Recognizing time lines in scenery

I'm very lucky.  I live a 1/2 mile from one of the biggest urban forests in the country in the State of South Carolina.  I walk in those mysterious, beautiful and winding woods almost every day.  This morning, as I took a detour from my regular early (before the sun is up) route, I came into an open area that had a creek on one side and thick woods on the other.  In between these two areas was a road created by wagon ruts and between the ruts was a brilliant green grass of some type.  Today is the first day of Autumn, but I didn't know that officially until I got back home.  There was something about being in that area and beholding that particular scene that sparked a memory in my brain.

I remembered walking to first grade in what would have been September of 1960.  The setting was quite different though. I went to the first half of first grade wearing a dress, short white fancy socks and something other than tennis shoes.  The short walk across the elements that made up the high desert, vacant lot between the ticky-tacky subdivision in which I lived with my parents in Albuquerque, New Mexico and my elementary school was filled with sand, tumbleweeds and cactus.  I could look up to see the Sandia Mountains that towered over my little 50s hacienda-type school.  And I did wander from home to school mesmerized by all those natural wonders.  I remember chasing lizards; rescuing kittens; pulling stickers out of my socks; wiping the blood off of my bare legs that were stabbed by the points of the hard yucca leaves; watching the sun illuminate the yellow leaves of the aspens on the mountain.

Then my father took a job.  In December.  In Charleston, West Virginia.  We moved into the snow, with the house we were staying in temporary clinging to the side of a mountain.  I don't think I walked to school until the Spring.  But when I did, it was a fairyland of flowers and ferns.  The landscape was as radically different to me as it could possibly have been.  I meandered once again.  The jackrabbits now took the form of baby bunnies that looked like expensive stuffed animals I only seen in fancy toy stores. The lizards weren't bumpy and dry here, but smooth and moist. Purple hyacinths burst out with tiny lavender trumpets blowing out the first scents of Spring. And everything was green - green like the brilliant grasses this morning.

All of a sudden I realized that it had been a half of a century ago, on this Autumn Equinox, when I began attending school.  I took into consideration, for probably the first time in my life, how much my concept of who I was in the world changed then.  And how hard I've struggled to return to that 6-year old who integrated what she witnessed and "read"in nature back into her current life.  And how much walking in the woods in a place far away from both West Virginia and New Mexico helps me to visually take hold of those elements and set them into my day like a beautiful stone into a ring.

This is why your snapshots are supremely important...

Okay, let's get this premise out of the way right now.

Setting aside all religious, self-actualized, psychological, metaphysical and paranormal inferences that might interfere with the statement for a moment: you are a singular entity who presently exists within a finite period of history on Planet Earth. That fact makes you an amazing and unique historical figure.  Inexplicably, it also lumps all of us into the same category while simultaneously revealing that each of us is a singular one-of-a-kind character on the stage of this globe.  A paradox to say the least.  We're all alike and we're all different - all at the same time.

Nobody has ever witnessed the Earth, has ever inhabited this planet or has ever existed before who is remotely like you.  That's not to say that most of us don't share similar circumstances with, not only our fellow inhabitants today, but also those who lived hundreds or even thousands of years ago.  But nobody else has ever "awakened" on the Earth who was the product of your mother and father on the same piece of dirt at the same moment in time.  Only you.  And only you can read your story because only you know the meaning of the signs and symbols of your personal language. Yes, your language.  The one you speak to yourself within every moment of every day.

If you're not sure what that language is or how it's constructed, it's only because you have accepted the idea (as almost all of us do) that you only communicate in the language of your country, state or region.  Of course you speak and read the language of your region and communicate with other people in the symbols that have been mutually agreed upon as speech.  But I'm referring to the code within your own sphere of existence. The one where a particular smell from your childhood opens up a virtual library of meaning for you.  The one where a shape or a pattern sweeps your mind (and your heart) down a path populated with rich and powerful symbols that only you can assemble into a distinctive expression.

One of the easiest and most accessible ways to begin exploring your personal, internal language is by dragging the shoebox of ancient photographs out from under the bed.  Or pulling the baggie full of old, out of focus, faded snapshots from the back of the closet. Or retrieving the old video tapes (super 8, 16mm films) from out of the attic.  Then just start looking at them.  You will begin to discover that you have been serving as your own documentarian.  Your parents and your friends and even local newspapers and your schools or businesses have been adding to your biographical material. Why? Because your life is important to document.

A critical piece of advice to consider at this starting point is: don't try to "understand" what you're seeing in your images. Simply look at them and allow what you see to astonish you.  Because it will.  It's been waiting there for a long time to do just that.

What's a "professional" photographer anyway?

I went to a university and studied photography (among other things).  Avant guard; pristinely printed black and white images with the darkest blacks and the brightest whites (the true gauge of perfection according to Weston and Adams); ciba chromes; a variety of coatings on printing paper; wide angle lenses; macro lenses; fish eye lenses; 35 or 4 by 5 and all the other implements that made up that special universe of humans who are "professional photographers".  When we finally finished our courses and graduated, we too could be "professionals", and more importantly, commercial photographers where the evidence of our design-savvy education would be strikingly evident.

Yes, I learned it all and yes I graduated. But the question I continuously asked of my then professors was "what about snapshots?"  They gasped, cursed, and looked at me in utter disbelief.  The reason, they reminded me speaking as well as they could manage between gritted teeth, I was studying under their tutelage was because I WOULD NEVER, EVER take "snapshots" again (as they sat down hard into their director's chairs and held their queasy stomachs).  Snapshots were the result of amateurs who had, somehow, gotten their hands on a camera and recorded below quality images on film.  "Look", they demanded of me as they opened a text book to an example of an inferior shot, "look at this. There is no composition here. There are no black-blacks and no white-whites. The midtones are muddy and the focus is quite definitely off."

"But don't they do something else?" I inquired.  "Yes," one of my professors roared, "they use up valuable chemicals and waste photo paper!"

I have made my way in life as a writer and a teacher.  Photography is still my first love and although I almost fell out of love with it for the short time I tried to be a professional shooter, thank God I came to my senses and realized it would just ruin the passion that always wells up inside me. The thrill that occurs only when I behold the image awaiting me when I shoot soley for my own pleasure.

How you've documented your life.

It really is as simple as beginning to look at the photos you've taken all your life.  Initially you might shrug the idea of examining one, single photograph for a long period of time. Pick one picture from your album (or what I like to do even more is pick one out of the box that holds the pictures you've never been quite sure why you can't throw them away).

Place the picture in front of you on a surface that gets plenty of light and start by looking at it for a full 60 seconds.  Just look at it as you've never looked before.  Where was it taken? What was happening in your life then? Is there a color or a shape that pulls your gaze toward it? As you look at the photo, what words come into your mind? Do you want to throw the photo away or do you want to put it back into the container you took it out of? Why do you want to get rid of it now? or Why do you want to keep it?

That's enough for the first session.  You will have encountered some aspects of the photograph you never considered before.  There's nobody else to consult about what you experience with this image.  It's only you and how you interpret it within the context of your life.  That's the fun of the process and the frustration.

But never fear, it only gets more compelling from today.

All you have to do is look!

Open up a photo album.  Look at a picture you framed that's on a table. Peruse the titles of the books on a shelf in your office.  You're there. In every fragment you've chosen to tuck away in an album, shoebox or in the back of your sock drawer.  In every expression you've chosen to show to other people held in place by a silver frame. In all the potential information residing on the shelves where your books are kept, waiting for the day you'll read them all the way through.

Learning to "read your life" is a process of peeling away what you assume you see around you and breaking it down to your individual encounters with shapes, colors, shades, and symbols.  It's finding out how you decipher each of them.  It's discovering what your internal language is saying to you.  And only you can figure it out.

Why should you even want to to find out how your unique code is structured?

Because that's how you frame everything else in your life.  You are the translator of all the information that's ever entered your life. Now that entirely too much data comes into our personal worlds, unless you can determine the meaning, your meaning, of basic incoming details - it's hard to know what you else you might understand about anything else at all.

That's what I've found to be the truth for me anyway.