The Humble Stuff

Some days just get away from me. I spent a good part of the day working on exhibition planning and a book layout, and I made a few still lives, though these were not speaking to me so I let them go. It was chilly and the fire inside was keeping me close to home. Then, suddenly, I realized that before the day disappeared I should go out and see something, keep the one-a-day work ongoing.

Frankly I was so caught up in the museum work that I was kind of flat and groping for somewhere to take myself, but it was getting late and it was bitterly cold, so I walked around the garden looking for a view or some play of light, anything that might spark my interest, and whaddya know, right there in front of me, on the grounds of the house we rented, was a kind of formal arrangement that I found oddly pleasing.

In a way – let’s be honest – it’s a little like an accounting of objects; trees, deck, stairs, wall, etc., but it also had its own rhythm, and a simplicity that grew on me the more I stood still and allowed myself to enter its particular expression of ‘place’. “This is where you are!” it reminded me. Sometimes a photograph is just about that; a sense of place, and your place in it, a place  where the mystery emanates from.

So I let myself be taken in by it, by the colorless hour of the day, the stepped stone wall and the wooden steps, the paring of the chairs, the pacing of the trees, the point of view from below the deck that brought it all into being for me. It’s good to look hard at the humble stuff, because, in truth, most of life is like that. And once we accept that we do not have to be in the exotic to be turned on, we have much more to look at.