Category: spirituality

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cloud watching

When I was sixty, I had a revelation I should have had when I was six. Between classes at work, I liked to lie on my back on a bench outside and gaze at the sky. I was lying there on a warm summer day, the sky clear blue above and to the north over Lake Erie but with a bank of cumulus clouds looming from the southwest. I looked up at the emptiness above, closed my eyes, then opened them and saw a faint puff of white overhead. As I watched, it slowly grew, took on a visual substantiality as it drifted southward where it melded with another small cloud I’d overlooked.

I wondered where it had come from.

Then out of the corner of my eyes I caught sight of another tiny, thin, puffy, slow emergence drifting to join the other.

Then I saw it.

Directly overhead a cloud emerged from nothing, out of thin air in the most literal sense. Growing, transforming, drifting to join the others that were now disappearing against the mottled gray background of the cumulus bank. Over and over I watched the emptiness above give forth faint wisps that grew and drifted away. I saw clouds being born.

As a rational adult I understood what I witnessed. My location was perhaps a thousand yards south of the Lake Erie. As air moved from the lake over land ,humidity condensed with the change in temperature. But this simple atmospheric phenomenon struck me as miraculous because it upset the unquestioned assumptions I had used since childhood to understand the world: that everything comes from somewhere, that what is undetectable to the sensate mind doesn’t exist, that meaning is governed by the mind’s ability to trace the origins of things.

This miracle proved to me by personal experience (and isn’t personal experience the only irrefutable authority for truth?) that nothing gives forth something. I suddenly saw what hadn’t been there, or what had been there but had been invisible, as the humidity was there before the cloud was born.

Cloud watching has taught me what little I know about the creative process. As an artist, what I create is the invisible passing through a temporary form. My images, like clouds, come from nowhere and become now here.nsa

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cleveland photography spirituality Uncategorized

toward the light

Toward the Light is my experience exploring the distinctive qualities of light in Cleveland, Ohio, where I live.
I know very little about the physics of light, and I am a self-trained photographer, so I can’t speak technically about it. But in my experience Cleveland light has its own character perhaps shared somewhat with other parts of the Great Lakes region.
It may have something to do with the latitude, though I doubt it, because the light in San Francisco, where I spend part of my year, is also of the same latitude but seems sharper.
I suspect it has to do with the humidity caused by lake Erie. The evaporation over the lake and drifting condensation over the land produce what locals know as a Cleveland sky, dense and lowering in the winter, high and soft and sculptural in the summer—a sky unseen anywhere else I have traveled. The resulting environment is a narrow rain forest along the lakeshore that fades away into the drier climate of central Ohio. Near the lake, the lambency of a humid August morning bathes the air with a light that rises from the ground, and Spring fog swaddles new foliage with a pale florescent glow as it floats in the air. Throughout the seasons, Cleveland light is always soft and forgiving.
Apart from the lake, there is so much water in the Cleveland environment—puddles, ponds, streams, rivers, marshes–that light is always rising from reflective sources to surprise the eye as it moves through the landscape. Even in deep woods, trees can be momentarily foot-lighted by pools of stagnant water as beams of passing light shoot through gaps in the foliage overhead.Rocky River 113
What light falls on or passes through has much to do with how the quality of light expresses itself. Forest City was Cleveland’s original name and remains its nickname today, a testament to the density and extent of woods that cover the sinuous moraines deposited by the glaciers that formed the Great Lakes. It is possible, of course, thanks to architecture and agriculture, to escapes the woods and gaze directly at the sky, but the characteristic Cleveland experience—urban, suburban, exurban and rural—is still the walk under foliage or, in winter, its vast skeletal framework.
One thing I’ve learned photographing Cleveland is that leaves are always translucent. They can be almost opaque when plump with moisture and green with chlorophyll, but by Fall they have become thin, veiny, even lacy with only their ribs impeding the passage of light. The vast majority of Cleveland’s trees are deciduous, and the variety is unrivaled, meaning the shapes and colors of leaves seem infinitely varied. And the colors are in constant change, from the first lime-green buds of April to the last tan oak leaves clinging to bare limbs in January. Every variety has its distinctive palette throughout the seasons, so Cleveland autumn displays are distinct, if not for their brightness at least for their range of color. Light is constantly being filtered and colored by foliage through most of the year. And if that isn’t enough variety, the foliage, for the most part, is in steady, delicate motion. To the black and white photographer, this means the tonal range in a landscape can be so subtle that edges often blur.
Whatever the reasons, the light in Cleveland is alive, and the eye must be fully present to witness it.