Milkhouse, late afternoon, Hebron, N.Y.

Humility, wrote Thomas Merton, is absolutely necessary if a person is to avoid acting like a baby all of his life. To grow up means, in fact, to become humble, and cast aside the illusion that we are the center of things. True humility, is, I think, one of the rarest traits that I encounter in human beings.

I can think of few people to whom I might apply that word. It is something for which I truly strive because I believe that only the humble can really be open to true human connection, and learn to listen and put their own fears and needs aside. I’m not there, but it is a place I would love to be.

I’m heading to New York City for the day. We are taking Maria’s mom to New York for a special birthday celebration. I hope to see my daughter there.

It has been about five years since I pointed a camera to a farmhouse on Kinney Road and opened my eyes to the light and images and shadows of the world.

That night changed my life. I have not seen the world the same since then and an abandoned milkhouse on a country is a radiant place for me when we drive by and I see the late afternoon lighting coming through that screened window. Maria, who is as humble as she is good, can sense my twitch now and says, on her own, “do you want to stop,” and I nod and she pulls over and I jump out of the car – nearly rushing into traffic as always – and she takes out her sketch pad and draws while I nose around for the best angle to catch the fading light.

We have pulled over a thousand times in a thousand places and never – not once – has she been annoyed or impatient with me. I am so appreciative of that.

A neat book, highly recommended

Next week – March 16, to be exact – my daughter Emma Span joins the authorial ranks with her new book, “90 per cent of the game is half mental,” already getting nice reviews. Her book party is next week in Brooklyn, of course, and I’m going as proud papa and official photographer. It takes Em a lot longer to write a book than it makes me, but then she has taken on a pretty big subject. And she labors over every word, five or six times. They had to pry the book out of her hands.

Although the book is nominally about her strange experiences as a New York baseball fan, it is, of course, about much more. It’s a coming of age memoir, I think, a book about work in New York these days, and about an outsider coming to terms with an insider world, a subject that is perhaps familiar to her. Her chapter on movies is hilarious, not in the least because she recounts in great and merciless detail my dragging her to movies since she was in a stroller. I got in trouble taking her to see Terminator II when she was eight or nine, and we had to go back and see it again because her eyes were closed for most of the first viewing.

She has lots of fun poking Dad, as is only fair.

Emma’s odyssey took her through some awful and scary jobs in New York and finally to work as a baseball writer, at least until she got canned in a corporate takeover. Emma never quite figured out (I think she did) whether she wanted to be watching the game from the press box or out in a bar. The book is funny, but also pretty poignant, at least to me. I keep thinking of O Henry’s amazing accounts of the smart people who came to New York to make it and of their struggles. There’s a lot of that in here. Anyway, it’s coming out next week, and as a completely unbiased observer, I can’t recommend it highly enough.

Place to meditate

This is where Maria and I go up to meditate sometimes, or just to sit and talk. It is a good view of Bedlam Farm and yes, one would have to be a little crazy to leave here. Where else in the world would one get to sit in a place like that.

Sunset, Pole Barn

I walked up the hill with Maria on this crisp, Spring like day. I missed the sheep today, missed going up there with Rose and marching up the hill, through the woods, down paths in the forest. I am not one for looking back too much, although I am beginning to tally up some of the loss in my life, but this would have been a glorious day to take the sheep out. I think Rose missed them today too, although I can’t say for sure.

The sheep loved the pole barn, and it was the center of their existence, Perhaps I will visit them in Vermont over the next few weeks, and take some photos. I think it would have been too painful to see them – they are with Lulu and Fanny also – and I’d like to see them as well.