Today my friend David Johnson sent me an excerpt from the book Vision & Voice: Refining Your Vision in Adobe Photograph Lightroom by David duChemin. My BLOG is called “The Way I See It,” and there is a paragraph in the excerpt David sent me that definitely speaks to me: “The way you see things (vision) and the way in which you express them (voice) are evolutionary. Your vision and your voice are so heavily tied to you as a unique person that it’s impossible to separate them from who you are. So they evolve and change, making them a moving target and, at times, infuriatingly unpredictable. Finding this elusive vision is not a destination; it’s a journey. I know, it’s a cliché. But if you expect to find it once and spend the rest of your life trying to express it, you’ll be needlessly frustrated. There’s a great deal of freedom in knowing, and accepting, that your vision grows and changes. Remember the game of hide-and-seek? It’s worse than that. It’s a game of hide-and-seek where the kids, keep switching places. You look under the table today and the kid’s not there. Look tomorrow and he might be. That’s the way it is.”

Here’s what I’ve been doing for as long as I can remember, and I hope to go on doing it as long as I live. I wake up every morning with the intention of going out to encounter the world, to engage and to be engaged. I am a collector. I go through the day collecting images and ideas. Some of the images are kept digitally; some are recorded in my journal and posted on the BLOG. Some are recorded only in my memory. Often those are the very special, private ones that are too delicate and too intimate to explain. The ideas are like that too. Some of those are recorded in my journal, and I write about some of those in the BLOG. Some ideas are much too fragile and ephemeral and intimate to trot out for public viewing.

I went out today with no idea what I might find; but when I saw it, I knew in an instant that it’s what I was looking for. As duChemin points out in his book, “Serendipitous moments make up the best part of (his) photographs.” Mine, too. I am sure I shall never forget the parrot that is my photograph for today. It is a “rescued” bird. Somebody who “owned” it couldn’t continue to care for it, so it was taken in by the Bird Rescue League. By tomorrow somebody else will have made arrangements to take it home, but it will also always belong to me.

The little guy below was also abandoned and is looking for home.After I'd posted the BLOG today, my friend Taylor Hill read it and was reminded of something Thomas Moore wrote:

Do we land on a belief system and enforce it all our lives,
or do we enter a life-long process, a spiritual adventure
that continually transforms our perspective and therefore our lives?
Are our spiritual resources and practices ends in themselves
or means to a constant spiritual iteration--a journey that never ends?
                                      Thomas Moore, The Soul's Religion