We have a beautiful old apple tree right in the middle of the pasture. The donkeys love to eat the apples as they drop. We have fenced off the trunk, but the animals mostly leave the tree alone. The apples have character and grit, each one of them is different from all of the others. Maria say sit is a happy apple tree.
From Maria to Simon to Gus to my photography and my blog, the last decade of my life seems to be about opening up, connecting to other people and to animals, growing and healing and changing.
Now, I am called up to open up to the message of the Great Blue Heron who has come to live in our pond, and who speaks to me about the connectedness of the world, and the power of creativity. Like my dogs and other animals, the Heron has come to us for a reason, and brings us a message.
“Animal Speak: The Spiritual And Magical Powers Of Creatures Great And Small, by Ted Andrews, is an important book in our home, it often inspires us and guides us.
The Blue Heron’s legs, he writes, “are symbols of balance, and they represent an ability to progress and evolve…The long thin legs of the Heron reflect that you don’t need great massive pillars to remain viable, but you must be able to stand on your own.”
The ability of the Heron to stand in the water enables them to follow their own paths, writes Andrews, enables them to follow their own path.
Most people will never be able to live the way heron people do, it is not a structured way, and does not seem to have a stability and security to it. “It is, though,’ writes Andrews, just a matter of perspective. There is security in heron medicine, for it gives the ability to do a variety of tasks. If one way doesn’t work, another will. This heron people seem to inherently know.”
So here’s the thing. I am a heron person, so is Maria. So are the 30 people who have already bought prints of my Blue Heron photograph, which has upended things a bit here. I have never taken a photograph that sold so many prints in so short a time. I don’t think I’ve ever sold a photograph that sold 30 prints at all in less than 48 hours.
The picture is a coming together for me. Maria is overseeing it’s printing and sales. George Forss, my good friend and photographic inspiration is doing the printing. The heron is living on our pond. Oddly enough, it also came just before our trip to New Mexico in October, a landmark for us, our first vacation together.
The heron has endorsed our trip and perhaps came to support it.
The symbolism of the heron is our story, Maria and mine. We do not live in a structured way, we have no real security in the common understanding of the term. If one way doesn’t work, another will, that is my mantra. This is the life Maria and I chose, the one we share.
The heron then, is a collaborative and creative experience. Every day, for nearly a decade, I have worked on my photography, studies the light, learned about lenses, sought emotion, color and light in my images. Every new lens is a rebirth for me, a new way to see the world. In truth, I have never worked harder at anything that I have my photography, or loved anything more.
I will never stop looking for new and different ways to be creative.
There is much luck in a picture like this, the heron just standing there, me with a new lens I was eager to use to capture the magic in the world. But I knew it was a special photograph the minute I took it, the minute I saw it.
I see the world anew, in part because I look every single day. The photograph then, is a coming together. Of Maria and our love for one another. Of my photography. Of the spirit and genius of George Forss. Of the symbol and messages of Mother Nature, and of the spiritual and magical powers of all of the creatures of the world. Of the determination and courage needed to be creative, and put one’s work out into the world.
So there are 20 prints left – this is a signed and limited edition, we are capping it at 50. The print costs $110 plus shipping and is not framed (it will be shipped in a secure tube) and is being lovingly printed by George on archival paper, I’m going to get the first 16 today.
If anyone wants to purchase the print, you can e-mail Maria at [email protected]. Since we are not printing more than 50, Maria may choose to keep some for our Open House on Columbus Day weekend. So there may only be 10 or so still available.
I am open to the message of the Blue Heron. It is right under my nose.
Gus is continuing his charm offensive on the sheep. Today, he came up to Zelda, barked once, and then licked her on the nose. She didn’t seem to know what to do. Gus is no longer afraid of the sheep, he often charges right in front of them and has stopped them several times on the strength of his attitude and his bark.
He just thinks he is big, and in so doing, he becomes big.
When the people who claim to love animals doomed the elephants and shut down the circuses and killed the ponies and tried to ban the carriage horses from their beautiful park in New York, I wrote that we are in danger of losing the magic in our world.
I am sure many people dislike me for my views, but I dread the political correctness that has swept through our culture, animal and people and is driving the magic out of our world.
A woman wrote me yesterday to say that the read my new book “Talking To Animals” and was deeply offended by my defense of the New York Carriage Horses, she said she was a long-time reader of my books and my blog but would no longer read both, as I was not the person she thought I was.
I felt badly for her, my blog is definitely not the place for her, but I would hate to live a life where I never hear an opinion different from mine, or can’t bear a different way of thinking, or considered a view that was not the same as mine. It seems like a disease to me, and I hope I never catch it.
There are all sorts of ways to look at the world, and it’s just like getting a dog: there are many good ways to do it.
One reason I love my new Achromat lens and am working hard to learn how to use it is that the geniuses who invented it, and the creative people who have brought it back say one of their goals is to capture some of the magic and ethereal wonder that remains in the world, the very magic being driven away by ideologues on all sides and by the legions of the angry and the aggrieved that have taken over our public spaces.
Yesterday, I took my lens out into the woods with the dogs and with Maria and I felt the magic out there, the otherworldly quality of the deep woods, the peace and contemplation one feels there that is so hard to find in our disconnected world. I am excited to try to capture some magic. Magic is one of the foundations of spirituality.
This photo captured that for me, the dogs in the light, the softness and beautiful cocoon of the woods, the embrace of Mother Earth.
This one is for all the children and adults who still believe in magic, who fight for the carriage horses and the magic they bring, for the elephants now being slaughtered because there is no work for them, for the people who loved them and cared for them, for the ponies who once gave rides to children, and for the children who will never see an elephant or a circus again.
And for the sanctity and purity of nature.
When we lose our sense of magic, we lose a great part of what it means to be human.
