At the Centre of the Compass

Macrocarpas, Waipapa Point

Of late my photographs have come as stories I write to myself (but then they always have). Of late those stories take some time to walk in the door, often trailing the image by weeks or even months. I will make the photograph, usually from a non-place, what Miyamoto Musashi refers to in his book The Book of Five Rings as the Void, that place where one lets go, where one photographs from intuition, where one allows all the years of training and practice to work from the subconscious, so that one is clear to respond to whatever presents itself, to whatever speaks. To be able to do that, it is important to put in the time, to practice until the mechanical aspects become unconscious, so that the soul is free to listen to whatever is asking to be heard.

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Icarus at the crossroads-2

“What saves a man is to take a step. Then another step.”

– Antoine De Saint-Exupery

“You don’t have to see the whole staircase, just take the first step.”

– Martin Luther King, Jr.

It isn’t easy being Libran.

I think that there may be some things for which we Librans have an instinctive loathing or perhaps fear. One of those would have to be the crossroad. We get to a crossroad and we must  make a decision. We must choose.  This of course throws most Librans into a spin, for making a choice implies committing oneself to a particular course of action and living with the consequences. They may work out well. Or they may not. We may have made the ” right” choice or we may have added up two plus two and given ourselves an answer of five. We will set out, confident we’ve made the best possible choice, only to find out later on that it was not the right one. And then we are faced with either being told we are wrong or, worse still, sitting there in the darkness, telling ourselves we were wrong, that we should have taken an altogether different route, made another,  in hindsight, wiser choice. Perhaps the fear lies not so much in the act of choosing but rather in the consequences of the choice and the possibility of a future self-beat-up.

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