Starbucks enlightenment

Shinzen Kai and Aikido of Minnesota dojo

Many years ago I was in a Starbucks outlet getting my daily caffeine reinforcement when I noticed a book titled, Wherever You Go, There You Are. It was written by Jon Kabat-Zinn and subtitled, Mindfulness Meditation in Everyday Life. The simplicity of that title appealed to me. I didn’t find it necessary to read the book; I got the message. It’s one I have drawn on and shared many times since that morning.

A couple of weeks ago I was on a lunch break from my job at National Camera & Video. I noticed a black and white poster featuring Wilma Rudolph, once known as the fastest woman in the world. The photographer was Brian Lanker, a name that struck a chord. I looked him up later that day and realized that he had been at the Eugene Register-Guard when I was getting my master’s degree in journalism at the University of Oregon. I went through Lanker’s website and saw that he’d published a book on dance photography titled, Shall We Dance. Maya Angelou wrote the forward. I ordered a copy and spent the next few days savoring both the text and the images. I noted that Lanker (who died in 2011), sometimes chose photos that were blurred, or with skewed horizons, to great effect. Would I have made those choices? I wondered.

Wherever I go, there I am.

If I had not taken a part-time job, I would not have seen Lanker’s poster, which had been cast aside under a TV stand. I would not have purchased his book. I would not be writing this now. But none of that matters. Wherever I go, there I am.

I ponder this as I pose the question, what is my photographic style?

Close. Dramatic. Layered.

My style is both rooted yet evolving. It builds up and wears away like desert sand. Over time, the land appears to shift. What seems like a cataclysmic change — say, after a flood — gets subsumed in the blanket of time. Even so, the essence of the material remains the same. Hard stones remain hard; soft stones remain soft.

Keep your eyes open, and your mind free.