Rediscover the lost art of contemplation and storytelling

Contemplation has become a lost art in land management.  Master land managers of old were intuitive  contemplatives.  They  valued the act of sitting quitely and ruminating about the land and getting in touch with the longer-than-human-life timescales.  They also spent time just walking about the land and taking it all in.  Hunting and fishing were more than just a foraging activity, it required an ever increasing working knowledge of habitats and behaviors. These folks had picinics in their fields, swam in the rivers, took naps in the shade of a tree.  Modern farming infrastructure seems to have displaced the quite, beautiful spots on the farm  where we would gather on Sundays to relax and breath deep the frangence of the woods and the meadows.  And, we would tell stories.

This pastime from recent history was so common.  Storytelling was also a significant way of understanding, sharing, and creating  knowledge.  We learned where we came from, how we used to do things, and laughed with each other over the humor of life.   Also, within these stories there were a subset of stories that told about the long, slow change of the land over the years.   I can remember growng up around a  community of farming elders who told stories about the land around them.  They invoked the presence of things much older and deeper than the current season's happenings.  Their life-long intimacy with their home place gave them a perspective that talked about the land in such detail but in the context of time spanning decades.  Their stories were a blend of lessons learned, changes witnessed, and new questions to mull.

In this context, you can appreciate the power of multigenerational oral histories that were passed from one generation to the next through these stories.  These elders are now mostly gone from our communities.  Nearly a century of agricultural progress has  distanced  us from our intimate connection with the land and its rooting, connective influence among farmers .  Sadly, we have also become estranged from story telling as a form of knowledge discovery and transfer.  We now tend to lean heavily on science to understand and communicate about the natural world around us.   I believe we have lost something vitally important in this evolution of our farmland ethos.

Environmental sciences struggle to connect us with land because of its necessary objectiveness and the secular nature of sciencentific knowledge in general.  We study whole complex systems by seperating it into controlled pieces and observing.  This helps us understand how some things work within the whole but often out of context of how the whole operates.  Science has a place in our relationship with land no doubt.  But, it should not accupy all the space in our relationship with nature.  Science can make us feel more confident in our management choices.  However, reductionist, objective science can not capture our imagination.  It can not nurture our emotions to have affections for the living land.  We need to have a personal and intimate relationship with land.  That relationship can not survive the transfer from generation-to-generation if it is not swaddled in a deep and abiding love, true and genuine.  I believe that Intergenerational transference holds the promise of truly hearing and understanding the voice of our landscapes.  The land does have a voice.  We need to bend our hearts and our ears to the land and listen to its message.

So maybe, If we let it, the land can teach us.  The challenge is that the language of land is a slow speak.  It takes the land years to say something to us.  We struggle to make sense of what it is saying because we are so short lived and have a relative short attention span.  We don't see the story unfolding.  I believe that well organized photography could be the interpreter of the land's long, slow cadence  and that we could finally hear it's story and pass that story on to our inheritors so that they too, can continue to hear the long, slow speak of the land.  After all, human language, to an extent, is the verbalization of the symbols we call letters.  It is not so far fetched to imagine that photographs could become like letters and if they are organized into a proper structure, they can form words for a visual language.  A universal language that can be  a story, a poem, or even a song.  These stories do not need to be investigative photojournalism.   They do not  just focus on the things we fear are wrong with the world.  Some stories are inspirational, comforting, even devotional.  Photo series that span seasons and years reveal new insights and expand our awarness of a multitude of activties  working at a staggering varieties of scales in time and space. The century-long lifespan of a hardwood tree is intertwined with the hours-long time span of the life of an adult mayfly, or the minutes-long  lifespan of a soil organisim.

Photography as a regular farm chore can allow us to tap into these deeper insights while still getting our production work done.  Getting out in the fields and just taking pictures on a regular basis, we can reconnect with land. Make it one of our regular chores that is a  joy and not so much a toil.  Smart phones make it easy for us to have a camera on us at all times and they are very effective at gathering general images of landscapes and certain environmental shots.  Try  adding a good camera and a few lenses to your farming toolkit.  Telephoto lenses capture more intimacy and macro lenses will open you up to an amazing world of the small things that dominate your landscape!  Use a combination of all of these tools and you will be on your way to speaking the language of land.

Lazy summer naps under a tree or taking a quick dip in the river and drying off in the sun, were important spaces in a land manager's day to reflect on things. These quite reflections had a profound impact on management decisions in their time. This organic process of creative planning directing hard work that was followed by rest and reflection, may be a thing of the past.  A loss that can make us a little melancholy when we think about it.  However, there may be a way to recapture the reflective peacefulness that was associated with these impromptu daily life experiences of yesteryear.

The Photo Space Time Gallery™  is developed to help you interpret land's long, slow speak and trigger deep thinking.   It does this in two ways.  First, the system will help you learn what kinds of photos you should be taking as well as suggestions of where and how often.  The system has built-in functions that help you see the evenness of coverage over the areas of your working lands as well as frequency of photos over time.  In this way, the Photo Space Time Gallery™ teaches you good habits in collecting a wide variety of photo types and spreading your exploration across the whole of your landscape.  The more you spread your photo taking across the space of your landscape and over extended periods of time, the more insightful the second part of the Photo Space Time Gallery™  becomes.  After a few years you will know these strategies intuitivelly and you will be always thinking about new strategies for taking photos.  

The second thing the Photo Space Time Gallery™  does is curate your photos for your future viewing.  It does this by organizing visual cues and presenting them back to you as an aid in meditation.  Sitting quitely and letting images of your landscape flow before you will nudge your mind  and will open up new connections that you may have not thought of before.  I find that listening to music while viewing my photo space time gallery, I am triggered into even deeper thinking.  The music you select doesn't matter as much as having an auditory stimulation while using your visual senses.  This combination produces variations of thinking states and all of them contribute to your absorption of complex information that can feed creative imagination.

The intricate blend of clear details coupled with that something extra found in a good picture, is what I believe can tap into a different part of your brain and  elevate your land management to a whole new level.   My hope is that the Photo Space Time Gallery™ will become a "storyteller" for your personal exploration of intimate knowledge of your place.

Start by taking photos of the things you enjoy seeing.  Don't over think it.  Building a collection of images will come soon enough and remember that it is not a science project but rather an act of love.  A celebration of all things living.  Let your imagination guide you into all the little nooks and crannies of your landscape.  Be a tourist in your own back yard.