49Living the Life
By a free way of living I mean the difficult process of finding out what your own feeling about the world is, disentangling it from other people’s feelings and ideas. In other words, this wanting to be what may truthfully be called an artist is the last thing in the world to worry about. You either are that thing or you are not.
—Paul Strand
Small storms meandered over the high desert as I made my way down a long unpaved road to a remote desert river. Occasional snow flurries gave way to a patch of blue sky, and whenever a long view presented itself, I stopped to watch as cloud shadows gracefully swept across the wild landscape. I was on my way to a little-known canyon to spend a few days camping in solitude. The plan, such as it was, was to witness the emergence of spring, to wander in the warm glow of reflected light in narrow sandstone passages, to sleep in the open air under a star-filled night sky, to think deep thoughts, and perhaps to make a couple of photographs.
As I set up my camp on a lofty ledge above the river, I watched ravens perform aerobatic dances in the afternoon wind, listened to the warbling of a male meadow-lark, and delighted in the rich scents of riparian desert flora. To say that I was happy may miss the point. Contentment may be a better word for it. Most people associate happiness with fleeting episodes of elation, but contentment is a sustained state, a goal to be pursued in its own right, regardless of any other purpose or outcome.
I can photograph in many places that are much easier to reach and to work in—places already vetted by other photographers and where pleasing images are practically guaranteed. But I stay away from such places. The ease and predictability of photographing them makes them not more, but less desirable destinations for me. This is because I chose this life and this career not for the sake of filling my files with yet more variations of familiar compositions, but so I can experience what to me is the most rewarding of all states—the sense of serenity to be found in wilderness and nowhere else; a sense that, for a sliver of time and space, everything is as it should be, that beauty has a purpose and that life is an astonishing gift not to be squandered.
To be able to do what I do and to experience the world in the raw is why I live and work as I do. Photography, writing, hiking, staring into the heavens on a quiet night, and sharing these experiences with people I care about are not the purpose of the life I lead, but the rewards for it, and so long as I can make sufficient income to sustain myself, I need little else.
As so many invest their days in promoting, elevating, and marketing themselves as commercial brands, it may be worth heeding the greatest danger of celebrity: it is far easier to make other people think you live a meaningful and purpose-driven life than to actually live a meaningful and purpose-driven life, and one may realize too late that the two are not interchangeable, and in terms of quality of experience, are not even close. I therefore measure my success not by how many images I make, how popular I am, or my annual income. Success to me is simply a matter of accomplishing and sustaining a life that is meaningful and rewarding in its experiences, independent of anything else.