Looking Breathlessly

By Thomas James Martin
Published - May 5, 2002

For me there is only the traveling on paths that have heart, on any path that may have heart. There I travel, and the only worthwhile challenge is to traverse its full length. And there I travel looking, looking, breathlessly. ~Don Juan (Yaqui indian shaman in Carlos Castneda's series of books)

I have been in and out of photography all my life. It all started with a “Brownie” box camera given to me for my 10th birthday. In my teens I saved up enough money to graduate to a cheap 35mm camera.
I was early captivated by the great photographers and it seems that I bought a magazine of collected photographs of various types almost every month. For example, I had collections of Scandinavian photographers, Ansel Adams and other nature photographers, photojournalists, etc.
In those days there was more question than there is nowadays as to whether photography is an art. This was never a problem for me. Photography is its own art form, ". . .a discovery of the world in terms of light."

How those photographs enriched my experience and understanding of life. The French photographer, Henri Cartier-Bresson, was my earliest hero.

Looking over his work in collections (those "annuals") as a farm boy on tobacco road in the Piedmont of North Carolina, I yearned for a little 35mm Leica rangefinder like he made famous and a knapsack with which to travel and photograph the world.

I dreamed of capturing--like Bresson--the essence of the eternal moment: An embrace of lovers; bicyclists caught in some great mysterious design, the ineffable truth of which could only be expressed visually; Language at times unable to express the true nature of the infinite heart of existence.

If you were to ask me what is the most valuable thing that I have
learned from photography, I would have to answer, “seeing.” When I work with a camera, I am fascinated with how so often I cannot find anything of interest to photograph at first.

Then, as I relax and shed layers of mental preoccupations, the linear expectations and anxieties of our very mental (perhaps insane) culture, my mind settles quietly into my intention to take pictures, I find myself shifting into greater connectivity with my feelings, and I begin to “see.”

What we see so often is a kind of consensus reality, an inventory of preconceptions that we have agreed that is the way the world should be. For example when I first look at a tree when I am in my ordinary, preoccupied mental state, I don’t see that tree in its totality. I filter it through so much mental noise that I only see the obvious things happening around it. I may notice a bird flying away or if there is a strong wind, I may notice the swaying of branches and trunk, but I don’t really “see” it.

To really “see” you must become as an infant or small child who does not see the world the way we see it as adults. A child does not see the color blue or rather s/he sees one color as a continuum of all colors; not a tree, but an extended form. The child has not learned all our adult notions of consensus reality.

Turning away from all my mental preoccupations, I become a vessel for expression. As my intellect joins with my feelings, suddenly pictures are everywhere: A leaf falls into an interesting arrangement of wild flowers; a spider web glistens with dew; a curve of sunlight on wind-swept water.

I think this phenomenon is an example of what some spiritual masters call “falling into the heart,” that is releasing the bonds of the conscious mind and acting from one’s center of being, a place where heart and head and senses meet.

For me it is the place where true art is found whether the art form is visual or not. Photography—as well as poetry—have from childhood been natural ways for me to diverge from the ordinary mind into a kind of “super-mind,” where I find that I can use so many more of my faculties other than the intellect.

Once experienced, to attempt to create without functioning in this "super mind," is rather like the taste of a sugary soft drink after sipping a fine wine; cheap and empty and heartless.
Don Juan, the shaman quoted in the epigram, offers additional observations about "seeing" when he tells his disciple, Carlos Castaneda, that he is teaching him how to see as opposed to merely looking, and stopping the world is the first step to seeing.

We have talked about "seeing" in this first essay. Next time we shall continue our exploration of the relationship between art and spirituality as we look into some ways to "stop the world" and see it as it really is rather than how we think it is.

Copyright 20002-10, Thomas James Martin, all rights reserved