While I don't sing solos if I can help it, because music done badly isn't really music and can be
difficult to enjoy, I feel okay about putting these out for y'all to see because here,
I can do photography even a bit badly, and still feel good about it because people seem to enjoy it.
That enjoyment is one powerfully valuable essence of art.
It is also a way for me to participate in a world-wide effort to bring peace, harmony, and an end to suffering in our own lives.
It happens this way: When we can feel in our hearts genuine appreciation and gratitude,
we are speaking to the web of creation
our expectation for peace and harmony to be returned to us. When we can see our surroundings and our relationships as beautiful and harmonious
and feel appreciation and gratitude for that, we are generating the signal that the Universe needs to produce that abundantly around us.
Here, on this website, vast numbers of us are putting out images that inspire appreciation and gratitude.
I know, because I am endlessly awed by the images I see in people's collections, and I write and tell them,
"Thank you for bringing that home to us."
The more we can participate in that practice, the better our world will be.
A version of this image hung in a photography show in Pocatello, Idaho during April 2013, with the title, "Winsome Summer Face."
I had to explain to more than one viewer that it was not precisely the flower whose portrait was being captured;
it was the way the flower was peeking out from behind its comrades' foliage.