Over a year ago when I began posting this online journal, my intention was to share my everyday, personal pictures, the images I do as a kind of visual diary. Often these pictures are not extraordinary--in fact, if the images have any value at all, it is because they are utterly, absolutely, breathtakingly ordinary.Sometimes I’m a tad reluctant to post these photographs on what is, after all, the worldwide Web. The very same computer you’re using to view these quiet, unspectacular photographic moments of my life can lead you to images of the Big Stories of our planet: war in Iraq, an earthquake in China, a cyclone in Myanmar.
Still, I have to believe that “little moments” matter. I look out the window and see our cat sitting in a chair in our garden, watching over a jar of honey. I walk into the kitchen and see beautiful light shining on a chair and an empty dog bowl.
Lately I’ve read several short but wise books by the Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh. In his book “The Miracle of Mindfulness," the Zen master writes about meditation, and gives advice on sitting quietly, mindful in the moment:
“If you cannot find joy and peace in these very moments of sitting, then the future itself will only flow by as a river flows by, you will not be able to hold it back, you will be incapable of living the future when it has become the present. Joy and peace are the joy and peace possible in this very hour of sitting. If you cannot find it here, you won’t find it anywhere.”
