July 21, 2025

This adventure of writing a daly reflection has opened before me as an exploration of myself and our (corporate/universal) need for this kind of exploration/realization/awakening/ enlightenment worldwide. Everything will do that if we let it.

Everything is a portal, a port-key, a threshold to ourselves if we have the courage/luck to see what we look at, and keep seeing/looking all the way. Forever.

Nature and nature photography will certainly do that, will lead us to ourselves, who we are, what we are about… Joseph Campbell liked to say that reflection leads to new realizations. 

It has been a recent realization to me that God is not a spiritual being, but a psychic reality. As you may know, I am a Presbyterian (Church USA) minister. I retired after forty years and six months in the business, and I threw God away around my third year into “the business.” And, am still working out the implications of that act and the realization that produced it, and realizing along the way from there to here, that all enlightenment is like that. 

Enlightenment is not the end of the road, but the beginning, going on and on forever… So in sharing my photographs, and my philosophy with you, we are playing like two children in a sandbox, with “achievement” being not a part of the equation at all, any more than realization is the achievement of reflection. It is just the game. The game is that way. And on we go...

And this image of the sun rising is a great symbol of what we all are about, whether we know it or not. Waking up. Seeing as though for the first time (T.S. Eliot, "We shall not cease from exploration. And the end of all our exploring. Will be to arrive where we started. And know the place for the first time." From Burnt Norton).

An aside: T.S. Eliot also said, in "At the still point of the burning world," 

“At the still point of the turning world. Neither flesh nor fleshless;
Neither from nor towards; at the still point, there the dance is,
But neither arrest nor movement. And do not call it fixity,
Where past and future are gathered. Neither movement from nor towards,
Neither ascent nor decline. Except for the point, the still point,
There would be no dance, and there is only the dance.”

Making Eliot the prophet of these times, all of the time.

And sunrise is a wonderful image of what we all are about, waking up to the realization/enlightenment/awakening/etc of who we are and what we are about, by playing our way there forever, ongoing, never-ending, looking/seeing/knowing/doing/being/becoming forever. Which is the point. The still point. Of it all. No?