Magnolia budding, Rustic Canyon, Sunday afternoon 21 February 2010

Hobbled by the limits of what a camera can do (and what I seem able to make it do, as you can see), I throw all my faith into words.  And then I worry, possibly far too much.  I admit it.  What you think matters.

So to begin with, of course, let us remember that words are slippery and difficult and tend to repeat themselves.  And people with cameras and words are fallible.  And then there is so much to choose from, I mean in terms of the world itself and everything in it, so many elements to juggle and keep in the air at one time.  What you can count on to carry the story and balance the composition, what details to keep and which ones to leave out.  How it will all sound later when it changes, and it will certainly change because you will change; your perspective will.  I don't know about you, but I go into a kind of trance in the process.  The trance is the place you go where time doesn't go, and you are there, doing this juggling, this thinking, this composing, half enchanted, half dissatisfied, not quite dreaming but not where you will be later, afterward.

Later what happens is you start to doubt, or I do at any rate.  Judging kicks in.  The whole process is exhausting and I suppose is not even good for you, except not being good for you never stops anyone.  The difficult part is everything you don't say.  The part about the magnolia tree in Ohio that you can't even see but I was thinking of, the one that won't be budding for ages yet, the one that bloomed like something a young boy would find exotic and full of meaning, pink and white and faintly sexual right out there in the open after the snow was gone, not in sunny California but in the middle of Ohio, a very long time ago. 

You were somewhere else, of course.  You were thinking of another past entirely.  Indians on horseback, not cowboys.  Barefoot Indians. 

You can't tell from this photograph how anxious I was to get to the next one, and how already disappointed I was with the the way the light was changing.  And at the very same time, you can't see how happy I was to be with my friend, to be where I was, right there, right then.

You can't imagine how interesting it all was in that moment and place and then afterward, in the bliss of the trance.  And how much I looked forward to telling you so, as soon as I got back.