The Conjugation of Ice

"Your first 10,000 photographs are your worst." --Henri Cartier-Bresson.

My childhood friend Leif, witness to my life as I am to hers, an artist since her dancing infancy, is discovering a passion for photography. She sent me some of her pictures, and I wrote back in great excitement, cheering for her new work.

This email from her yesterday: "I love it that you call what I'm doing work. It's hard for me to see it that way, but I guess enough effort and longing go into it these days to call it that...even with little point and shoot."

My response: "Whatever you make, whether with a camera or with wire, with your body in movement, with a brush, with words on the computer or in a notebook--what you make is your work. What I make is my work. When we're doing our work, we're absorbed in it, clock-time vanishes. Doing the work, we are nothing but the work. After the work, when we rest, or when we pay the bills, or when we love the children or care for our own bodies, we yearn to get back to the work. We long for the work like we once yearned for a lover, more now than ever.

"It doesn't matter whether others say yes to it. It only matters for us to say yes to it, or NO, or this could be better, this pleases me, this isn't what I wanted, this falls short, this is getting there but it's not there yet. We are the only judges we have to please, and it matters to us to develop skills to serve the image-making and to grow in the work. All these years we have been doing our work, whatever else was going on. We never stopped trying to be better, trying to grow in the work. We're still doing that."

After that exchange of emails, I found myself at Tanner Springs, watching how fingers of ice on the pond yearn for each other and reflect each other. The image in the lens falls short of what I saw: ice reaching for ice. I tried a poem about it, and the poem falls short, isn't done yet, but I post these three fragments as a message to my future self, affirming the Work: email, picture, poem: all saying the same thing.

Ice lies down in sheets
and yearns for union.
Ice reaches back, persistent
till ice and ice meet and touch,
integrate as self and Self. Despite
looming hulks of glass and steel,
despite the annoying grab
of little grasses, this yearning
is the conjugation of ice.