November 25, 2025

The Woman on a Black Horse is my metaphor for my Intuition, the Psyche-Psychic source and center of my being. What’s yours? With this statement and this question, I am reforming religion as we know it and making it more personal and more reflective, meditative, mindful, vibrant and alive than the religion I am replacing with its theology, doctrine, dogma, beliefs about heaven and hell, sin, redemption, atonement, salvation, God, Jesus, the Bible, etc. ad nauseam. I am the proponent of a new reformation. Out with the old in with the new–or as Jesus said, “The old has passed away, behold the new has come!”

The new has come for me in the form/image of The Woman on a Black Horse whom I saw first riding with my wife and Tom Phillips, the high priest of photography guides in Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park near Mexican Hat, Arizona. We were driving/being driven through the desert to Tom’s favorite photography sites when I saw coming toward in the sagebrush a Native-American woman on a black horse, whom I instantly recognized as The Photograph of the journey. I wondered if Tom would point her out but he didn’t and I did not request that he stop so that I might take the picture that needed to be taken. My hesitation was grounded in my uncertainty about two things, one the decorum of a beginner photography presuming to know more about the picture that needed to be taken than the Buddha of Photography in Monument Valley, and also the etiquette of a white man disrespecting the integrity and dishonoring the sacredness of the silence surrounding the woman on her journey taking care of her own private business. I did not know where the lines might be lying and did not want to impose my will upon the decorum of the situation at hand. Looking back, I should have asked Tom about the propriety of taking the photograph that was jumping up and down before me, waving its little hands, shouting, “What About ME? What About ME?” And I drove past leaving it untaken and haunting me with regret every day of my life since that moment. The Photo untaken. The albatross around every photographer’s neck all their life long. And the Lucky Charm chanting “Never Again” in our ear every time we see the photograph that needs to be taken, daring us to fail ever again to do what is called for in each situation as it arise and honoring it with doing the right thing in the right place at the right time in the right way AND GETTING THE PICTURE NO MATTER WHAT!!!

The Woman on a Black Horse goes with me wherever I go. My lifelong Psychic companion, guide, director, instructor and friend, to whom I owe everything in my photographic career and also my life, because it spills over into everything, don’t you know? Becoming what needs to be said, what needs to be done, what needs to happen, what is called for everywhere, all of the time, beckoning me to action in the service of what needs to happen, here, now, no matter what.

And she has become the source and ground/foundation of the New Religion that I am espousing here, now, urging you to join me in worshipping and working for The Woman on the Black Horse as she calls us to wake up, see, hear, understand what’s what and what is happening, what is going on, and what is called for here, now in every moment of every situation from now until our death, begging us to respond to what is called for with the right action in the right way and the right time and the right place which, I am here, now, to tell you that is all Jesus was doing when he walked among the people doing his thing in ways that it needed to be done and woke them up and transformed their lives, even though the Church of Rome and all churches ever since have shamefully applied their own spin to in a way that pays the churches way through the world with tithes and offerings and wealth and privilege being as they now are the only path to heaven there is and who wouldn’t to whatever they are told to do with their personal salvation on the line?

The new reformation is about just you and me and our Psyche–The Woman on a Black Horse, who knows what we need to know about what’s what and what needs to be done here, now with the gifts that are ours to give, like the gift of seeing what needs to be done with the gifts of our original nature, our innate virtues–what we do best and enjoy doing most (Which we often do not do, like I did not say, “Can we stop so I can take that picture?”), our intrinsic intuition, our inherent imagination, etc. amounting to all we need to meed the situation as it arises and do there what needs to be done, where, when and how it needs to be done, always and forever–for the sheer joy of doing it and the satisfaction of having done it, no matter what. As Flip Wilson might want me to say: WELCOME TO THE CHURCH OF WHAT’S HAPPENING NOW! Amen! May It Be So!