Category / Photography

by John

Summer Pairings

Here is the first Monarch to visit our garden this year. It was a welcome surprise because the numbers of Monarch butterflies are dwindling. They have started migrating from their breeding grounds in Canada on a long journey through the US to Mexico, often covering fifty to a hundred miles per day, reaching their destination near early November.

Several tornados touched down in Northeast Ohio yesterday, yet the butterfly shown above survived to replete its store of energy by extracting nectar from verbena flowers in our garden. The damaged wing is likely a result of the storm.

Another pair of reliable visitors are woodpeckers who come to feed on suet in our feeders. The first image is that of a Downy Woodpecker, the smallest species of woodpecker in North America.

The second image is that of the larger Hairy Woodpecker that gets its name from the long, thread-like white feathers that run down the middle of its black back. Like the smaller Downy it is at home at the edge of forests such as the one behind our home.

Another summer pairing in our garden is Cosmos, the familiar annual with colorful, daisy-like flowers in the sunflower family that sit atop long, slender stems. They attract birds, bees and butterflies to the garden.

Another variety of Cosmos is a tall plant with semi-double and double flowers ruffled in a variety shades – violet, lavender, white, and cream.

As I walk under the old oak tree behind the house or the tall red maple in the front, I’m reminded by some mushrooms of the microscopic network of fungus interwoven with the tree roots below the surface.

Mushrooms that I see above ground are the fruit of the fungus just below the surface. Generally, the fungus feeds on dead organic matter like rotten wood, returning its constituent matter to the soil. Its fruit, the mushrooms, are a reminder of the complex neuronal system of the tree roots just below the surface that live in partnership with fungi.

A final pairing on today’s walk around the house: Two tomatoes in a pot, green but turning red: A sign of many more warm summer days to come.

by John

The Philosopher as Artist

Photographic and Philosophical Musings

“Silently welcomed home” is how I describe the experience of returning to a grove of mesquite trees and being present among them in the Sonoran Desert of Southern Arizona. A camera marks the occasion.


Later, after selecting one of the images, I crop it into a visual matrix of fifteen smaller images, print and frame them, then mount them on a wall.

The effect seems quite pleasing.

But, tiring of ‘realism”, I remove the photographs from the frames, leaving only the black cardboard mounting boards, change the orientation from vertical to horizontal, and hang the installation in our entrance hall.

By eliminating any surface image, I frustrate any attempt to see an underlying reality other than a void. Somehow, this new installation gives voice to the futility of any attempt in art to express the inexpressible, to express any underlying reality.

Western thought is based on the idea of center – an origin, a truth, an ideal form, an immovable mover, an essence, a God which guarantees all meaning: Art, words, and language serve as signs mediating this original, irreducible object. The French philosopher, Jacques Derrida, takes exception to the assumption that signs are capable of referring accurately to a transcendent reality that exists outside of language. For Derrida, there is no knowledge of ‘reality’, but only symbolized, constructed experience. Abstract or non-objective art seeks to uncover a signified transcendent by erasing signifiers and discovering pure form.


There are fifteen frames in my installation, underscoring the view of philosopher Jean-Francois Lyotard that meta-narratives with their claims to Truth are crumbling and are being replaced by smaller, heterogenous local narratives, narratives that cannot lay claim to any such knowledge.
If art is about surface and the paradox of an underlying unreachable reality, then by eliminating the surface in empty frames, the viewer is faced with the ambiguity of confronting a void.

To emphasize the paradox, I decided to hang the work in a virtual gallery challenging the viewer to question what is real.


The objects depicted in the lower right frame are duplicate images of a woman pushing a shopping cart in her unwitting search for the transcendent which, of course, is happiness.

But we can’t escape the illusion of our experienced reality, so I asked my granddaughter to pose in front of the installation. She willingly obliged, or so it seemed to me,

by John

Love Sonnet for a daughter

Lake Ontario shore, 2007

When summer joy has been in short supply
and cloudy days outnumber all the rest,
is it some lingering loss, a love denied,
or sun’s sad absence puts us to the test?
Perhaps no longer have we a claim on bliss,
our once new loves since lost with passing time
and youth’s achievements hidden in the mist
of long-forgotten days like last year’s wine.
But something sadder still is cause of pain
if joy of those we love is our joy’s measure:
It’s love itself our loved one cannot find
that makes us settle for more modest pleasure:
A cup of tea, some melody, a gentle frame of mind,
a prayer our love by love one day is found.

Ten years later, an answer to prayer. And the sun still shines.

by John

Weekend Music

Some student musicians were kind enough to visit our community during a local music festival and play for us. It was a perfect way to spend a summer afternoon, and a reassuring message about the hard work, talent and generosity of many young people today.

Then I saw a young man in the audience in front of me scrolling on his iPhone. “Oh no,” I thought. “This is a sad commentary on the youth of today.” Then I looked more closely:

He was following the score. My faith was restored.

Earlier that weekend, I had read a blog post that beautifully described a fig tree. A folksong about a walnut tree came to mind, a memory of at least ten years ago, and I spent a lot of time trying to find it on the internet. Success! Here are Luciano and Fernando Pavarotti singing La Giana with the Rossini Chorale of Moderna in 1990.

by John

The Song of a Bird

Perhaps one shouldn’t write about the song of a bird. Certainly not a poem. The birdsong is enough.

And yet, I’m compelled to share my early morning experience, walking under the trees in the half-light before sunrise last spring under the dark shapes of maple, oak, and fir. I couldn’t see any birds but I heard them, above and on the sides. Different sounds, males calling females and birds claiming their territory. For a moment I was pulled into another world. A world bursting with joy and with life.

I had my phone with me and I photograph the sky as if to say, “I see you”. Then I recorded the birds singing, as if to say “I hear you.” There was a magic dialogue.

The phone then analyzed the sounds and gave me a report. The spell was broken. Technology should have no place in the contemplative experience, at least not for this eighty-two-year-old.

by John

When Bats Come Out To Fly

This is the thin time
in desert’s diaphanous dusk
when blackened shapes
stand stark against a liquid sky
faintly marked
by the early evening star
pinning night’s silk shroud
over a dying day.

This is the thin time
in twilight’s warp
when bats come out to fly.
Like shuttles weaving frantically,
they stitch up vespers veil
and pick at threads of memories
embroidered long ago
in the fraying fabric
of a slowly fading mind.

This is the thin time
between the chatter of the quail
and the coyote’s fearful cry
when our gilded mountains
turn their greasy grey
and I slip quietly
into darkness
at the dying of the day.