“Man is not free to refuse to do the thing which gives him more pleasure than any other conceivable action.”
           ~Stendhal

You know, I was reminded today of the occasional frustration of shooting from a kayak that is clipping along in a downstream current at a speedy 4 or 5 miles an hour. Add to the moving speed of the drift downstream the dappled light of a canopy of cypress trees. Add to that high noon. And add that a twisty channel, requiring some steering despite the ability to drift along without paddling. Add all this together and the sum truly becomes "drive (drift) by shooting".

Depite the fuzzy math, it was a great, great day. Any day on Fisheating Creek is a great day. The only other river travelers today were two hunters in jon boats, scouting for this weekend's hunt (for what, I'm not sure). I just *love* what I do for a living.

Today was testament to my new philosophy: a (week) day in the kayak with the camera is not a day playing hooky. It is, after all, one of my profit-generating businesses. Through my Artist's Way studies, I've discovered that I have a peculiar block, not easily identified by surface behaviors: work is only work when it's hard and unpleasant. If it's fun - if it's play! - it can't possible qualify as work.

The wonderful thing about the freedom of change is that discoveries can become joys in the blink of an eye. If, of course, you allow them.

Nikon d2x, nikkor 24-120mm VR @ 55mm, 1/50th, f/13

“You could not step twice into the same river; for other waters are ever flowing on to you.”
           ~Heraclitus

Early evening storms ended a long, productive day at the office desk. I sat watching rain fall outside the office door as dark clouds passed overhead in their hurry to the north. A thin sliver of light threw golden rays through the rain and into the canal, and after a quick check of the radar (oh, the joys of the internet!), I threw a quick bag together, grabbed the tripod and bolted to the car. I just drove, no destination in mind. As I neared New Pass, the light began to streak gold across the sky. An enormous rainbow stretched to heaven on the east side of Estero Bay. 

Magic time!

Last night I was having a discussion with artist friends, talking about how all things change and are never the same, experience to experience. As the conversation ambled along, I was reminded of how weary I'd grown of my old haunts earlier this year. Some, I haven't visited in months. Through those eyes, their "sameness" had seemed to have run their course with my heart, my imagination.

Lately, I've grown new eyes. These new eyes see the exquisite variances of light falling on rivers of water, ever changing, moment to moment. What we see, like life itself, is ever new, one blink at a time. All we have to do is learn to see.

Nikon d2x, nikkor 12-24mm VR @ 12mm, 1/10th, f/13

“Anger points the way, never the finger.”
           ~Julia Cameron

9/11 Call To Arms:

Six years ago on this morning, I was rowing my skiff across Hickory Bay. I remember looking up at the sky, that luminous morning Florida sky, and feeling a gust of anxiety blow through me as I rowed in the humid heat. Later, I walked in my door from the dock and saw an airplane fly into the second Twin Tower. I stood there in the doorway, paralyzed. It was hard to grasp. That image, that bit of film, was just so unthinkable. I could not process it.

Six years ago, this nation changed. We aged. We all died a little that day. We've been battling a cancer ever since - and undoubtedly, long before.. The world has changed. Malignant cancer has spread around the globe.

I don't often write about such things in this space, save for a few environmental ramblings. But God help us, we aren't doing a very good job of surviving this cancer. We are blind to healing our wounds - any wounds - through hope instead of hate, through love instead of fear, through compassionate, insightful living instead of violence and invasion.

We haven't done a very good job of this so far - this healing. So much death. So much loss of our beloved freedom in the name of "the world has changed since 9/11". Yes, it has. We changed it. Every human involved changed it. Cause and effect. We think the only "cure" for 9/11's effect is battle.

Ironically, there can be no cure for an effect. Effects, once caused, become part of the past - yesterday's news. They immediately and irrevocably become a constant - unchangeable. All you can do is respond with love or hate. That was our choice then and it remains our choice today.

If only we'd been able to see that back then. If only we'd been able to see past the pain and outrage. Seen that for every bullet fired or every bomb dropped, an equally powerful gesture of care, compassion and tolerance would stem these mighty Rivers of Martyrs, recruited and outfitted in their passionate hate for us and all that we stand for. It is a simple law of nature that hate cannot be beaten or conquered with hate. No one, not them, not us, seems to get that.

Sadly, we don't even like ourselves as a nation all that much anymore. We battle each other. We battle daily life. Politics are paralyzed by polarization, greed, sexual misconduct that feeds the media frenzy machine, lies and corruption. Citizens are paralyzed by the next mortgage payment, a volatile financial life, their kid failing school, the price of gas, ghetto poverty or a relationship gone south. We are all so paralyzed by the rampant xenophobia that spans our borders that we can't see the simple paradox of how broken we are inside those borders.

For a Super Power, we are a nation of Super Unhappiness.

Our wounds are festering: education, crime, corporate evil, poverty, and the very infrastructure we have accepted as a safe constant - our roads and bridges. We are spinning out of control and much like an addict, we have fleeting glimpses of that realization, but our denial makes us powerless to change.

Change. Change envelopes us at a cellular level every second. We are powerless to resist such change, even when it is invisible to our conscious existence. Do we wake up each day, springing out of bed with, "Hey, a new set of cells in my liver today! Cool!"? And yet, it is so. Change does and will happen, whether our own tentative sense of scientific power over it shows up to participate or not.

I hear the news these last few days and it seems we are like chickens madly spinning clucking circles around the coop because the shadow of the wolf may fall across the doorway. We're afraid. We're a world waiting for the other shoe to drop. We haven't healed from the last wolf attack and that open wound propels us in wild, fearful circles so we won't be wounded again.

Common sense tells us that such commotion in the coop draws attention. Fear begets fear. It's so contagious! Unhealed wounds spread infection along the veins and arteries of a nation that spread across the globe.

The only road to recovery - THROUGH recovery - is to heal with hope. Violence does not heal us. Invasions do not heal us. They only rip us apart where the little cells of healing have tried to take hold. If only we had spent the last six years not just dropping bombs, but building an equal number of bridges at home and throughout the world, we might have seen the proof we seem to need that nonviolent recovery always heals where violence rips apart. Perhaps those delicate bridges of hope and understanding would one day span those Rivers of Martyrs until the rivers dried up on their own.

Perhaps if we could see that our own healing is just that: our own. It does not belong to any leader or outlaw or terrorist or pundit. Perhaps, just like the addict who cannot see the self-hatred that drives their own addiction, if we held up our OWN mirrors and looked to ourselves to fix instead of others near or far, we might see hope in the looking glass.

Yesterday, Marianne Williamson's blog called for impeachment. While I admire her voice as one of the true and loving voices in our culture, I say that is still assigning blame externally. We are all angry in our own way for our own reasons, it's true, but let's allow our anger to point the way and not the finger.

I see a call to arms. I see a call to human arms that reach out and embrace a way of life that becomes a tide of tolerance, then hope, then love. I see a call to arms that will embrace lives of conscious living, enlightened living, healing the inner box so you can move to the next level and think outside the box.

There is an urgency here. Work hard. Be aware. Get over your painful past, your bad parents, your wrong job, your broken relationships and most especially, your hatred for yourself. Get over it all and learn to heal those wounds inside by getting over our impossible perspectives and faulty thinking. Forgive everything.

Do it today. Let's get an inner healing tidal wave going on a global scale by starting with just one cell in one person. Heal *yourself*. Get to know yourself. Be courageous enough to *love* yourself. Begin today. Then help someone else by being a model for happiness and the only peace we can ever effect: inner peace. Ask everyone who wonders about your peace to learn to Pay It Forward. Start groups and clusters that share in the healing.

Spread this notion: we cannot heal ourselves by thinking someone else must heal first.

Let us love ourselves as a pathway to loving the human race. Let us get over ourselves. Let us quit pointing the finger and instead use it to grab on to the hope that only an authentic healing can bring. Let us drench our black and white images with color; lots and lots of gorgeous, powerful color.

Let us all begin today. With this, there is no time to lose. We cannot stop the march of change but we can change our perspectives about it.

And that makes us all equal partners in a magnificent power.

 

“Storms make trees take deeper root.”
           ~Dolly Parton

A snowbird friend asked me to check on the progress of the remodel project at his penthouse condo on Barefoot Beach recently. I finally found some time to run over between afternoon storms today. I arrived with my trusty D100 new best friend in hand because this little humble camera had another thing I have longed for on the D2x: an onboard flash! For quick zip-zip, run around and shoot throw-away shots, it was perfect. It sure beat lugging the SB-800 along, although "lugging" might be a tiny bit of an exaggeration.

As I was leaving, new storms were building again to the east. I shot this scene from his balcony as I enjoyed the rare (to me) high vista and the view back across the water in the middle-left of the image, where I live.

This east-facing view from his balcony, away from the Gulf of Mexico, is a good one in the mornings. I'm going to have to remember to dash over for a sunrise one day.

Some six hours later, thunder is still audible, echoing in strange swirls, first east, then west, then south. We had a good rain, and for that in this parched land, all growing things rejoice.

Nikon d100, nikkor 12-24mm VR @ 12mm, 1/125th, f/11

“Our deepest fear is not that we are inadequate. Our deepest fear is that we are powerful beyond measure. It is our Light, not our Darkness, that most frightens us.”
           ~Marianne Williamson

I have been working a program for artists called The Artist's Way. It is based on, and uses, a text of the same name by Julia Cameron. I have known other artists who have used The Artist's Way to "unblock" their creativity, but for myself, I have not had a full enough understanding of my own creativity that would allow me to even recognize what needed to be unblocked.

My Artist's Way cluster is small - there are only four of us. Often, it seems we spend more time talking about our inner "stuff" rather than our inner artist. I have relaxed my impatience for staying on track, and have learned to trust that all sharing, regardless of the very nature of it, is truly what heals us from the inside out. And healing is what gives your creativity permission to bloom.

There is no Secret in the universal law that our outer world is merely a reflection of our inner landscape. This understanding is the foundation of everyday miracles. There are no lines of distinction between creativity and existence that we do not put in place with our own minds. All that we seek so stubbornly with our minds is only that which we do not allow with our hearts.

Yesterday, I pushed off from the dock with a now-familiar prayer: may all my encounters be joyful and may I find an expression of love for my world on this day; may my resistance to creative miracles be diminished.

I took a lesser-traveled right turn at the end of my canal and floated under the Bonita Beach Road bridge. I paddled north to the Imperial River, then into the Auger Hole, one of my favorite twisty-turn channels in this area. The tide was rushing out with a noisy passion and I half-floated, half-paddled toward Estero Bay, followed by impossibly blue skies, passing electric green mangroves, riding on top of water so clear it was nearly invisible. I took my time, no rush, no headlong push to my destination. I looked and I really *saw*. I shot up an entire card before I ever reached the Bay. I didn't care - I didn't judge - that most of it or *any* of it was pure junk. I just experienced.

Giant leopard rays glided smoothly under my small yellow kayak as a I paddled against a warm headwind across the bay. I pointed the bow toward a cluster of mangrove islands, their skinny-water flats now exposed in the last of the falling tide. Tiny specks of white and pink dotted them in the distance. Birds! My thirst grew.

I was able to squeeze my tiny boat between two oyster bars and thread my way to the last dimple of floatable water in the middle of the flats. From there, I drifted, slowly slowly slowly, letting the wild mix of feeding birds gently grow accustomed to my presence.

Passionately pink roseate spoonbills, reddish egrets, snowy egrets, great while egrets, herons, pelicans, and a mix of shorebirds I'm not able to identify by sight, mingled in the mud and sea grasses, feeding on shrimp, fish and mollusks. I was struck by this awareness: my photography can never convey sounds like this, this sucking and splashing of birds feasting.

I spent hours there, getting closer until literally, I could have touched a spoonbill had I stretched out my paddle at the end of my arm. I snapped hundreds of frames, and savored just *being*, until a rising tide chased the birds back into the mangroves and floated me back out into the bay. I paddled home under a huge McDonald's sweet tea banner towed by a tiny plane, allowing an inner sweetie smile to drench me at a cellular level.

Prayers are heard. Thirst can be quenched. Anything is possible when we have the simple courage to allow it.

Auger Hole: Nikon d100, nikkor 12-24mm @ 12mm, 1/50th, f/11, Nikon polarizer
Roseate spoonbills: Nikon d100, nikkor 80-400mm VR @ 400mm, 1/800th, f/10
Reddish egret: Nikon d100, nikkor 80-400mm VR @ 400mm, 1/640th, f/10
Mickey D Sweet Tea: Nikon d100, nikkor 80-400mm VR @ 400mm, 1/1250th, f/9

“The creation of something new is not accomplished by the intellect but by the play instinct acting from inner necessity. The creative mind plays with the objects it loves.”
           ~Carl Jung

Nikon d100, nikkor 80-400mm VR @ 400mm, 1/200th, f/8