“My soul is tuned to the quietness, peace, and stillness that nature inspires.” – Shikoba
I’ve been reading The Maine Woods by Henry David Thoreau for at least three years now. I’m about halfway through, and I’m guessing it’ll probably be another three years before I finish. I only read it after crawling into bed. On a good night, I’ll get through a few pages before my eyelids falter and the book falls to the floor with a thud. Sometimes I don’t even survive more than a couple of paragraphs before I’ve gone out like a whale oil lantern.
What is it about this book that has such a strange effect on me? For one thing, the prose is so beautiful, hypnotic, and calming that I feel as if I’m on the journey with Thoreau and we’ve just set up camp near Mount Katahdin for the night. The fire crackles; a balsam-fragranced breeze sends sparks deep into the velvety sky. A loon calls plaintively in the distance … and … I’m down for the night.
The Shape of Quiet
There’s something indefinable about the light here in New England and the way it magnifies the rugged beauty of the landscape. I can fully understand when Thoreau says, “We can never have enough of nature.”
I’ve taken a lot of photographs while traveling throughout the region. But I don’t consider myself a landscape photographer — or a photographer at all, for that matter. I’m more of an observer who happens to carry a camera. The photos I take are filtered through my experience as a graphic designer, and I’m often drawn to vistas that are sparse and minimal. Quiet and meditative. This is what feeds my soul.
Just as every designer learns to embrace white space as an essential element in design, I’ve come to appreciate the vast “nothingness” of a spacious sky or an infinite ocean. Because it isn’t really about the absence of something, but the presence of something that can’t quite be defined.
