THE "STILL POINT"                                                                  

The seal you see here is used on my prints and cards, and was made for me by an Australian-Chinese artist, and means "still (or calm) point (or place)". 
 

: I don’t know where or when I first came across the term “still point”, but it has been in my consciousness for a long time. Maybe it was from my school days, studying T S Eliot’s “Four Quartets”...these lines from “Burnt Norton”:

“After the kingfisher’s wing has answered light to light,

And is silent, the light is still,

at the still point of the turning world.”

: Don’t ask me if I understood it back then, but it lodged in my memory as an expression of something I knew was important and needed my attention. It didn’t get that attention until many years later when I began reading the texts and scriptures associated with meditation and mysticism. The term has been used, I know, for many centuries, in various literary, philosophical and spiritual, contexts...for example, the 14th century English mystic, Julian of Norwich wrote: “God is the still point at my centre”; and many meditation traditions talk about the still point of one’s being, reached in meditation, from which all insight & action emerges. My own experience of meditation confirms a quiet, calm, “still point” or place, or state of being, sometimes “achieved” through the practice, sometimes reached unintentionally, spontaneously, when I am not even “trying”. This point, or “place”, is a momentary/timeless experience of clarity, in which a sense of “at-oneness”, rather than “understanding”, links me to all things. Was it Blake who spoke of seeing “the universe in a grain of sand, and heaven in a wildflower”? ~ there’s something of that in this experience.

: Now, coming back to my photography, I find the most satisfying results come when I get myself & my preconceived notions “out of the way”, & let the subject speak for itself. “Getting myself out of the way” is kind of what happens in meditation when I slip into that place I might call the “still point”. I am not saying I meditate before making photos, but my most satisfying work seems to be the result of quietly standing before my subject matter & letting it determine how the image will be...It has always seemed to me that when my head is cluttered & my approach is complex, my images will be too. This is sometimes how it should be, but more often than not I am disappointed with these images; however, when I come with a different, simple, quiet, more contemplative approach, then my images seem to reveal something more...

(Google “Minor White” to read a more articulate commentary on this matter & see his book “Mirrors, Messages, Manifestations” ...seriously good reading...)

SO, SUMMING UP:

"STILL POINT PHOTOGRAPHY"? Photography that aims at coming from that quiet, still, reflective place within.

"SEEKING THE HIDDEN WHOLENESS"? Using that kind of photography (coming from that still, quiet place within) to seek for the hidden wholeness within my subject matter.

    Click here for The Hidden Wholeness   or    Click here to go back to the Bio