Camera Therapy

Camera Therapy is an essential part of my health routine.

I first became aware of the therapeutic effects of photography when I was traveling the West along the route of the Lewis and Clark expedition. I had drafted a novel about the expedition and was revising it as I drove back roads along the Missouri and Columbia Rivers, trying to see at least some of the landscape as the explorers had seen it. I was also taking a lot of photos.

Photography was an important but rarely indulged hobby at the time. It was the stage of my career when I was working at unpleasant and non-photographic jobs to save enough money to retire and do what I'm doing now, traveling and photographing the world I see. I had taken a leave of absence to work on the Lewis and Clark novel.

One afternoon I was walking through a campground in a meadow near Helena, Montana. Wind howled across the treeless landscape and the sun played dodge 'em with fluffy clouds, alternately lighting and shading the craggy mountaintops surrounding me. A pair of mule deer grazed at the edge of the meadow.

I was carrying my camera and trying to capture the scenery, and not doing a very good job of it, but I was suddenly overwhelmed by a feeling of perfect bliss. For the first time in a long time, I felt complete, like I was who I was supposed to be, doing what I was supposed to do, where I was supposed to do it.

At the time, I attributed this to the whole experience I was engaged in, traveling, writing, exploring new things, learning and absorbing all of this experience into my core existence. Photography was just part of it. The last time I had felt that way was when I was hiking the Appalachian Trail with my camera in 1982.

It didn't occur to me until later that the camera was the reason for that bliss. When I began to approach retirement a few years ago and knew that I would soon have the opportunity to fulfill this long time photography dream, I began spending as much of my free time as I could out shooting or toiling away at the computer trying to perfect my images. It was a stressful time. Big changes were happening in my life -- divorce, kids leaving the nest, and the stress of continuing to work in a job that grew more boring and less fulfilling day by day.

And that's when I realized that the time I was putting in with the camera was more than just practice. The process of finding and photographing local birds and wildlife was exposing something else: me. The person who had to hide in someone else at work came out jubilantly when I picked up the camera and went walking. I was fully me again.

Then a few months ago, I discovered why it works like that, when I came across Carl Jung's explanation for the difference between the conscious and the unconscious minds. The conscious mind, he said, can be trained. The untrainable unconscious mind belongs to the collective unconscious, which Jung felt was the same in everyone. Much of Jungian psychology revolves around finding one's unconscious.

And there it was. My conscious mind deals with all the technical aspects of photography, which have always been easy for me for some reason. Camera controls, exposure, focal lengths, white balance, all those numbers things I get because I trained myself to get them.

The rest of it, from pre-visualizing the image to finally presenting it, come from the unconscious. Art works when it comes authentically from the unconscious. The receptive viewer sees a work of art not only consciously, but also unconsciously, and in that moment connects with the artist's unconscious and feels the collective unconscious.

At least that's how I think Jung would explain it.

I explain it this way: In order to make photographs, my conscious and subconscious minds have to get along. They have to communicate, collaborate and cooperate. There has to be harmony within the space between my ears and between the head and the heart.

And photography is one of the few activities where this happens. The rest of the time the conscious and unconscious are fighting like little children, and sometimes all you can do is put them in time out and shut the door. But when I can, I gather the cameras and the backpack and the tripod and head to the nearest refuge for fresh air and communion with true nature -- both the world's and my own.

That's camera therapy. Maybe I can get my health insurance to cover the cost of my next big lens.

Unnecessary Beauty

It was one of those totally relaxing afternoon dives on a shallow site off the Caribbean island of Saba. Sun rays danced over the sand and the reef, revealing tiny coral polyps and neon bright anemones as they made their living catching microscopic plankton as it drifted helplessly by.

I was shooting macro, as I did on nearly every dive that week, so I was on the lookout for exactly those little creatures. Underwater macro photography exposes the crown jewels of the coral reefs. Hard corals form the hard base of the reef on which everything else depends, for food and shelter. Nestled in closely with the corals are other small creatures, including anemones, Christmas tree worms, tiny crabs and shrimp, zoanthids, crusting sponges, nudibranchs and small fish. 


Everything is there for a reason (unless it's an invasive species, which is another topic for another day). Everything there eats and is eaten. A coral reef is a great place to learn how ecosystems function. And it is all about function. Except for the beauty.


And that's what struck me on that afternoon dive. Maybe it was because it was so relaxing. I was enjoying near perfect neutral buoyancy, moving by the tiniest flicks of my fins, as close as you can get to that zen state of not just being one with the water, but actually being the water. 


I was drifting slowly through a narrow crevasse peering closely at the shady side when I spotted a feather duster worm so tiny and so orange I almost didn't believe my eyes. I wasn't narced, not at 30 feet deep. It was real, and about the size of my little fingernail. It was tucked in among brain corals and rope sponges that made it hard to photograph, but I did my best and got a few images worth keeping.

And as I backed away and continued on my aqueous meander, one word popped into my mind and wouldn't go away.


"Why?"


Usually I have asked that question in despair, trying to understand the reasons behind greed, cruelty, violence, destruction, betrayal and other human traits. But now I found myself incredulous that this world could be full of such beauty, and that most of it existed for its own sake. 


The reef would still function if it were all drab and muted. It would function differently, to be sure. Science has explained that some of those colors and patterns help creatures identify each other or serve as warnings about things that will kill. 

But when you look closely at these things, you see patterns and colors that go way beyond function. They are more intricate than the anti-counterfeiting patterns on folding currency, more colorful than the wildest acid trip, more breath-taking than a gothic cathedral. And they are not just in the smallest creatures, but in the close-up details of the larger animals as well. The question is, Why?


If you have read this far thinking I have an answer to that question, you're going to be disappointed. Everyone will have a different answer, and it will be right. For me, it's enough just to realize that there is incomprehensible beauty and goodness in nature. 


Maybe its purpose is to balance the incomprehensible ugliness and evil that we humans are capable of. But I'm pretty sure that when we are gone, extinguished from the planet along with the dinosaurs and passenger pigeons, the beauty and goodness will still be here. 


Unnecessary beauty exists for its own sake, for its own purposes, whatever those are. It doesn't need us, doesn't need to be appreciated by us. It was in the ocean for millions of years before we evolved into hominids and developed the technology to find it and be astonished by it. And it will be there for millions more after all our technology has rusted
. 
So, why it's there is really not that important. It just is.


What is important, I believe, is that we're just lucky, or blessed or whatever you want to call it, to be able to see it, if only briefly. 

That is the why that deserves pondering.