to be preserved as if it were a museum. Simply keep it safe and bounded and protected from the heavy hand of humanity and it will thrive and be preserved for generations to come.

The ancestors of the Native Peoples of this land know different. The beauty of the landscape and the utility of the landscape exist in concert. The Native Peoples created harmonies of soil and flora, forest and fauna. These harmonized landscapes we call pristine untouched wilderness but they called home.

The hands of the Native People and the wisdom they lived resulted in a landscape that was hospitable to the human. This is changing.

As carbon is released into the atmosphere because of human mechanization, the flora grow stronger. And with the current approach to wild fire, and the avoidance of ancient peoples practice of prescribed fire, the flora of the understory grows each year. And grove by grove, all over California, the old-growth dies in flames, fueled by an unchecked understory.

The wilderness designated areas are museums of nature that are being plundered by fire through mismanagement and misunderstanding. Logging removed most of the old-growth. Now, fire will consume what’s left unless significant changes in forest management occur.

“Wilderness is not a luxury but a necessity of the human spirit, and as vital to our lives as water and good bread. A civilization which destroys what little remains of the wild, the spare, the original, is cutting itself off from its origins and betraying the principle of civilization itself.” ― Edward Abbey

So much of our shared ideas about wilderness in the American West are influenced by the legacies of John Muir, William E. Colby, Ansel Adams, Eliot Porter, Edward Abbey, and many others. The destructive power of clear-cut logging, mining, and other resource extraction is still evident over the whole of the American West, California, and the greater Monterey Bay areas. In an effort to stop all of the old-growth forests of the American West from disappearing, John Muir formed the Sierra Club to conserve portions of the landscape from industry. National parks, national preserves, and state and county parks were created to protect and preserve lands from development. These efforts were in many ways a great success. We greatly benefit from the early efforts to protect these beautiful places where all can recreate and enjoy the natural world.

Since the early 1900s different approaches to management of these natural resources have been explored. Forest fire suppression, thinning of the forest, Wilderness Designations, and prescribed fire, all are ways to manage the forests of the West to support all forms of life.

Until recently, little academic research focused on forest management before the arrival of Europeans. Over the previous 20 years, more and more research is being published regarding the documentation of Indigenous peoples actively and continually tending to and shaping the natural world to be more hospitiable and supportive of human life. A new book published this year by Dr. Lee Klinger highlights both new original research in the Big Sur forests and academic and cultural documentation of prescribed burning and other Indigenous methods that stretch back as far as human memory.

Dr Lee explains in his wonderfully concise and practical book, Forged by Fire: The Cultural Tending of Trees and Forests in Big Sur and Beyond that the forests and landscapes of North and South America and other places around the world were the result of long term human wisdom and tending of the natural world.

“…I have come to learn that a common trait among most of the world's Indigenous Peoples, both past and present, is the cultural practice of tending trees. …Indigenous Peoples, from the tropics to the subarctic and subantarctic, thrived and are still thriving among forests they have cultivated for millennia. Through reciprocal acts of tending the plants and soils, and receiving their sustenance, the People have learned how to best fill their various niches in the forest and help maintain a long-term relationship. That is why, today, we find the vast majority of the world's biodiversity hotspots on Indigenous lands.” ― Dr Lee Klinger

The sources Dr Klinger cites come from all over the globe spanning many scientific disciplines oncluding archeology, geology, biology, history and testimonies of Indigenous peoples the world over. Dr Lee convincingly argues that human wisdom and human care co-created the forested landscapes that in the American West captured the imaginations of the public and inpart inspired the conservation movement.

The idea that the cultivation of forests over milenia is responsible for the great forests and old-growth trees of Big Sur transformed my perspective of wild places.

My whole life, looking up into forest canopies, climbing trees and spending time beneath ancient groves has been awe-inspiring. The Ancient Bristlecone pines, Giant Sequois, Giant Redwoods are part of megaflora that inspire in me a desire to contribute to the continuation of the life of these large species of life. Few things manage at once to humble me and encourage me as being among the giant trees of California.

There are many, many places within the Big Sur range of mountains and coastal forest where I can sit and think and be in the presence of giant ancient trees. Redwood temples, old-growth Oak savannah, mighty Manzanitas, Monterey Cyprus, and Pines and Sycamore trees are among the most beautiful places that I visit. The tragic reality of these old-growth groves is that they represent a fraction of what the forest was, but 100 years ago.

One critical piece of evidence Dr Klinger highlights is the presence of shell mounds upon which old-growth trees are growing. The Indigenous peoples of the Big Sur area, Esselen, Ohlone, Salinan and Rumsen, harvested mussels, abalone, clams and other sea life and transported these shells to mounds all over the Santa Lucia Mountains many miles above the coast. This significant effort over thousands of years were part of an integrated cultural, spiritual and ecologically supportive practices that fertilized the soils and supported the life of the forest. To see at the base of old-growth trees the fragments of shells suggests a human wisdom at work over many centuries.

To stand in the middle of an ancient redwood temple and imagine the time and attention required to protect those trees is to contemplate a humbling mystery. Thousands of people over thousands of years developed a culture of care and concern for a rich overstory of trees that are a beautiful and fragile monument to human potential and vision.

That these ancient old-growth trees are largely gone from North America is a tragedy with less than 5% still alive compared to what thrived for centuries before Europeans visited the continent. Almost all old-growth persists within conserved areas such as National Parks and other preserves.

One theory about this trees is that they are the product of a human culture working with natural processes to modify and augment the environment to support the life of the world and the many diverse species within. The opposing theory is that these olg-growth forests were a process of nature and the habitation of humans within and the culture of these peoples played little part in their evolution. Joan Maloof is one example of academics that believe:

“An old-growth forest is one that has formed naturally over a long period of time with little or no disturbance from humankind. They are increasingly rare and largely misunderstood.” Joan Maloof, Nature's Temples: The Complex World of Old-Growth Forests

Most approaches to old-growth forests today is to protect and preserve these places to keep people away. Preventing old-growth from being logged is a critically important work. But are these forests going to re-establish centuries old trees without the helping hands of human?

Certainly I am no expert.

The arguments put forth from Dr Klinger seems properly respectful of the evidence on the ground as I’ve experienced it and his ideas incorporate the testimony of Indigenous peoples alive today about cultural practices of using fire and other methods to tend to the health of the forest. Much historical records from the Spanish and other Eurpeans in North American support the widepsread use of fire by Indigenous peoples. Ideas from people like Joan Maloof generally ignore the presence and significance of Indigenous people and their witness and history and contribution to the life of the forest.

In Don Usner and Paul Henson’s wonderful book The Natural History of Big Sur they write:

“Native Americans in many parts of California deliberately used fires to make the land more productive. The natives burned to improve wildlife habitat and to encourage the production of edible plants and seedproducing oaks and pines. Salinans and Costanoans (also known as Ohlone) periodically burned grassland and oak woodland, and these fires must have spread into the mountains at least occasionally. The Esselen of the Big Sur area probably burned in a similar fashion.

Human-caused and lightning-caused fires continued during the Spanish-Mexican period (1800-1847), but records of how often and where these fires occurred were not kept. Spanish diaries from the period indicate that natives continued burning. Other records indicate that loss of summer and fall livestock forage led the missions to ban native burning. As the natives left their homelands to join the missions, much of the Big Sur coast outside the northern ranchos became very sparsely inhabited during this period and was probably subject to less frequent fire than before European settlement.”

Finding these old-growth trees on public lands, and photographing them will be a background project of mine. Over time as I accumulate photographs, I will publish a gallery. In the mean time, here are a few pictures from around Big Sur of likely culturally modified trees.

I’ll leave you with a section from the forward to Dr Klinger’s book written by Tom Little Bear Nason:

“It's sometimes difficult for me to talk about the loss of ancient forests in Big Sur, products of thousands of years of care by my People, all occurring in my lifetime, on my watch. The Ancestors cannot be pleased. I have seen old-growth ponderosa pines, incense cedars, Douglas firs, and Santa Lucia firs disappear from whole valleys because of damaging wildfires. My grandfather and my father warned the Forest Service repeatedly that this would happen unless fire was returned to the land.

You would think that after so many firestorms raging through Big Sur in recent decades, and all the lost homes and forests, that our community would try a different approach, one that is more open to fire, working with fire not against it. But fire is still being suppressed throughout most of our region. Between the many locals that understand the importance of healthy fire but don't have the means or knowledge to put fire back on their lands, to those who hold onto the wilderness ideology that any intervention by humans is a crime against nature, who is left to take the lead?

My dad tried to take the lead, and my grandfather, but few followed. Those of us who did are carrying on the fire practices learned and refined over hundreds and even thousands of years. I've been doing it for 63 years, 64 years - nearly since birth. Our fires were never large. Sometimes they would be thirteen acres, or forty acres, or four hundred acres. Probably the biggest one my dad ever did was about a thousand acres. But we burned every year.

Then in the 1970s the authorities stopped us from burning, writing us citations. Now look where we are at. In just twenty years we have lost the majority of our big trees, and many others are dying. The big grandfather oaks are dying because of all the little oaks growing like weeds around them. Redwoods too. Fire must be returned to the land and there are people like me and other Native brothers with that knowledge who are willing and able to do it.” - Tom Little Bear Nason, Forged by Fire: The Cultural Tending of Trees and Forests in Big Sur and Beyond

You can pick up a copy of this wonderful, concise and persuasive book here: Forged by Fire: The Cultural Tending of Trees and Forests in Big Sur and Beyond.

I certainly have.

Immersion (Piss Christ) by Andres Serrano comes to mind, a photograph of a crucifix submerged in a glass beaker filled the artists unrine explores conceptions of…well do we even care what the artist was trying to say? Apparently, he meant no disrespect to anyones faith and he is a Catholic and faithful follower of Jesus Christ.

Much contemporary visual art is intended to break down categories of meaning, to critique and deconstruct frameworks of power, prestige, hierarchy.

While traditional art is rooted in a respect and love for beauty, purpose, skilled craftsmanship and tradition, national identity, contemporary art often rejects idealization, narrative frame, inherited meanings, inspiration, and responsibility.

This same degradation of pattern and tradition can be heard in the work of 20th and 21st century classical music composers.

While the particular methods of compositional New Complexity, Serialism and other experimental classical musical exercises, such as atonality, dissonance, complexity and abstraction, are all potentially useful tools of music presentation, some composers play with perception as a way of breaking apart, challenge and undermine traditional conceptions.

Beauty is often set aside.

Accessibility for broad audiences is eschewed. It’s fair to ask if any audience beyond increasingly small concentric academic circles are invited or intended to participate in much of contemporary classical music.

Listening to much of contemporary classical music is difficult and discordant, and its designed to be this way.

Brian Ferneyhough’s String Quartet No. 2 which you can listen to below is one such example. Should you decide to listen through the whole piece, read the comments on Youtube below the video. They are enjoyable and insightful.

In parallel much of popular music is the opposite.

Insipid, simple, formulaic rehashed music designed to be palatable, accessible, and base. Popular music is at a low point.

Within the last 100 plus years of musical and artistic tradition, there are many notable, wonderful, useful composers, artists, musicians that take up the challenge of art making with great success.

While some seem to be confused about the meaning of music and life, and the place of music and art in supporting life, a confusion we can only sympathize with, others seem to be clear, focused and committed to meaning and beauty.

Consider these two pieces from two composers that I’ve recently enjoyed over and over who know what they believe:

Both Arvo Pärt and Morten Lauridsen have faith in a beauty beyond and within themselves that we all share are searching themselves for ways to express what the see and feel and to invite us into those searching and apprecaiting.

Listening to these pieces it feels as though I am sitting beside the composers as they patiently sahre to what they see in the world and what they feel too. They have received the beauty of their surroundings and are passing it along.

Morten Lauridsen writes:

As artists we must constantly strive to achieve that which leads to those magical, ethereal, and completely fulfilling musical experiences that leave us all enriched and transformed.

Arvo Pärt is an Orthodox Christian and with his music is intending to explore the depth and meaning of the Divine Logos through sound, attempting to apprehend the oneness from which all things are created, the oneness that binds all things.

The poet William Carlos Williams too calls attention to the need of beauty and meaning in our lives:

It is difficult

to get the news from poems

yet men die miserably every day

for lack

of what is found there.

In life bordered by death, the question of misery and beauty is ever present.

In poetry, in music, with the visual arts, with life, beauty and suffering co-exist and a lack of connection between the discordant beats and the consonant notes of life leads to a downward spiral for the human spirit.

William Carlos Williams highlights with these lines that patterned, aligned, beautiful language contain reflections that remind us of meaningful coincidences and concordant, layered ideas that give life purpose.

What is it about patterns that suggest meaning exists? 

Patterns are beautiful. Patterns are the foundation of meaning. Patterns allow us to recognize, to see, to hear, to know.

The capacity to recognize requires a measure of familiarity, a connection to a prior experience or understanding. Language itself is a shared, communal pattern of speech that makes possible communication. Musical language is the same. The visual arts too must be rooted in patterns, shapes, colors, forms that are recognizable.

The crusifix in urine is a horid example. No amount of academic narrative can make such a work constructive and beautiful.

Patterns allow for meaning. Out of the chaos of our limited perspectives glimpes of order emerge and converge and carefully these glimpes of order may be translated through pen or brush or lens.

Representing the world as ordered, framed, discernable, loveable are acts of faith that form the foundation of our civilizations.

The cultural moment we find ourselves in is one of decadent chaotic questioning into the meaning of the inherited structures of civilization.

There are some that find beauty and rationality in the legal and spiritual traditions of our nations. There are others that question whether beauty exists and whether or not the legal and spiritual traditions exist for anything other than building oppressive structures of power.

As musical and artistic movements evolve, the thread of connection is formed. Patterns are elaborated and refashioned but patterns persist.

We are lost without them.

I’m very curious what you think of the music above. Please do share in the comments.

This personal journal was not intended for publication. Found post-humously, the journal was published for its powerful series of reflections on how to live a judicious and productive life. This journal is now known as Meditations and for 1800 years represents Stoic philosophy through the pen of one man and his struggle and desire for truth, virtue, justice.

In Meditations, he asks himself:

My soul, will you ever be good, simple, individual, bare, brighter than the body that covers you? Will you ever taste the disposition to love and affection? Will you ever be complete and free of need, missing nothing, desiring nothing live or lifeless for the enjoyment of pleasure? …No, will you not rather be satisfied with your present state and take pleasure in all that is presently yours?

The whole book is a wonderful example of one man who desired the best of himself. There are many, many insights contained within and for centuries people have reflected on the ideas in the book.

For myself, the book is intriguing because it’s easy to read accessible wisdom, and immediately applicable and inspirational too.

As a set of ideas, it’s powerful. As a personal journal, it’s an example of the inner work and discipline that is required for excellence.

What begins Meditations is a perfect example of useful ideas within an exercise full of promise. The first section begins with the following:

From my grandfather Verus: decency and a mild temper.

From what they say and I remember of my natural father: integrity and manliness.

From my mother: piety, generosity, the avoidance of wrongdoing and even the thought of it; also simplicity of living, well clear of the habits of the rich.

This personal journal begins with an articulation of his own foundations, a list of people and ideas for which he is grateful that formed the man he is and the man he desires to become.

What a great way of remembering well and usefully those people who made a positive impression. This section ends with a remembering of the good things that came from the gods:

From the gods: to have had good grandparents, good parents, a good sister, good teachers, good family, relatives, and friends - almost everything;

It’s commonplace in contemporary life to hear people talk about gratitude as a foundational practice that leads to a better life. Here we have an emperor of Rome beginning his own journal with gratitude for the specific gifts of and from key people.

Great example.

The rest of the book is filled, each paragraph, with words of wisdom.

For the creative person, here are seven wonderful reminders that speak directly to my creative practice:

1:

We should also attend to things like these, observing that even the incidental effects of the processes of Nature have their own charm and attraction. Take the baking of bread. The loaf splits open here and there, and those very cracks, in one way a failure of the baker's profession, somehow catch the eye and give particular stimulus to our appetite…looked at in isolation these things are far from lovely, but their consequence on the processes of Nature enhances them and gives them attraction. So any man with a feeling and deeper insight for the workings of the Whole will find some pleasure in almost every aspect of their disposition, including the incidental consequences.

Great advice for a photographer! There is “charm and attraction:” in the decay, beauty in the accidental, the intimate, the broken and the breaking. Careful observation will find in all things a significance as a reflection of the relation to the whole is always recognizable.

2:

…in the sequence of your thoughts you must avoid all that is casual or aimless, and most particularly anything prying or malicious.

Building a mental habit of cleansing the thoughts of anything casual or aimless…what a task for us all. To be purposeful with all our thoughts and to be properly directed towards the good and useful is a task for a lifetime.

3:

Always make a definition or sketch of what presents itself to your mind, so you can see it stripped bare to its essential nature and identify it clearly, in whole and in all its parts, and can tell yourself its proper name and the names of those elements of which it is compounded and into which it will be dissolved.

So much of creative progress involves the careful articulation of an idea or subject and understanding the particular component parts is a strength to cultivate. To strip bare, to identify clearly, to properly name elements, are creative habits that all great artists practice.

Recently I found a work by Henry David Thoreau, Wild Fruits, which is an uncompleted manuscript, where love for and careful observations of the natural world are recorded and reflected in the written word. Thoreau is exemplifying the Transcendental search for connection to God and truth through direct mindful engagement with the natural world.

He writes in the beginning of Wild Fruits:

We can any afternoon discover a new fruit there which will surprise us by its beauty and sweetness.

Wild Fruits is Thoreau showing us the way and embodying the value of carefully noticing the wonder of the world that surrounds us. He didn’t need to go far to find the marvelous. Simply walking around his hometown, Concord, Massachusetts, he found in every leaf and every fruit a microcosm worth his attention.

Back to Meditations…

4:

No action should be undertaken without aim, or other than in conformity with a principle affirming the art of life.

Purpose ought guide our creative work. Creative work is an act of faith embodied. We believe that in making our artful connections we are making a contribution to something greater than ourselves. We believe that art-making is worthwhile. Knowing our purpose, and understanding the meaning that drives us, allows us to know whether or not our work is aligned with the good and beautiful.

5:

Everything in any way beautiful has its beauty of itself, inherent and self-sufficient: praise is no part of it. At any rate, praise does not make anything better or worse. This applies even to the popular conception of beauty, as in material things or works or art. So does the truly beautiful need anything beyond itself?

This struck me as an important reminder to not seek approval from popularity. To align our work with the good and beautiful is its own reward. The praise of others can’t be the goal of our work.

6:

At break of day, when you are reluctant to get up, have this thought ready to mind: 'I am getting up for a man's work. Do I still then resent it, if I am going out to do what I was born for, the purpose for which I was brought into the world? Or was I created to wrap myself in blankets and keep warm?' 'But this is more pleasant. Were you then born for pleasure - all for feeling, not for action?

Quite a few years back I read this passage and was surprised and delighted to find Marcus Aurelius reminding himself that getting out of bed can sometimes be hard and it’s worth remembering that we are not born for the warm blankets of bed, but for action, for purpose, for life. Perhaps we all at times struggle with this.

7:

Your mind will take on the character of your most frequent thoughts: souls are dyed by thoughts.

I’ve found this to be increasingly true the more I focus on squeezing out the useless thoughts by focusing on the good and beautiful. There is no end to the process of cleansing out the mind. Meditation, prayer, journaling, and practicing silence are all ways we manage the ever-flowing contends of out minds.

For creatives, this cultivation of our surroundings to support our output is a core practice that forms our taste and forms our notions.

To mindfully cultivate the garden of our mind, following our intuitions, allows us to grow in the grow in the direction of our own humanity. We become more ourselves through the cultivation of intuition and taste by cleansing our minds of the unfruitful and casual.

Once again, I’ve included some photos below that are the fruits of my own searching in nature for the wild fruits that surprise and delight. Do let me know what you think in the comments!

Feedback is always welcome.

All art is an invitation to pause and consider and be available to revelation and reevaluation. 

When I make a photograph I invite the viewer to give their attention to my framing of the world, to limit their attention to what’s within the photo, to consider what’s in the frame and without too. 

If my photo holds the attention of the viewer, the photo is successful.

How is this done? How is attention elicited by art?

Works of art, artifacts of the material world, assembled, crafted, are organized into recognizable forms and patterns that are significant to the artist.

And what is the significance? 

Significance is what the artist proposes and the viewer decides. This is the invitation. 

This dialogue between object and subject, artist and viewer, is where the meaning is realized. This dialogue, this connecting of object and subject, artist and viewer is the work of art.

Fundamentally, art connects the material world to the immaterial world.

Artworks become an idea in the human mind.

For Joseph Campbell, dreams are the gateway into the world of mythology. Why do we dream? What do dreams mean? Clearly, dreams are stories about the world, but are dreams of the world? Dreams pose immediate questions about the world. We can ignore them, but we can’t escape them. 

The nature of artmaking involves connecting objects, connecting colors with a brush, organizing objects with a camera lens, shaping stone, all physical acts in the material world that become successfully or not, ideas and concepts that exist in the mind. How is it that a statue of marble can make one feel pride? How does a painting affect a viewer emotionally? 

This mystery is what we explore when making art. Art is a ritual that enquires into the significance of ten thousand things.

The experience of music highlights this possibility to connect and communicate ideas, the immaterial, through the material, musical instruments. How are sound waves able to communicate the deeply complex, nuanced, and universal feelings of sadness, joy, surprise, finality?

With music, harmony is achieved through consonant and dissonant soundmaking. Consonant sound is pleasing to the ear. Dissonant sound is not pleasing to the ear. Organized through musical composition and performance, consonant sounds and dissonant sounds together elicit in the mind of the listener all manner of human emotional experience. 

Music is an invitation to experience and consider the full range of human subjective experience.

So it is with all art. Art mediates, negotiates, moderates, and reconciles object and subject.

Art-making is inquiry into meaning. Art poses questions and responses to our most important concerns.

And how does an artist know where to begin? How does an artist know when to stop? How does an artist know when to abandon a work or to complete a work?

There seem to be innate human understandings. 

Beauty and love and harmony are as universal as their opposites. 

While yes, beauty is in the eye of the beholder, there is wide agreement on between the eyes of us all. 

Particular artists aside, particular artworks aside, beauty exists in the world and is recognized universally. There is harmony among humanity about the beautiful. 

The endless debates about the nature of beauty emphasize that beauty exists for us all. 

We know in ourselves when we are in the presence of beauty.

We hear harmony, knowing within ourselves, in our minds, when a dissonant chord is resolved beautifully, finally. Musical harmony experienced together 

When I am making photos it seems as though there is something within that intuitively responds to particular locations and perspectives. When that something captures my attention, I pause and consider how to represent that something with my camera. Which lens? Which exposure? Should I return at another time or day or year? At times there is no internal dialogue and other times, plenty of internal dialogue. 

Working these questions out in practice is part of why art-making is meaningful to me. 

Recently I’ve been working on curating my own work within the Big Sur mountains that communicates the significance of what I am doing. 

There is beauty in those mountains, and it’s worth preserving and it's worth preserving access to those mountains to explore the beauty there. 

I’ve included a few photos below. Feedback welcome. 

I go through periods where it seems all I listen to is the Goldberg Variations or the Brandenberg Concertos or the Well-Tempered Clavier.

Classical music grabbed hold of me from a young age.

As a child, I spent many hours in front of a large speaker, a speaker then larger than me, listening to Beethoven, Mozart, Vivaldi, the waves of symphonic harmonies washing through me.

These were foundational experiences. I was transfixed by the movement of the sound and how I too was moved. I had few words then to describe the effect of the music.

And now too, words fail me. It’s as if music is a world you enter into that outside language, within our being, within the world.

“The inexpressible depth of music, so easy to understand and yet so inexplicable, is due to the fact that it reproduces all the emotions of our innermost being, but entirely without reality and remote from its pain… Music expresses only the quintessence of life and its events, never these themselves.”

Arthur Schopenhauer

Music communicates and resonates with aspects of our human experience more fully than words. Music reproduces within our being the emotions associated with our experiences in life.

Sorrow, joy, surprise, delight, softness, harshness, water, wind, breathing, walking, all rediscovered in the world of musical composition and performance.

There are moments when music sends a warm chill through the body. The hair rises on the neck as melodies chime bells within that we didn’t know existed. Musical performance at times seems to reach through our bodies, transforming our bodies into extensions of the musical instruments. The sound of beautiful music strums our bodies like the musician strums the strings of a violin.

Consonance is a universal experience of music as beautiful and harmonious. Dissonance too is universally recognized and all human cultures have musical traditions that meditate on the dissonant and the consonant. Those pieces of music that most resonate are always the consonant. And consonant music is what forms musical traditions.

What makes music consonant or dissonant? Why is musical harmony experienced as beautiful?

While musical notes can be represented with all manner of notational methods, and while the nature of musical harmony can be described in language, neither the notations themselves nor the words used to describe the effect constitute the power of music.

Just as the world can be described and measured through math, math did not create the world.

So it is with music.

Music is the melody whose text is the world.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Listening to Bach’s Goldberg Variations is an education on beauty and harmony. Perhaps one of Bach’s most well-known compositions, the Goldberg Variations are meditations on beauty and the multifaceted ways that beauty is experienced.

Comprised of 30 variations of an aria, a single musical theme, Bach explores the many ways that a single idea can be represented. Each variant demonstrates Bach’s mastery of musical forms and styles, and each variant has a unique character, underscoring the diverse ways a single idea can be explored.

Listening to them doesn’t require any musical understanding to appreciate. Glenn Gould’s recording is a rapturous experience.

All of Bach’s music are a reflection of his belief in God and beauty and his compositions are meditations on the eternal Truths.

The Goldberg Variations as a work is a reminder that beauty is worthy of continuous reflection and attention. The experience of beauty is represented as the most worthy pursuit.

Mixing together prayer and play and variety, grounded in a practiced, honed musically technical excellence and with room for personal expression through performance, Bach points to the transcendent beauty that centers our existence. Each listener is invited to experience the great diversity of musical beauty and beauty itself in all its delightful variations. Each performer is invited to inherit the compositions as form and reform the music with their own musical expression.

You can listen to one excellent performance of the Goldberg Variations here:

The Goldberg Variations remind me of the Katsushika Hokusai series of drawings, Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji, the most famous view being The Great Wave off Kanagawa.

Both Bach and Hokusai take a single subject, Bach an aria, Hokusai a mountain, and reflect on that single subject from many different viewpoints. In variety, in diversity

Both bodies of work together are examples of technical mastery of craft, but much more they both represent compositional and narrative mastery.

This is the highest form of artistry.

To demonstrate superior technical and creative ability is one thing but the capacity to place those abilities into service of something greater, a story, is something else together.

The practice of channeling intuition through craft into a work of art is beautifully presented in the work of Bach.

His work is inspiring, educational, instructive and humanizing.

There is something about a great work of art that encourages one to be more of oneself.

Few pieces of art are as memorable for me as The Great Wave off Kanagawa by Katsushika Hokusai. What I didn’t know until recently was how much I would also be inspired by the life story of Hokusai.

As a kid, I loved the depiction of the drama of that crashing wave. The fury of ocean waves still captivate me and now as an adult, revisiting The Great Wave, my eye is still held captive by that great wave. Studying the work, the elements of the piece converge becoming a story of power, resistance, and human struggle.

Boats tossed about by the power of a merciless ocean, men doubled over, struggling, surviving, the claws of the wave edges, Mt Fuji dwarfed by the great cresting wave, all come together powerfully.

Hokusai's use of color, line, and composition in "The Great Wave" with the striking Prussian blue pigment, then new to Japan, adds depth and intensity, evoking a sense of awe and terror.

The curling, claw-like lines of the wave create a dynamic sense of movement and energy, while the asymmetrical composition, with Mount Fuji off-center in the background, adds to the feeling of imbalance and instability.

The small boats and human figures are dwarfed by the massive wave, emphasizing the insignificance of human existence in the face of nature's power.

The Great Wave" can be seen as a reflection of the Japanese perspective on the relationship between humans and nature during the Edo period. Serving as a reminder of the insignificance of human existence in the face of nature's power and the need for humility and respect in our interactions with the natural world. At the same time, the print celebrates the courage and resilience of humanity, as the fishermen lean into their work against treacherous waters.

This piece and many others by Japanese artists circulated around the globe in the 1860s, where many artists in Europe were strongly influenced by the use of color, choice of subject, compositional strength and visual impact.

It’s not hard to see the influence between Hokusai’s The Great Wave and Van Gogh’s The Starry Night.

Other notable artists inspired by Japanese woodblock prints include:

• Édouard Manet - painter among the first Western artists to collect and study Japanese prints, influenced by the use of color and composition

• Vincent van Gogh - deeply influenced by the bold colors, flat planes, and compositions of Japanese prints

• Claude Monet - influenced by asymmetrical compositions and a focus on nature

• Edgar Degas - painter, sculptor, and printmaker inspired by the unusual perspectives and cropping techniques

• Mary Cassatt - American Impressionist painter and printmaker influenced by the elegant lines and intimate human scenes

• Henri de Toulouse-Lautrec - French painter and printmaker inspired by the flat colors, bold lines, and compositions

• Paul Gauguin - French Post-Impressionist artist drawn to the exoticism and spirituality of Japanese art

The arc of Katsushika Hokusai’s artistic life is as interesing as his most revered works.

Katsushika Hokusai (1760-1849) was a renowned Japanese artist and ukiyo-e painter of the Edo period. Born in present-day Tokyo, Hokusai began his artistic career at a young age and continued to create art until his death at 89.

The Ukiyo-e Movement Hokusai's work is associated with a focus on depicting the transient nature of life, including landscapes, scenes from everyday life, kabuki actors, and sumo wrestlers. This artistic movement flourished in Japan from the 17th to the 19th century, with Hokusai being one of its most prominent practitioners.

Hokusai is quoted as saying shortly before his death at 89 years of age:

From the age of six, I had a passion for copying the form of things and since the age of fifty I have published many drawings, yet of all I drew by my seventieth year there is nothing worth taking into account. At seventy-three years I partly understood the structure of animals, birds, insects and fishes, and the life of grasses and plants. And so, at eighty-six I shall progress further; at ninety I shall even further penetrate their secret meaning, and by one hundred I shall perhaps truly have reached the level of the marvellous and divine. When I am one hundred and ten, each dot, each line will possess a life of its own.

How wonderful to consider such commitment to craft and artistic expression that by age 70, having produced from a young age countless drawings, and having had a full career, he understood himself to be just beginning his full potential as an artist.

And at 86, he remained committed to progressing and working and creating to create meaningful work.

The Great Wave was but one piece in a series entitled Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji.

How often is it that one particular great piece of art captures such attention to make its origins forgotten and ignored? The Great Wave is such a piece.

But the origins are fascinating too. The series was begun during a difficult period of time for the artist in his 60s. Suffering from the death of his wife and dealing with financial burdens from a grandchild he had aided, a creative study of Mt Fuji was begun.

Katsushika Hokusai was both teacher and master of his craft. He published a guide to drawing entitled Quick Lessons in Simplified Drawing. Additionally, over the course of his life and just after his death a total of 15 volumes of his drawings were published to great acclaim within Japan, his first volume being a best seller.

A lifetime of drawing, teaching, and publishing laid a foundation that made Thirty-six Views of Mount Fuji and The Great Wave possible.

And he continued to draw, create, publish and teach until his passing at the age of 89.

I’ve included below a few of my own wave photographs.

I do wonder about my own artistic work as I continue to develop my craft and vision over the coming decades.

Go here to see more of my Big Sur wave photography.

Art-making is an exploration of the real and the ideal. These perceptions of ideal and real are rooted in the prevailing realities of each historical period and the personal experiences of the artist.

Romanticism is a period of artistic expression that highlights the interplay between changing political, theological, and economic realities in the artist's personal life and creative process. This interplay gave rise to new ways of seeing and representing the world and our beliefs, with a heightened appreciation for nature, emotion, beauty, and the individual’s relationship with the Divine.

With the emergence in late 18th-century Europe of Romanticism alongside the rise of the modern individual, artistic work became a process of individual expression and evocation with the natural world as a primary subject.

Romanticism gave rise to many successive artistic movements that placed personal experience and vision at the center of artistic process and elevated idealized representations of the natural world as a primary subject for artistry.

The Protestant rejection of the authority of the Catholic Pope, a couple hundred years of warfare contesting that rejection, an increasingly industrial global economy bringing wealth and growing urban centers and the Enlightenment, together made possible a conception of the individual as a rational being, able to think and see and know the world without the confines of ancient traditions. Scientific experimentation, engineering, mechanized business, and literacy enabled these new notions of humanity. Enthusiasm for man’s creative potential energized industry and political dialogue. Utopianist visions of man’s potential would emerge to find many willing followers.

With this new focus on reason as a means to progress, the true and good, Romanticism, an artistic movement, emerged to provide balance, focusing on the human emotional connection with nature, God, and self.

Key artists of Romanticism include Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Goethe, Dumas, Casper David Friedrich, JMW Turner, John Constable, Goya, Beethoven, Wagner, and Brahms.

As a landscape photographer, the work of J.M.W. Turner, John Constable and Casper David Friedrich loom large as exemplars of artists representing the majesty of the natural world mediated through personal intuitive experience.

The paintings of Casper David Friedrich in particular highlight the connection between man and the immensity of nature. Friedrichs paintings are powerful meditations on the landscape and man’s experience of himself within the landscape.

His careful study of the elements of nature through outdoor drawing excursions and travel throughout the German countryside was the workshop for his ideas. Rocks, trees, cathedral ruins, clouds, these sketchings would be worked into well-planned paintings. Starting out as a draftsman, drawing was the foundation of Friedrich’s artistic practice.

Friedrich’s paintings are often spooky, dark, with bare trees, protruding rocks, cemeteries, gravesites, ruins, subdued colors, lone figures gazing with backs turned to the viewer, sunsets, sunrises, moons lit scenes, all intentionally evoking a range of emotions.

“I must stay alone and know that I am alone to contemplate and feel nature in full, I have to surrender myself to what encircles me, I have to merge with my clouds and rocks in order to be what I am. Solitude is indispensable for my dialogue with nature.”

Casper David Friedrich

He sought to experience and represent moments of high contrast that spoke to the raw power of the natural world. Awe, excitement, tranquility, transfixion are communicated through human figures within large-scale scenes. The human figures are caught up within and captured by the beauty and the powerful forces of the natural world.

Friedrich’s depictions of nature are no celebration of the human triumph over nature, but rather a recognition of nature’s awesome power over humanity with atmospheric melancholic tones, reminding viewers of our mortality.

The focus on landscapes and nature with human figures facing away from the viewer ran counter to established artistic trends.

Prior artists used landscape as a background to dramatic human subjects. For Friedrich, the landscape becomes the primary subject, and the humans within his compositions are subject to the grandeur of the natural world.

This departure was a radical one born of a commitment to personal expression and the desire to express personal emotions. His theological foundations were formed by theologian Ludwig Gotthard Kosegarten, who taught that God reveals himself through nature.

“The painter should not just paint what he sees in front of him but also he sees within himself.”

Casper David Friedrich

This idea would become foundational for successive artistic movements. Realism, Impressionism, Expressionism, Cubism, Fauvism Mannerism, Art Nouveau and many others all share a common root in this idea of individual emotion and expression as starting point for artistic creation.

For many landscape photographers as well, inner experience of external reality is the story to be told. And much of today’s photography of grand landscapes is directly inspired by Friedrich.

Friedrich expanded the subject matter artists explored. Landscapes were a micro niche within classical artworks. Biblical stories, the drama of political moments, historical figures, the nobility, were largely rejected as subjects by Friedrich, replaced by mountain scenes, ruins, beaches and countryside.

This new focus beyond the traditional subject matter expanded the possibilities for future visual artists.

His commitment was to the personal experience of the transcendent universals of beauty and power of nature and expressing that through his art.

Friedrichs work is an excellent example of an artist dedicated to pursuing a personal vision, aligned with his core beliefs about God, man and nature, aligned with personal intuition and masterful grasp of craft.

Édouard Manet, 1832 - 1883, pursued painting as a profession, rejecting his fathers’ encouragements towards law or military service. Manet rejected the classical subjects painters of the time generally depicted with elaborately staged scenes with models, props, and costumes.

Influenced by the politically motivated far-leftist Gustave Courbet to represent everyday life, rather than aristocratic life, Manet would incorporate expansive, loose, visible brushstrokes, a reduced sense of depth that flattened scenes, highlighting the surface, rejecting idealized presentation.

The subjects of his early work challenged conceptions of propriety and beauty, with crass and provocative depictions of prostitutes confidently gazing at the viewer. Manet was criticized as “the apostle of the ugly and repulsive.”

These insults were continual and took a toll on Manet.

Many of Manets’ paintings are rooted in earlier works of earlier painters and he used these classical scenes to emphasize his departure from convention. The patterns of prior artistic periods were repetitiously used to push forward new ideas about the purpose of the artist and the place of art.

Art is always exploring the relationship between ideal and real with materials and craft and Manet pushed the boundaries of respectability, mirroring back to Paris the fullness of a developing urban culture.

While Manets’ tutor, Thomas Couture, would comment with his paintings on the decadence of Rome at its height with pieces like The Romans during the Decadence, Manet would represent and embody the decadence of his own time with pieces such as Luncheon on the Grass.

While the background and context for Manet’s work are interesting and important, for the man, painting was life.

It is not enough to know your craft - you have to have feeling. Science is all very well, but for us imagination is worth far more.”
- Édouard Manet

An artist through and through, he desired to represent the world beautifully in accordance with his internal experience. This was a labor of love. He was as much a product of the past as of his own time.

His radical breaking with convention, rooted in tradition, encouraged others to pursue subjects and styles outside the mainstream of visual art in 19th-century Paris.

Claude Monet is chief among those who continued exploring how brushstrokes might depict the everyday and pursued with obsessiveness how to capture on canvas the varied qualities of light and the beautiful. Reviewing Monet’s body of work is to be introduced to visual meditations of place and time. His series of paintings of the same scenes at different times of day with different shades of colors and tones are examples of how artistry, craft, and vision develop over time with love.

Monet was more concerned with landscapes, seascapes and urban life, principally reflecting nature in his work. Monet painted outside, in the open air, a foundational practice of impressionism and of many many painters working today.

Technology enabled this move outside through tin tubes of oil paints.

Reflecting on his first experience painting outside:

“I was overcome by deep emotion, suddenly it was as if a veil was torn away… My destiny as a painter opened out before me.”

The capturing of light dancing with nature became Monet’s obsession. Fantastically productive, he left behind 2000 paintings, 600 drawings, and 3000 letters.

Monet was initially criticized as mundane, pretty, childish.

And Monet continued mining the vein he established for himself, working till the age of 86, nearly blind by that time, on giant paintings of water lilies.

With Manet, I see the throughline of creative exploring of method, style, subject and intention. His willingness to be true to himself and to develop artistically in the face of insults and derision is an example for us all. He was himself, accepting the inspirations of the past and present and filtering it all through his hands with oil, brush and canvas.

From Manet to Monet, I see the throughline of creative inspiration, mentorship and practice. Monet cultivated a community, learning from Manet, learning from his friends. Inspired by the light of the sun, by masters of old, by everyday life, by city streets, by Japanese woodcut prints, collecting 200 such prints, particularly of Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige, he returned time and again to familiar subjects in his own established style.

While visual art in the Modern period would continue to push the boundaries of subject and style and medium, Monet was delighted to stay within his own world exploring with joy, the light and the beautiful, all without the need to be recognized as valuable by the reigning artistic orthodoxy. Perfectly happy to find an audience outside the academies of the day, Monet contented himself with his work and engaged the marketplace for visual art from a growing urban population.

For Monet, painting outside, and meditating on the light as it evolves was an end in and of itself. To see and reflect and represent the natural world was a meaningful act, sustaining and affirming of life.

Art collectors too, such as Albert C. Barnes (1872 – 1951) were also soundly criticized for collecting Impressionism’s finest examples, Renoir, Cézanne, Matisse, Picasso, Van Gogh, Manet and Monet too. Barnes suffered from withering criticism from the art world and rejected their mocking.

Barnes loved the beauty of the Impressionists and amassed the most significant private collection of their work in the world. Barnes believed in the transforming power of the arts. He believed that art was for everyone and established the Barnes Foundation to make accessible to all the works in his collection.

He designed the rooms of his own museum to showcase Impressionist paintings alongside African sculpture, metalwork, decorative art, Orthodox Icons and more.

I recall visiting the new Barnes Foundation in Philadelphia some years ago. It was a wonderful afternoon, each room it’s own world of beauty and meaning.

The collections of each room remind the visitor that art is made from the elements of the material world. Craftsmanship is foundational. Commonly used artifacts are carefully crafted for every use. These common artifacts when crafted well, items like door knockers, a tankard, keys, teapots, furniture, clothing, all these are little pieces of art, when crafted carefully, beautifully.

So it is with our lives. Carefully crafted lives are works of art that reflect the beauty we encounter in the world when we seek that beauty.

“I'll have to explain to them that Bach was using the drinking songs of the day, that 'Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded', the original text that everyone in the congregation would know, was: 'My love has gone and left me, and I'm all alone, I cry into my Bierstein'. They'd all know that! Then Bach would take that melody, that the congregation knew, re-harmonize it—beautifully—make a fugue out of it, or whatever the treatment was.”

- Dave Brubeck

That J. S. Bach repurposed the most popular drinking tunes of the day into sacred church music is hilarious. And insightful. And fun too. I can only imagine the smiles that emerged on the faces of the church attendees the first time Oh Sacred Head Now Wounded was performed in church. All the drunks must have felt right at home.

Nicely done.

Dave Brubeck told and retold this story as an example of how repurposing, remixing musical tunes may make for new musical explorations.

One of Dave Brubeck’s most famous songs, on his most famous album, Take Five, was inspired by street musicians in Turkey playing a well-known Turkish folk tune.

During a morning walk in Istanbul, Brubeck encountered street musicians playing a unique and quick rhythm in an uncommon 9/8 time signature, a time signature difficult for Western musicians to incorporate.

That afternoon Brubeck was at a local radio station for an interview with its own orchestra. Brubeck mentioned the rhythm to the musicians on break. After he hummed it, they recognized it as a well-known Turkish folk song and explained to Brubeck: "This rhythm is to us what the blues is to you."

The tune made a lasting impression and he continued to listen carefully for melodies and rhythms that resonated with him as he travelled.

Returning to the USA, Brubeck, and the other members of his band, Paul Desmond on alto saxophone, Eugene Wright on bass, Joe Morello on drums, began working out songs using alternate time signatures. Joe Morello was able to play drum solos in alternate meters and wanted songs to showcase this ability.

Together, they created the Take Five album with all original songs exploring alternate time signatures. An album of all original compositions alone was a challenge to the general practice of jazz music albums, aside from the unusual alternate metres. Much of jazz recordings were of jazz standards, familiar pieces.

Bringing together the unique rhythms for a whole album was a significant challenge for all the musicians. The second song on the album, Blue Rondo à la Turk, is a masterpiece. It’s worth every listen. 

That tune has been stuck in my head for almost 3 decades now. It still brings a smile to my face whenever I hear the tune. 

For me it’s an example of how inspiration, preparation and purpose and collaboration come together beautifully.

Brubeck was available to be inspired by any tune, found anywhere.

Together with his band, he was committed to exploring the edges of ability. His curiosity, humility, commitment to excellence, and collaboration with his band made possible the best-selling jazz album of all time.

His creative work is an example for us all.

Inspiration is everywhere. Will we notice it? Will we be humble enough to make use of the inspiration around us?

The inspiration is only able to be put to use when we are creatively engaged. We need to be walking the path towards a destination, a goal. We need to be doing the work to make good on our inspirations.

As we walk our paths, those along for the journey bring their own inspirations to the dialogue. This dialogue is jazz music. The dialogue and collaboration with others may make for powerful creative work.

And new ideas often require a well-honed ability to execute and deliver on the promise. So much of jazz is the preparation to be able to respond dynamically to other musicians, live, in the moment.

Our skills make possible the emergence of new ideas. And our skills develop in the direction of our creative goals. A jazz pianist and a classical pianist develop remarkably different skills, each aligned with their respective goals.

So it is for us. With a direction, a goal, collaborators, skill, humility, curiosity, and dedication, beautiful things are co-created.

With photography, it’s the same.

Sometimes a musical line, a painting, a statue, anything might inspire. And when that inspiration is carried within and taken into creative work, the root of inspiration can grow into something new and beautiful.

I was lucky enough to attend a Dave Brubeck concert in Redwood City, Ca in my late 20s. I recall the man’s energy as he walked onto the stage, slowly, carefully. Addressing the audience, his stories were well crafted, each word well chosen. Having spent over 60 years performing and entertaining he entranced us all in a way I’ve rarely seen.

And when he sat down at the piano, he lit it on fire.

The only other performer I’ve witnessed with such power and experience was Ray Charles, who I saw in concert as a young boy. His energy too was infectious. For both Brubeck and Charles, I remember most their magnetic and infectious energy and presence. They both performed and communicated and entertained as much with their smiles as with their fingers and voices.

I wonder what 60 years of committed creative work looks like in my own life. Perhaps I will be old enough and strong enough to find out!

I’d be curious to hear what stories inspire you in your own life, in your own work. Let me know!

If you haven’t recently listened to Blue Rondo à la Turk, you might give it a listen.

Here is a recording from Youtube:

This happened again not so long ago.

Ansel Adams: An Autobiography is a wonderful work for any creative looking to understand one man’s journey of developing craftsmanship, artistic vision, a sustaining career, and achieving a measure of impact and success that is both impressive and revelatory.

The first paragraph contains a critical series of insights that blend together forming a seed of a theme that becomes the autobiography:

“It was wonderful to set up the camera among the rocks at nearby point Lobos and to work in the fresh sea air experiencing again the empathies with scene and visualization and camera that every serious photographer comes to know. Just as a musician gets out of practice, I was slow with the mechanics involved and managing the equipment and even the exposure calculations. It took a little time to regain the facility I had when I was making new pictures every day. But all smoothed out and the miracle of image on the ground glass revived me.”

- Ansel Adams

An analogy, the process of becoming reacquainted with craft, the wonderfulness of it all, the miracle of artistic creation reviving, all this resonated, but one word forms the crux of the story and the most significant part of his story and his photographic work: empathies.

All creative work involves showing up again and again to seek connection with the work, the craft, the process. The connection?

Our emotions.

For Adams, aligning self, scene, vision and camera was a process of internal discovery alongside external exploration.

Perhaps I am wrongly assuming that we all know of Ansel Adams and his work. For American nature photographers, Adams’ work is a beacon of inspiration, casting many shadows.

So for those who are just now learning about Ansel Adams, here is a brief intro:

“At one with the power of the American landscape, and renowned for the patient skill and timeless beauty of his work, photographer Ansel Adams has been a visionary in his efforts to preserve this country’s wild and scenic areas, both on film and on Earth. Drawn to the beauty of nature’s monuments, he is regarded by environmentalists as a monument himself, and by photographers as a national institution. It is through his foresight and fortitude that so much of America has been saved for future Americans.”

- President James E. Carter Presenting Ansel Adams with the Presidential Medal of Freedom

Beyond the significance of the Adams’ photographic work, his writings and teachings on photography continue to provide significant insight on how and why to pursue photography.

A famous Adams quote encapsulates his approach and perspective:

“A great photograph is one that fully expresses what one feels, in the deepest sense, about what is being photographed.”

Empathies, scene, visualization, camera.

Standing in the natural world, noticing the elements, waiting for a sense of beauty to arise within as we look, hoping for an experience of delight to emerge, the “serious photographer” seeks an internal childlike knowing of wonder as catalyst for a creative photograph.

This makes sense to me.

Experiencing beauty is a great privilege, an experience we all share, and while language connects us to being and reality and beauty, the fullness of reality and beauty lies within and without and beyond our being.

To catch glimpses of beauty is to connect with a primal moment of wonder and awe that universally points our attention outside of ourselves, evoking spiritual and philosophical questions and musings.

“Wonder is the only beginning of philosophy”

- Plato

Witnessing beauty is humbling too. Beauty directs us to look outward and inward. Beauty delights and judges.

To witness beauty is to be inspired by beauty to become beautiful ourselves.

The elements of Adams’ description of his returning to photography are themselves instructive:

• The wonder of being outside

• Internal awareness of empathies

• External awareness of scene

• Personal vision

• Craftsmanship

• Relearning the process of craft as creative act

• Witnessing the miracle of creativity

Put another way:

• Gratitude

• Presence

• Awareness

• Story

• Craft

• Humility

• Wonder

This seems to me a rather straightforward path that connects us to our creative work and the world.

Beauty inspires action. Beauty is inspiration.

The word inspire comes from the Latin word inspirare, which means to breathe or blow into. This conception of inspiration as something we breathe in stretches far into the ancient past with the Biblical creation story where God breathes life into the first ones.

We are His creation, inspired creations filled with the breath of Life. We are spiritual beings, having the spirit, the breath of God within. We are inspired beings capable of recognizing and representing beauty. We can breathe in beauty because beauty was breathed into us.

Beauty is the divine breathing, enlivening us to the wonders of creation, if we are willing to receive.

Witnessing beauty connects us with that Divine wellspring of life, the divine breathe, revealing, calming, delighting, encouraging, reminding.

If we attend to beauty, beauty becomes inspiration and then becomes us.

The matter of our attention is the question.

Inspired, we act. Inspired, we create, or rather co-create together with the Divine.

Adams believed that:

“The clear realities of Nature seen with the inner eye of the spirit reveal the ultimate echo of God.”

Certain moments seem to contain pockets of inspiration that drive us forward. Others seem to be without any such sense of higher meaning. 

Surprisingly, delightfully, inspiration strikes at a time of its choosing.

Whether we are at Point Lobos (a good place to go!) sitting at home, cleaning out storage, or walking with a friend, inspiration is waiting for us.

The mundane and the spectacular both contain the potential for inspired creative action. The whole world contains occasions of inspiration.

But we do need to be prepared.

We prepare by developing skills with our craft. We prepare by practicing awareness of our internal life and the external world. We prepare by practicing all of the above. We prepare by anticipating the struggle to relearn craft in the moments of our creative work, to work out and work towards how we can represent beauty to others. We prepare by remaining available for the emergence of beauty. We prepare by going out and seeking beauty actively. We prepare by learning from those who came before us, those who believed in beauty, and those who organized their lives around seeking out beauty.

Adams, in the concluding paragraph of the introduction of his autobiography, frames his world of peace and beauty with his early childhood experience of the great suffering caused by the 1906 earthquake in San Francisco.

Having recalled the smoke, the fear, the refugees without homes, the explosions, the uncertainty he writes:

My closest experience with profound human suffering was that earthquake and fire. But we were not burned out, ruined, or bereft of family and friends…

I believe in beauty. I believe in stones and water, air and soil, people, and their future, and their fate.

- Ansel Adams

There is much in the world that is not beautiful, not lovely, not inspiring. But there is beauty, and we may recognize beauty and we may allow ourselves to be transformed by beauty. Beauty is present within us and the world and is able to be inhaled into our lives, not just our artistic endeavors.

I also believe in beauty and the creative act as an act of faith.

If we believe in beauty, we believe we can experience beauty, and that experiences of beauty can be communicated with others and this is all worthwhile and sustains and guides our lives.

This photo I share below is one of mine that reminds me of Ansel Adams work, partially because he shot very similar compositions from the same place I stood. I didn’t intend to re-present anyone else’s work. But often, upon reflection, my own work bears striking similarities with other artist’s work. It makes me smile to think that Ansel Adams inspires my creative work, even if this one photo is similar to his work.

“What’s so hard about that first sentence is that you’re stuck with it. Everything else is going to flow out of that sentence. And by the time you’ve laid down the first two sentences, your options are all gone.”

Joan Diddion

What makes the blank page daunting? Why is publishing a photograph difficult? What makes starting hard? What makes continuing hard?

Fears.

Creativity requires confronting fears often, fears of many forms from many roots.

Last Saturday, April 6th, 2024, several college friends from San Luis Obispo walked into Big Sur to begin a climbing adventure at a well-known waterfall. One of them wouldn’t walk out. 

Just off Highway One, there is a beautiful waterfall, one of the most beautiful in all of Big Sur. One hundred twenty feet of cascading freshwater on a journey to unite with the Pacific Ocean. The first waterfall photo is a segment of that waterfall.

That same day, I too went to the falls, though I was going my own way, to explore new places, maybe new falls.

Many people walk to see these falls. I’ve been many times, last Saturday my most recent. To get close to the main falls, caution is warranted. Many people get injured here with slippery smooth wet rocks. Almost once a month emergency services are called for something minor. Saturday was not such a call.

I started a bit late in the day but I soon found a new place to explore. Looking at the topography map made me smile. A small section of creek descended one thousand feet of elevation. Very promising terrain.

Why hadn’t I gone this way before? It seemed that every 200 yards a new cascade greeted me, some small, some large.

When I’m in new territory I have two goals: get familiar with the area and attempt to create photos that communicate enough of the beauty I witness.

Often I am mystified by how to approach a scene. Even in the age of digital photography with a nearly endless capacity for storing photos, I want to capture scenes well. Finding an initial perspective sometimes takes time, other times you know just where to point the camera.

On this day, the fears I encountered were familiar.

Do I wait for the light to change here or keep exploring? How far up the drainage do I go today? Are my photographs worthy of the beauty all around? Will I be able to create well without my filter kit (which I forgot!)? Will I be able to get to the trail before the light fades? Will I ever get conditions like this again? Am I talented enough? Can I meet my own expectations for my work? What will others think? Is this section safe? What’s the best route?

Familiarity with these fears makes them easier to name and manage and incorporate into my creative practice. They become friends along the way that inform the way I go and what I create. Fears become guides, affirming that I am exploring beyond the familiar, and raising questions about how far, how much, how long, that keep me safe and working the edge.

Walking down the trail back to the truck, I was enjoying each step. The day was full of new memories, new opportunities, and a photo or two that delighted me. Getting closer to Highway One I saw flashing red lights at the trailhead. As this was about 9:30pm I knew something serious was happening. Perhaps someone was lost, perhaps someone was injured.

Getting to the parking area, all the emergency vehicles were empty. Two sheriffs, two firetrucks, one ambulance.

I decided to wait a bit to find out what happened because I was curious and in the case of a missing hiker, perhaps I could help in some way.

I didn’t have to wait long. The emergency crew carried a body down to the road. Waiting a bit, I asked a Sheriff what had happened.

Apparently, a group of friends had decided to rappel down the main waterfall and one young man got stuck in the watercourse of the falls, and didn’t make it to the plunge pool alive.

I’m sure many people have rappelled down this falls and others in the area. On April 4th and 5th, rains came to the mountains, leaving snow at higher elevations. This made for a large waterfall to navigate.

I can only imagine at what fears these climbers confronted beginning their adventure. No doubt a mix of experience, happenstance, and desire contributed to a young man’s death that day. A tragedy.

While for myself climbing adventures are not my primary goal, I respect very much the desire to push oneself, to find an edge, to explore terrain, and drink deep of the beauty in wild places. I’ve thought of rappelling down waterfalls, though not this one. I’ve considered that happenstance and the natural world collide and serious accidents can happen to anyone at any time. There is always risk.

This week, I’ve been looking for articles to provide a bit more context on the accident online. Wednesday those articles began to emerge.

From the Daily Mail:

A 21-year-old student has fallen to his death from a 120 foot waterfall while hiking along Big Sur in California. 

Taylor, from Richland, Washington, who was set to graduate next year, was also a founding member of the Alpine Club at Cal Poly. 

He was known to be an experienced hiker having served as a trip leader for ASI Poly Escapes, an outdoor clothing and equipment shop.  

Taylor was described by staff at the store as 'a person of incredible technical skill and even more incredible kindness, unmatched wittiness and a passion for adventure that could inspire anyone.'

Kenneth Taylor seems like someone I would be glad to have bumped into on a trail. I pray the family and friends find healing in time.

For me, with this death and the other death from two weeks ago, also involving a waterfall in Big Sur, I am reminded that fears are valuable emotions. Learning to listen and learn from fears is a process that I will continue to honor with careful attention.

Steven Pressfields The War of Art is a contemporary, beautiful, simple, practical guide to confronting the main challenge of creativity, which is the resistance the artist feels when beginning and finishing creative work. Pressfield describes in ways deeply familiar to any artist how self-sabotage and our fears and anxieties can be recognized and overcome. It’s a great book and anyone attempting to do good work for the betterment of self and others would find pragmatic and concrete ideas to encourage and enlighten. We will talk more about Pressfields body of work in future posts.

I read the The War of Art perhaps 10 years ago now and few books have as much direct, practical application for myself and many other artists. and I've returned to this book time and again.

And now I have a new book that is every bit as useful to understanding and refining my own approach to creativity that comes from 17th-century Japan.

Miyamoto Musashi’s Book of Five Rings is a beautiful, concise, pragmatic guide to mastery of strategy with swordsmanship and warfare and life and art. The book’s introduction clearly connects the development of mastery in one domain with mastery of any other domain":

“…the principle of strategy is to know ten thousand things from a single thing.”

Joe Rogan often mentions this book and this idea on his podcast as profoundly influencing him as a young man. Hearing this mentioned a few times I decided to give it a read. It’s not a long book and not hard to read and will inspire useful reflections on learning, honing, and mastery.

This book is one I will return to from time to time.

As with Leonardo Da Vinci’s A Treatise on Painting, there are simple and immediately applicable ideas that transcend the genre of learning strategy and warfare.

Musashi was also an artist that honed his abilities as a calligrapher. There is no question that the ideas in the book are applicable to creative work. One could simply imagine that when Musashi talks about strategy, he is talking about creativity and creative approach.

There are 9 principles in the beginning of the book that are quite beautiful that I will focus on.

Miyamoto Musashi writes:

“Those who would like to learn my strategy should apply the following rules in order to practice the way.”

Each principle is simple to understand, challenging to master and infinitely valuable when lived and learned.

The 9 principles:

1. Think of that which is not evil

2. Train in the way

3. Take an interest in all the arts 

4. Know the way of all professions 

5. Know how to appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of each thing 

6. Learn to judge the quality of each thing 

7. Perceive and understand that which is not visible from the outside 

8. Be attentive even to minimal things 

9. Do not perform useless acts 

As photography is a primary craft I am learning, I will discuss the applications of these principles to photography. Most of these principles I already practice to a degree, but the concise articulation here in the Book of Five Rings is helpful and useful because they describe in a new way ancient truths. They struck a chord with me.

The first: Think of that which is not evil.

This idea is ancient, found in the Bible, Old and New Testaments, and other ancient texts. What we fill our minds with is the source of our own becoming. Managing the noise of our minds and finding the beautiful signal within and without is a struggle and practice that forms our perspective and values.

In the New Testament, Philippians 4:8, Paul writes:

“In conclusion, my friends, fill your minds with those things that are good and that deserve praise: things that are true, noble, right, pure, lovely, and honorable.”

Same idea, different vantage point. There is good and there is evil and we can cultivate a relationship with the good and true and we must.

Years ago when I decided to pursue photography with the best of myself I began a practice of viewing visual arts and curating for myself those artists that resonated with me. It’s now a daily practice that I use to form my own perspectives, consciously and unconsciously.

Reading too is such a practice, and the Book of 5 Rings is one such good book that is “not evil.” Music, prayer, church, conversation, photography, exercise, etc, are all avenues to walk toward the good and away from evil.

Train in the way

When Musashi talks of “the way” he is likely referencing the writing and philosophy of the Tao Te Ching.

On a practical level, here we are reminded that the way is learned through walking, through training, through doing, through careful reflection. As Musashi reminds the reader throughout his book, reading and listening are not enough to understand his ideas.

Understanding comes through continual training and study and application.

After many key ideas in the book Musashi will say: “Ponder this well” or “This should be examined well” or “Reflect well on this.”

There is no end to the walking of the way, to training in the way. Mastery is a road stretching out long before us.

Musashi writes:

“Follow a road that is a thousand leagues long one step at a time.”

“Be victorious today over what you were yesterday; tomorrow be victorious over your clumsiness and then also over your skill. Practice in accordance with what I have written without letting your mind deviate from the way.”

This framing of being victorious over what you were yesterday brings the development of mastery into the everyday beautifully. Small steps accomplish long journeys.

Take an interest in all the arts 

This too is an idea I’ve incorporated into my own practice. Painting, music, poetry, literature, philosophy, theology and every other arena of artistic endeavor provide context to one’s own practice. How one artist proceeds, how one artifact inspires, all inform one’s own artistic endeavor. We may learn from all domains and a well-educated, broad perspective on the different arts is endlessly useful for learning a creative endeavor.

A book about swordsmanship may well help one build a business, write a book, make a photograph.

Know the way of all professions

Musashi compares the work of a soldier and carpenter to demonstrate that strategy is developed within many fields, many professions and learning one will inform learning another. Being able to extract learnings from other fields artistic and otherwise is useful.

Decades ago it became nearly impossible to be a master of all the scientific arts. The depth of knowledge is great and perhaps greater than times past. Examples might be, biology, mathematics, physics, computer science, or electrical engineering.

Perhaps it’s not possible to know the way of all professions but we take a broad view within a range of professional domains that will inform our own journey. Narrow specialties don’t need to be the sole focus of one’s life and work.

Musashi writes:

“Without knowing others, one cannot really know oneself.”

Know how to appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of each thing 

There are pros and cons to everything and learning to tell the difference is key. There is an old Christian catechism book from the 1st or 2nd Century AD that begins with these words:

“There are two ways, one of life and one of death; but a great difference between the two ways.”

There are ways of cultivating life and death in all areas of life and we get to choose. Our choices are only possible if we meditate on the useful and useless, the advantages and disadvantages. There is a big difference between the two.

So it is with the arts. There are artists that maximally communicate their vision having learned how best to craft and present their work. And some artists take many things for granted.

One way I’ve practiced my appreciation of each thing is by reflecting through writing on particular works of art, generally photographs. What lens was used? What’s the exposure time? What’s the impact?

To differentiate well is a core skill.

Learn to judge the quality of each thing 

Along with differentiating, perceiving the qualities of everything allows for strategic engagement. How to incorporate discordant elements within a creative project requires discernment of the qualities of each element.

As a painter selects color, shape form, so a photographer chooses values of exposure, perspective, framing, lens, and much more.

My own approach to this is to educate myself and form my perspective through viewing and reviewing the great works of art and science and relating to them. There is often an internal response, a feeling that arises within me, a positive resonance. This is the signal to me that there is something worth sitting with.

Then attaching language to these internal moments of awareness and connection allows me to relate and articulate the qualities of the object.

I hope to get beyond questions of liking or disliking and into the more specific domains. Exploring descriptive metaphors are fun way to ascribe qualities. Talking about a glass of wine as if it were a human or thinking about a piece of art as an element of the natural world helps to flesh out one’s senses.

Perceive and understand that which is not visible from the outside 

There is a subterranean waiting to be explored and it’s always informing the surface. There are depths to exploring all things.

When exploring Big Sur, seeking out the unseen is great fun. Caves, underground currents, glimpses of ancient seabeds, the canyons in the mountains, the freshwater ways all are pathways to the not visible and there is much to be learned that rounds out the picture of the whole.

So often there are hidden roots, hidden foundations, hidden pathways that inform our lives and the world about us. Tracking the roots we find the wellspring of our being and the pathways of our becoming.

So it is with the 10,000 things, as Musashi writes:

“…the principle of strategy is to know 10,000 things from a single thing.”

We can focus on understanding what is above, below and before us, and through deep learning and reflection the keys to understanding many things become ours.

Be attentive even to minimal things 

The world is a macrocosm, we are a microcosm. The patterns that govern the whole world are able to be witnessed in the smallest of things.

The smallest of things can have a significant impact on the whole at any moment.

Paying attention to microcosm in photography reveals a level of beauty I find astounding, and rewarding to witness and represent. In putting together a photo book on Big Sur, microcosm is a major theme.

A delightful aspect of the variety of preserves within Big Sur is that one park contains many pieces of the whole and becoming intimately familiar with one park will provide a good understanding of the Big Sur whole. Garrapata State Park is a great example, or Andrew Molera, or Pfeiffer, or Lime Kiln…you get the idea. Mountains meeting the sea, redwoods, creeks, waterfalls, beaches, all wrapped up in beautiful packages waiting to be searched out.

Often when on longer outings in the Big Sur backcountry, it’s the small scenes that delight me most. There may well be an amazing waterfall for a destination, but the decomposing leaf lit just right with reflective light brings a surprising joy, a joy I revisit as I find new and interesting subjects that resonate.

Do not perform useless acts 

Of all the principles, this may be the most useful and difficult. How our modern lives are filled with so many useless avenues.

We’ve all explored some. None of us have explored all.

Filtering the noise out of our actions makes space for the signal-producing creative acts.

Years ago I stopped all subscriptions to online services. I minimize social activities.

Cultivating useful habits and pulling the behavioral weeds is a long road that stretches endlessly before us. One step at a time!

The internet is filled with trash that satisfies very little and managing our relationship to the deep cesspool is critical.

When it comes to the pulling the weeds of our behavior, I found this idea from Musashi helpful:

It is appropriate to understand details on the basis of a broad vision, and to attain depth by beginning on the surface.

If we have a goal for ourselves of mastery in a domain, we can begin with the obvious, and layer by layer, work towards the depths of understanding. By cultivating healthy habits and shedding useless ones, we begin in the place, on the surface. And there is no end to the depths we can go, step by step.

In closing, a final thought from Musashi:

“Examine these writings and train well.'“

“If you practice diligently from morning till night, the way of strategy, I teach your mind will spontaneously broaden.”

The Book of 5 Rings is excellent, and I will return to discuss the other chapters. It’s a good book. Recommended!

The photographs I include here are studies of light and water, two subjects that interact beautifully on many levels, far away and close up.

The tension within us and between us comes from the problem of how to rightly care for our bodies and our souls.

Scarcity, fears, desires, excess, love, animosity, affection, rejection all seem to have a rightful place yet that perfect positioning is not clear. 

The needs of the body often seem to exist in opposition to the needs of the soul. And even the needs of the body themselves seem to be in opposition. Too much stress leads to breakdown. Too much rest leads to breakdown. 

We humans seem to always be breaking down because of something that we did ourselves. 

With the soul as well, too much stress leads to breakdown and not enough stress leads to breakdown. 

Managing this tension between degrees of stress is the core work of creativity. 

How to balance our need for comfort and adventure,  work and play, the physical and the spiritual, the functional and the aesthetic, the mind and the heart?

This question of balance of the soul and body is at the heart of Greek philosophy.

A while back reading Plato’s The Republic I cam across this passage where Socrates is discussing why the warriors of his city needed education first on gentleness more than strength training.

“of course, gymnastic for bodies and music for the soul.” 

“Yes, it is.” 

“Won’t we begin educating in music before gymnastic?”

“Of course.”

— The Republic of Plato

Education in music before gymnastics. Of course. Cultivating a sense of beauty and order and harmony before the needs of strength training surprised me.

This happens often when I read from classics. There is a beautiful exploration of wisdom from so many years ago that is perfectly relevant for today.

And it rings true for me, now. 

The harmony and melody and rhythm of music are an education on what’s possible in a world of discord, dissonance and seeming randomness. 

We listen and ingest and know that something beautiful is possible and that beauty is part of our being and our becoming. We can all make sounds, beautiful and not. And there is an immediacy to the appreciation of music that needs no education to begin. We all love harmonic tones, and education deepens this appreciation.

But the appreciation is within us already. But that’s not all that is within us.

Reflecting on melody is an education on the possibility of joining together the needs of the body and the soul.

The emergence of melody and harmony from within ourselves is a mystery that uncomfortably lies beside the emergence of all that is not melody, not harmony. 

Therefore tension arises each day within and without. 

How to manage? What to do?

It’s easy to see in many commercial enterprises the willingness to “serve” easy solutions to the body and soul that quickly become corrosive.

Technology accelerates the potential for excess ease, excess entertainment, excess… 

Often the struggle between the easy path and the hard path is surrendered. 

So it is with education of the soul. 

We are never all we could be in the moment. We are always becoming. 

The challenge we face is that so much information swirls around our minds and in our lives without clear significance and generally clear insignificance. 

Knowledge is lacking. Wisdom is almost absent.

Jonathan Haidt, a writer, professor, will ask his students these series of questions:

Where do you go for information?

Where do you go for knowledge?

Where do you go for wisdom?

The answers to the first is obvious and easy for the students. The answers to the last are sadly lacking or absent. The sources of wisdom are being severed by ideology and technology, also by societal cycles that no one controls.

So I’ve turned to the near and ancient past for ideas that stand through time with strength. 

We may rely on ourselves with the pretense that all the beauty of the world exists within us. And while it’s true that all the great and beautiful realities of yesterday are contained within us, that’s not all that’s there.

Sorting through the useful and the ugly is our task. 

How we orient ourselves in the world is the core challenge. What we seek we become. 

Recently in Big Sur a woman died, her body found at the base of a delicate ephemeral waterfall.

A tragic ending to a young life in a most beautiful setting.

I’ve walked to the base of that waterfall, drank its water and cooled off in it’s spray on a hot day. The area is magical and rich and dangerous too.

It’s a favorite locale of mine to explore.

There are years when the flowers bloom so richly that each breath is fragrant for miles of walking. There are years when the hillsides are awash in purple and white flowers. Mushrooms abound and birdsong accent the day.

Each season brings unique beauty and austerities. But the beauty is what I seek and the obstacles are worth the braving.

Not far from the site of the woman’s final breath is a segment of creek that beckons each year. This year I managed to capture what is perhaps my new favorite photo of this particular segment. 

The challenge of the location is the light, the glare of the reflected light of the light colored stone, the movement of the trees in the breeze, the movement of the water…all these components must be incorporated properly to result in an photograph that’s honest and beautiful.

Along the creek you close your eyes and hear the serenity, you close your ears and eyes and feel the breeze. Near sunset, I often watch a family of ducks happily ride the creeks rapids. The ducklings have an exciting time of it with the mother resting into the flow.

Sometimes I encounter the scattered remains of a deer that was a meal. 

Life and death all part of the cycle and flow.

This location feeds my body and my soul and always reminds me of the tension that we all must manage in our own lives and in our own ways, creatively. 

In a world of swirling information and images we ought to carefully and thoughtfully seek the good, true and beautiful. We must filter harshly the offerings of the world and curate for ourselves the ideas, images and practices that will sustain our bodies and souls so that we may align with the Truth and the Beauty.

This is now an active and persistent fight. Every day I get sent online clips of humor and “insight” neatly packaged to gain my attention.

Exploring wild places on trail and off trail keeps me walking the way and thankful for those that came before that walked the way as well.

We must fight the ease of accessing information and press on towards wisdom.

There is so much wisdom in the past, and so much information in the present masking itself as wisdom.

It’s no wonder that Stoicism is having a resurgent moment. Decades after the university humanities departments largely severed its roots in antiquity, popular authors like Ryan Holiday and others reintroduce ideas from antiquity and find a ready and willing audience. Signal cuts through the noise.

Now more than ever in an era of transient ideas the pillars of human civilizations past are relevant and needed.

We don’t know it all and can’t but we can filter the cheap and easy and pursue the meaningful and the valuable.

If we aren’t happy with the current state of our creative output reflection on inputs is a primary place to reflect. 

What are we filling our minds with? What are the ideas that we are resting on? What flow of ideas are we meditating on?

There is no straight line between problem and solution. So it is with creativity. 

Reading photographer Ralph Gibson’s newish book where he reflects on his own creative process I found this idea important:

“Photography is like electricity: we know how to use it, but we don't really know what it is.” 

“One makes a photograph, and it leads to the next photograph which subsequently leads to the next, and it seems you have to make all three of them rather than go directly to the last one.“

Where do we begin? How do you choose which word to start a sentence with? Where do you point the camera first? What problem do you choose to begin solving? We aren’t going to solve all the problems today now are we? One way or another, a choice will be made.

In a sense, we are all conduits of something like electricity, life, love, breathe, spirit, something that we are living, but we don’t know exactly what it is. 

The Apostle Paul in the New Testament wrote in 1 Corinthians 13:12:

“For now we see in a mirror dimly, but then face to face..”

Dimly, darkly we see reflections of ourselves and the challenges we face. Confronting them with creativity, we search for the signal amidst the noise of life.

In a contemporary world of glittering images, information is now pervasively perversely available. A competition of attention rules our days. Life is a struggle of attention. Everyone wants ours and too often we want everyone else’s. We compete for attention, begging, conniving, pleading.

Filtering noise, hearing the signal, and focusing on the relevant is a difficult task and the critical one.

How does one identify signal from noise? How does one focus on the signal and manage the noise? Where does one find the signal? 

Humans see through pattern. What we recognize today is grounded in the recognitions of yesterday. The recognizable guides our perception.

We ingest patterns of language, behavior and visual patterns of beauty too. Through these patterns we interpret the world, making sense of the world, searching for the signal that resonates, that is recognizable. 

Ralph Gibson through his book, Refractions 2, lays out the patterns of his inspirations and influences, tracing for himself and the reader, his creative process. Sculpture, the nude, architecture, landscape, still life, Henri Cartier-Bresson, literature, The Leica, Music, Light/Source, Mythology, Theatre…his own mix of resonant references that form a frame in which to work and play. 

His comments on music I found really beautiful: 

“Melody is to music what reality is to photography.”

“How abstract can a melody be and still adhere to the parameters of listenable music? How abstract can a photograph become before it is no longer recognizable?”

The limiting factor in the creative solution is a connection to patterns that are known, heard, seen.

The problem of recognizing signal is that our minds are filled with the chatter of our own insecurities and delusions, noise. There is someone somewhere always preaching that we are not enough, ourselves primarily, that we deserve more and the solution lies on the other side of purchases. 

Advertisers well know the human weaknesses and use those to drive buying interest. Commerce we call that.

Distractions are everywhere. Misdirection is the primary human foible. 

Managing the noise, finding the signal, and organizing a creative solution, this is our task.

While we were young, the patterns were given to us, without our consent or understanding. Parenting is important.

As adults, we are able to better choose for ourselves the patterns of our lives. Perhaps not totally capable of patterning, or repatterning our own selves, but we are able to choose, or so I believe. 

In our pursuit of the patterns to ingest and digest, we hold the key to resolving the challenges we encounter with creativity and hope. Ancient ideas hold such power over our lives because the collected wisdom of humans throughout millennia provide us patterns that we can lean on.

The ancient patterns of knowing and living are a filter for the noise around us. 

With photography, the ever-present challenge is one of noise. One such example of this is camera sensor noise. 

When a camera sensor is directed to capture a low light scene, a low signal scene, the sensor heats up, working hard, and casting a random noise pattern into the image. These bits of random pixel noise clutter an image, obscuring fine detail, obscuring the image.

As I started getting serious with photography an early subject was the night sky. This subject situation requires the management of noise. 

The best way to manage noise with night sky photography to capture enough signal with multiple captures of the same image, over and over in a single session. Back home, the images can be organized with software, brought together and stacked, and when stacked, software can determine the random bits of noise from the consistent bits of starlight and the noise can be eliminated, mostly. 

The same process works in creative life, in life and in photography. 

Capture enough signal, and the noise can be managed, and not fully eliminated. 

Recently on a beach I was out looking for an interaction of elements to photograph. It was a bland enough day. Not much surf, not much sunset, not much atmosphere…not much at all. But there was an ocean, waves, beach, rock, quite enough to hold promise.

As small waves washed ashore, a rock stood in the way and the wave turned into a final splash before collapsing into the sand. 

To capture the splash a high shutter speed is needed to freeze the action. It’s a challenge to get the proper focus, framing and shutter speed. A very high shutter speed is needed and you have to push the sensor to its limits. 

I knew that the settings needed to capture the image I had in mind of the splash would make for a very very noisy image. But the potential image was beautiful enough to command my attention. No stacking here with this dynamic subject would be possible. 

The image must be beautiful enough to deal with the noise. In a properly crafted image noise can be its own creatively placed element, and sometimes it is background noise, present, but not overwhelmingly so.

One result of my efforts reminded me all over again why I love photography. There is a special delight in pushing through objections of my own mind and the dullness of a day to find a photo that is beautiful, and balanced even if it is noisy.

This process of creation is its own pattern of problem solving that will serve me today and into tomorrow.