Build your day around the rhythms of the day. Forget clock-time, and make time to respond to what the day presents you. The greatest symphony in the world happens as the pre-dawn light rises into day and the sun comes up to the songs of birds. Make time for it, often.

Nature’s rhythms, because they are our own deepest rhythms, can be the greatest healer.

Consider this prescription for whatever ails you: Sunrise and sunset, each day, in silence and stillness, for two weeks.

Repeat as needed.

Night

At least once, get up in the middle of the night, somewhere…

What could happen if two fervently held, opposing rights become irreconcilable

Come with me for a moment while I spin a historical fable about a country being torn apart.

It’s the 2050s. An issue bitterly divides the United States. It could be anything — racism, inequity, injustice, immigration, incarceration, environment, climate, health care, taxes, sexual abuse, gender, guns, censorship, the financial system, language, jobs, culture, or others. — We’ll focus on abortion.

Let’s say that abortion is legal in all 50 states, but many citizens remain fiercely divided about it. That sounds like a place to start our tale.

Much…

At 70 and beyond, I have begun to be aphoristic. Perhaps the wisdom of the ages is beginning to condense into simple utterances of unending resonance. Or maybe I just don’t remember as well. Here goes.

Because in some way we are all part of one another, each of us is a multitude — yet also a self — and in the singularity of that doubleness, we learn our names.

People have asked how I made these images, so I’ll try to reconstruct the process for you. Realize, though, that they were more explored and discovered than they were planned or made. But there was a process I can describe.

Some of my perplexity comes in this duality, which I cannot tease apart: As isolated individuals, we are alienated from the universe, which often opposes us and which defeats us in the end.

But as products of that universe, made of its returning elements, breathing in what the trees breathe out, we are part and particle of everything — but part of an everything that does not value us as persons.

To feel connected, must I give up my sense of self? …

The Heart of the Sun

For a decade after I retired, I immersed myself in making wildly experimental digital photographs, as a way of doing something completely unlike anything I had ever done.

This resulted in a 75-page ebook. But because few people find that book, I am publishing excerpts here because I love these pictures, the experience of creating them, and the writing that comes with them — and I hope others will, too.

The writings sometimes relate to the pictures directly, sometimes they relate in a general way. …

I felt re-baptized in the river that runs through everything

I began working to see the world not as things but as processes, each interconnected to all the others, and all of them constantly changing.

I looked for signs of change in everything. If something looked permanent, I sought out the hidden maintenance — the repair, paint, and replacement on a building, for instance — that gave it the illusion of being unchanging.

I learned to think of trees not as things, but as the presently visible manifestation of an ongoing activity: treeing. The treeing may at this moment be…

Some experiences are so powerful that they need a symbolic image to represent them

After I retired, I immersed myself in making wildly experimental digital photographs, as a way of doing something completely unlike anything I had ever done.

After a decade, I collected 75 images, along with some writings, in Dancing with a Camera in the Presence of Light, a $2.99 ebook available through Apple Books and Amazon Kindle.

Because few people find that book, I am publishing it in parts on Medium because I love these pictures, the experience of creating them, and the writing that comes with…