As a photographer, I stalk light, but I also stalk color, form and everything that to me represents beauty. Sometimes that means looking past something that is at first glance ugly or ordinary to find a new element I hadn’t see before. That’s the reward: seeing something I hadn’t seen before.
California is host to so many interesting plants, and many of them seem, to a desert rat like me, downright tropical. Like this banana tree. I thought the trunk was a canvas full of a hundred abstract paintings. Here I’ve shared just one of them. I didn’t make it; I just documented it. Still, it was a discovery. I found something I hadn’t seen before. Something beautiful.
An easy version of a medicine walk is to just go out and stalk beauty. Go for a walk and look for something you haven’t noticed before that offers some kind of suprising beauty. Bring it back with you–in the form of a photograph or a remnant of nature, or perhaps just a mental image or a feeling inside.
Beauty is an antidote for all that is troubling today, and so it is medicine for the soul. There is even a life path that the Navajos call the Beauty Way. Walking with beauty before you, behind you, beneath you, above you, inside you. What a way to live!
How do you stalk beauty in your world? And how do you make sure you bring iit with you on your journey? Send your comments!
