The force that through the green fuse

Like springtime today, but not as rainy. Shoots are coming up all over town, and I spent much of the day walking, thinking, and dreaming. I'm starting to get my energy back, and a book I got from the library today is sending up fresh green shoots in my imagination.

It's Pilgrimage, by Annie Leibovitz. It started with a project she and Susan Sontag dreamed of doing together, something they called The Beauty Book. An excuse to travel around to places they cared about and wanted to see. But then Sontag got cancer. It didn't happen. As part of her recovery from that loss, Leibovitz decided to make a pilgrimage. She writes, "For me, it meant going back to taking pictures when I was moved to take a picture. When there wasn't an agenda. If you are on assignment for a magazine, there are always agendas. Things that have to get done. I wanted to be in a situation where I took a picture just because I saw it" (23).

She decided to make a pilgrimage to places that mattered to her, and also places that had mattered to writers and artists who were important to her: Emily Dickinson, Virginia Woolf, Charles Darwin, Marian Anderson, Abraham Lincoln.... Leibovitz's pictures express something about those people, some of the personality, the essence or the energy of these people who were important to her. Marian Anderson's ball gown, Martha Graham's costume trunks, Annie Oakley's boots, the hills behind Georgia O'Keeffe's house in Abiquiu, Pete Seeger's garage full of tools.

So as I went walking around today, I began making my own list: people I have admired, loved, dreamed about. Some famous and some whose names are known only to their families and friends. I'm thinking of making a series of photographs honoring them. Inspired by Annie Leibovitz's pilgrimage, but different, of course. Inspired by Teleri Williams' poems about her grandmother, but maybe not poems. I'm not sure how to move forward, but these are green shoots for me right now.