Wake Up or is Everything Really Zen?

An interesting thing happened after I posted my latest movie (actually interview) over at TheAppWhisperer.com. It seems that most of the feedback I have received has all said the same thing. “It’s so relaxing!” Everybody seems to find my little movie relaxing or calming, comforting in an odd sort of a way. At first, my inclination was to write this off as a sign of the times-maybe everybody is looking for an escape from the madness that is COVID-19 and the times in which we currently live, so they are essentially hunting for calm where there perhaps is none. Maybe everybody is just collectively tired and needs to wake up some, you know, put down the decaf and all. The thing about it though is that I’ve gotten this feedback from multiple people, from multiple sources, most of which don’t even know each other. It’s like everybody who listens to the little movie has the same response. “Oh, that’s calming!”

If one person tells you something, you might just write it off as one opinion but once multiple people say the same thing, once you get the same feedback from multiple sources, it’s probably not the feedback or an opinion, you are probably onto something. In my case, since everybody has told me, “calm,” I am thinking I might just go with this idea, crazy as it sounds. Even if I don’t think of myself as “calming” in that sort of a way, if others find me to be so, then perhaps I should just own this. With that in mind, I got to thinking. I had been thinking about ways to incorporate photography into other things. For example, one of my friends recently published a photo book that wasn’t a photo book, and by that I mean she published a book about something and just used a lot of her photography in it. She incorporated her photography into a non-fiction book, of sorts. It’s a great idea actually, if you can pull it off, as it puts your photo book into a marketing category that sells, rather than leave it to compete with other photo books for a diminishing share of the photo book market (which has a lot of barriers to entry.)

I have always been big on meditation. Sometimes, I do small meditations before I photograph, as I find it helps clear my head and opens my mind up to seeing new things (or seeing things in a new way, which is even better for photography.) This new soothing personae of mine has me thinking that maybe I could do a photo book disguised as a book of small meditations. The idea being I could gather (create)  some meditations and use it as text in-between the images. I’d have to pick calming images of course, kind of like the one pictured here, but this could work, at least, I could see a book like this coming together. It would be easy enough to author a series of short meditations and, coupled with some soothing images, just might make for an interesting book, one that might sell anyway, given that a lot of people buy books on meditation. They are quite popular and this idea would put me square in that marketing space. Could a book of meditations be in my future? Hard to tell. I’ve been having a hard time getting books together these days but I could see something like this coming together at some point. I already have about three books in the works and they are harder to pull together than one might realize, even with the help of something like Blurb, which is a godsend. It’s hard to find the time but I shall add this too onto the pile of things I really need to try someday, you know, in-between all of the other stuff I do.

In the meantime, you will have to enjoy your meditation in a single frame, this one taken in an authentic Zen rock garden, on the outskirts of Kyoto, Japan, in autumn.

Until next time…