A Space for Observation

The slowing down of winter creates the perfect opportunity for contemplation.

The word contemplation is derived from Latin, meaning “to mark out a space for observation.” In ancient times this space often had religious significance as a place designated for philosophical or spiritual practices. Today the space marked out for contemplation is more likely to be the poet’s heart, the artist’s studio, or the photographer’s field of passionate interest.

Spiritual traditions have named the two paths of contemplation as knowing and not-knowing. Often imagined as light and darkness. The formal theological terms are kataphatic or “affirmative” way—employing words and concepts —and apophatic or “negative” way—moving beyond words and ideas into silence and beyond-rational knowing. It has been described as a realm of deep mystery and deep beauty.

In our Western culture, we often assign value to these two paths. Knowing is good. Not knowing is bad. Light is good, dark bad. For Westerners, not knowing can be a source of embarrassment and even shame for some people. Compare that to the advice of Rainer Maria Rilke from Letters to a Young Poet (public library). The beloved poet makes a beautiful case for the importance of living the questions, embracing uncertainty, and allowing for intuition.

In a 1903 letter to his protégé, the 19-year-old cadet and budding poet Franz Xaver Kappus, Rilke writes:

I want to beg you, as much as I can, dear sir, to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer.

As photographers, we have an interesting task. We are not painters or poets staring at the empty canvas or page. We are asked to engage the most fundamental and common aspects of human life and make our art right where we stand. How do we step into not knowing when confronted with something familiar? Humility is the simple answer.

Humility comes from the root word humus, which means earth, soil. Naturally and organically we are creatures of the dark earth. Humility is realizing in a visceral way that we are not separate or above anything else. And all things, us included, have hidden depths just waiting to be revealed. By embracing the mystery and vulnerability of our own mysterious, hidden, and unnameable selves, we open ourselves to the larger mystery. Here, a whole world of wonder awaits our gaze.

We will close with the wise words of the 13th-century Persian poet Jalāl ad-Dīn Mohammad Rūmī:

An eye is meant to see things.

The soul is here for its own joy.

A head has one use: for loving a true love.

Legs: to run after.

Love is for vanishing into the sky. The mind,

for learning what men have done and tried to do.

Mysteries are not to be solved. The eye goes blind

when it only wants to see why.

(…)

This talk is like stamping new coins. They pile up,

while the real work is being done outside

by someone digging in the ground.