Day: September 19, 2013

The poets say the heart is right to cry when even the smallest drop of love, of light, is taken away. Today I saw the roses, some of the first flowers we planted in our new gardens, begin to die. We’ve had a couple of soft frosts and I see the light in the flowers is beginning to fade, the color and light is about to be taken away. Fall foliage is a time of wondrous color here, but I am not fooled by the richness of the color – it means color and light, so important to me and my imagination, are dying and will be reborn next Spring.

For me, as a writer and a photographer and human being, this is a spiritual and emotional challenge, I love by color and light, it empowers and sustains me. I will find other sources of inspiration, other things to sustain me, and if color and light is dying, then love, the brightest light of all, continues. Crisis and mystery, birth and rebirth, life and death.

In the pasture yesterday, a strong wind blew up the hill, the donkeys linked up away from the wind as they do, and waited for Maria to come to them. In the pasture, these photos remind me of Willa Cather’s novels about the prairies, the farms of the Midwest. They evoke something timeless to me, the animal and the human, on a journey together.

In many ways, animals mark the passages of our lives, people can remember phases of their lives by the animals they lived with. Sometimes I think that is the mission of dogs and cats, to enter our lives when needed and leave when they are done.

I asked George Forss this week if I could hire  him to give me several photo lessons, and he readily agreed. We haggled a bit over price. What do you charge?, I asked. “Oh,” he said, “how is $20?” How about “$30?,” I asked. Okay, he said.

Buying a Canon 5 D is a little like buying an Apple computer, you can take really good photos without ever quite grasping how the camera really works. Modern full-frame cameras are complex, they have sophisticated digital imaging systems and settings. I’ve learned some of them, but not as many as I’d like to learn, and George is a genius at the mechanics of cameras as well as the composition of photographs.

George is one of the world’s most accomplished and respected photographers, he left New York City after 911 for reasons that are too complex to detail here and moved upstate. I am humbled to be able to take a photo lesson from a genius like George, he has become a good friend. He builds his own lenses and meters and is a long-time student of photographic optics. Next Monday is the first lesson, I am very excited about it. I try to be a better photographer every day. As long as I don’t mention aliens, we’ll be good.

I love this blog and am always re-thinking it, re-considering it. In recent months, I’ve come to see that the blog is not replacing books, but is becoming a kind of book all of it’s own, a living memoir, hopefully and possibly my great work. Inspired by Steve Jobs and others, the designers at Mannix Marketing and I have been working to streamline the blog, make it colorful, simple, visual.

Recently I asked the designers at Mannix to help me try and connect the blog more to the word, more to the idea of a book. We have been batting designs back and forth and this is the latest version of the new header, version 2.0. I thought you might want to see it. This one doesn’t quite work for me, the type face is too large and loud, it looks too much like a newspaper headline, it just comes on too strong. My idea (feel free to post yours on Facebook) is to make the typeface smaller and cooler. My notion is to take quotes from the blog, from the writing, and present them in this header as fade-ins (I got this idea – actually the fade-in was Maria’s idea – from the neat way the writers in “The Great Gatsby” wove the text in and out of the movie).

I want to emphasize the words on the blog as well as the images, to evoke literary typeface and text as well as Net color and visual design. As always, I share as much of the process as you can. This is not the final design, but I thought the readers of the blog should get a look at it. I’ll look forward to reading your comments on my Facebook Home Page. Let me know if you like the overall idea. Eventually there would be different quotes from the blog either streaming across or fading in and out, my preference. Give words the respect they deserve, and invoke the idea of the book.

After Dr. Flaherty inserted the needles, Red lay down and didn’t move for nearly a half an hour. His eyes opened to follow me if I moved, but he was otherwise as still as I can remember seeing him. I don’t know what goes on in a dog’s mind, and I am always wary of the things people do for their dogs and then swear by them, but I did sense a calm in Red that I am seeking to encourage and expand. He works hard, doing intense work and has so many interactions with people now, this is something I feel I owe him, and am eager to pursue.