Words Worth...
Chasing Water:
Images from the Heartland
| "Play is the job, the work, of children. Their office is that inner world of make-believe, of curiosity, wonder, and enchantment. There you find memories and treasures of great value - a piece of colored twine, grandfather's old pocket watch, three marbles, the nubbin of your favorite Crayola, a skate key....Would that we had not retired so long ago..." |
There was this place I went to as a child - it wasn't very far at all, and it took little effort to travel there. It was a place of wonderful silences, mystery, and intrigue. It was a time and place in part lonely for its solitude, but mostly it gave me times rich in ways that comforted and provided sanctuary. It opened vistas otherwise unknown to a young farm boy from a working-class family in the 1950s San Joaquin Valley.
I worked on the family farm from a young age, often after school and sometimes after dinner, and during the triple-digit heat of the summer harvest. In addition to learning a strong work ethic, I experienced the cycle of seasons, and our interdependent relationship to the food chain. I worked in the spring just as the blossoms magically appeared, and saw through them a part of the cycle of birth, life and death, and rebirth. On crisp fall days, I worked to irrigate our orchards, and came to know our place in the scheme of life. One winter I worked with my father learning to prune grapevines and peach trees. That was a tough winter of instruction for me as I wrestled with understanding my father, with the added hope of getting closer to him. It was especially difficult for my father, who not only struggled with the language, but with intimacy issues on top of that. Equally as difficult for him was communicating an art he didn't know exactly how he came by, or why you do it that way. "Just cut here," was his cryptic instruction to a puzzled youth.
Much of farm life is solitary, spent chasing water, my Mom's words for irrigation, and driving the tractor pulling a disk to turn the earth to slow moisture evaporation from the soil. There isn't much social about driving a tractor in the wee hours of the morning, or irrigating the orchards after sundown - hours spent working by yourself, with only your thoughts for company. During those times, I found solace within with my thoughts and imagination - in the imagery that came and flooded my mind as the waters flooded our orchards, that turned over in my mind as the soil was turned over in long rows by the disk behind the tractor. There was comfort there, a place warm and familiar, a second home.
As an artist, this is a place I visit often, a place where I experience the pull of gravity lessen, where I am able to lift off the earth and take flight. There, in my mind's eye, the mysteries of nature are opened before me in all their splendor, much as they were when first I experienced the cycles of life and death and renewal back on the farm. There, I experience an inner nature in common with all of life, and I find it at once affirming, vital, and authentic. Though some might find difficulty in describing such experiences, it is something I readily ease into as word-images form and tumble over the orchards of my mind. I have always loved words for their power to excite the emotions, for their ability to evoke images that give life to ideas, and form to answers in the face of a child's curiosity. In the absence of something visual, one relies on images summoned from within to clothe words spoken by another. This is a uniquely human facility, and one that carries rich rewards for any who would journey to that remarkable realm within. To a child, this is a land of make-believe, of daydreams and fantasy - a world wild and wonderful and enchanted. To an adult - to me - it is a place ever as real and necessary in the living of life, as vital to the nurturing of the soul as food and water are to the body.
This is a realm most of us left when we grew out of childhood - a place to which we now return in dreams, both night and waking, in periods of reverie, priceless and fleeting, or when we venture into that place from whence all art originates. I consider myself one of the fortunate ones, who instead never really left this world behind - who carried it forward just inside my vest as I grew into adulthood. It has been a source of comfort and strength when circumstance has called me to stretch beyond my reach, and has been cause for joy when I have encountered a kindred soul, who slipped me the sacred handshake as a sign from within their vest.
As I work in the realm of photography, I find I am spending extended periods in this realm of the inner. I have always had a rich inner life, and working with various images I am flooded once again with the excitement I experienced as a child as I witnessed the processes of creation in our orchards and vineyards. The image of a flower, or the sweep and grandeur of a landscape, transports me, and magically its power loosens the hold of the mind and allows passage to that inner world of the heart. It draws back the veil that dims the view of this intimate realm, and opens me to the possibility of flight - from there, it is but a step to soaring. I revisit the memory traces of these precious moments, and here I am chasing water again.
I look to share my images with others, to give a glimpse of the marvelous and amazing, in the hopes they will evoke memories, perhaps long buried, and stir one's sense of wonder once again; that they will touch aesthetic sensibilities, opening portals to that inner world of yesteryear, calling you back to the wonder-filled days of childhood, thus bringing you out of retirement… |
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