The fine arts and the hard sciences have more in common than most people believe, because both are driven by dopamine. The poet composing lines about a hopeless lover is not so different from the physicist scribbling formulas about excited electrons. They both require the ability to look beyond the world of the senses into... Continue Reading →
The Search
Searching is everything—going beyond what you know. And the test of the search is really in the things themselves, the things you seek to understand. What is important is not what you think about them, but how they enlarge you. —Wynn Bullock Winter invites reflection. For some, such end-of-year reflection is tied with traditions or... Continue Reading →
Experience First
Dear reader, I can use your help. I have never been a good promoter of my work, but I've always believed that by making the highest quality of photographs and writings I can, I could (can) count on sufficient sales to make ends meet. Becoming a celebrity has never been my goal and is not... Continue Reading →
Note to Self on the Matter of Hope
So many people are busy worrying about the future of art or society, they have no time to preserve what is. Utopia is in the moment. Not in some future time, some other place, but in the here and now, or else it is nowhere. —Alfred Stieglitz From my camp on the edge of a... Continue Reading →
Deep Work
Contrary to what we usually believe, moments like these, the best moments in our lives, are not the passive, receptive, relaxing times—although such experiences can also be enjoyable, if we have worked hard to attain them. The best moments usually occur when a person's body or mind is stretched to its limits in a voluntary... Continue Reading →
Future Hindsight
This article is reproduced from my book, Another Day Not Wasted. I am not fond of "teasers," and suspect my readers are not, either, which is why I am offering the article here in its entirety. For a limited time, I am offering autographed copies of the book (shipped to US addresses only) at a... Continue Reading →
Celebrating Absence
If the remission of pain is happiness, then the emergence from distraction is aesthetic bliss. I use these terms loosely, for I am not making an argument but rather attempting to describe the pleasure that comes from recognition or rediscovery of certain essences permanently associated with human life. These essences are restored to our consciousness... Continue Reading →
Headphone Photographs
I would prefer by far to write music which has something fresh to reveal at each new hearing than music which is completely self-evident the first time, and though it may remain pleasing makes no essential contribution thereafter. ~Roger Sessions I love music. My musical taste is diverse, and I almost always have something playing... Continue Reading →
AMA: Challenging Yourself, Writing, Offering Workshops
Every instance of stepping outside your comfort zone won't lead to an incredible sense of discovery and liberation. But it may happen when you realize that what you thought was your comfort zone is, in actuality, your compliant zone—where you've learned to behave in ways that you were expected to behave, perhaps by your parents,... Continue Reading →
Experiences, Not Moments
There are no moments. Moments exist in theory alone. To live, to feel, to experience, to think, is to be in a constant state of becoming. It is the dialectic nature of living, and why experiences cannot be contained in moments any more than a movie can be contained in a single frame.