Found you via some random searches focused on Minor White. Since I find myself very surprised that my use of a camera to catch light is moving people, I thought I’d better do more thinking about these things.

Maybe what I should do is get a cup of coffee first…

;-)

Thank you for the fine Lopez quote. I have a yellowed and worn copy of Arctic Dreams on my bookshelf, which you induced me to pull down. I especially like the evocation of a sense of mystery, which I think is really a kind of humility, a recognition that there is much we don’t know. What Lopez writes finds echoes in many an artist’s statement, though it always seems a bit hokey and trite when I write it.

As to the mystical nature of power places, I think each of us is on their own path with recognizing or denying that one, and in ten years each of us would probably say something different.

From “Northwest Passage”, photos by Robert Glenn Ketchum, (Aperture Press, 1996) quote from Barry Lopez (taken from “Arctic Dreams”):

“Whatever evaluation we finally make of a stretch of land…no matter how profound or accurate, we will find it inadequate. The land retains an identity of its own, still deeper and more subtle than we can know. Our obligation toward it then becomes simple: to approach with an uncalculating mind, with an attitude of regard. To try to sense the range and variety of its expression–its weather and colors and animals. To intend from the beginning to preserve some of the mystery within it as a kind of wisdom to be experienced, not questioned. And to be alert for its openings, for that moment when something sacred reveals itself within the mundane, and you know the land knows you are there.”

It seems there might be a distinction between “power places” and places of comfort. For example, a crossing or entrance would generally be a significant and powerful point, but it might not be where you’d most like to station yourself for observation or sense of connection. I love to climb peaks, and it’s always exhilarating, but it’s not where I feel most “at home.”

Prairie Mary

Castaneda’s power places were presented as matter-of-fact with no mysticism involved. Such outlandishness was as much part of the fabric in that realm as quantum physics may be in our understandings. Should there be a formative outcome stemming from the effects of consciousness in both cases is not mine to say.

The Alps?