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Heya, For the third month in a row, the pattern somehow persists: grind hard at work in the heat of the valley of the sun, and at month’s end, escape to the ease and awe of the mountains. Last week, my partner in real estate photography found us an Airbnb north of Durango, Colorado and got half off the bill for five days up here with six friends in exchange for photos and a video. He wanted to keep the place a surprise and just gave me the address this morning. My trusty Prius and I climbed out of Phoenix up to Flagstaff, across the empty yet always special expanse of red rock of the Navajo reservation, and into the San Juan Mountains. I arrived just before sunset to discover the place is a friggin’ mansion of a cabin with a stream running through its mountainside backyard! Light was fading and I immediately set to racing about, turning every light on in the place, firing up the hot tub, and diving straight into a twilight shoot. By the time I got the drone in the air the sun was low, painting a red light across the mountains. Minutes later, I was running about the property shooting in the narrow time window of the electric-blue twilight sky and think I managed to get some sweet shots. It was intense and great fun. Now, about this letter. The quote above (and the related subject to which I’ll soon get) have been wonderfully stewing in my head today as I watched the land pass by in the Prius. This stewing is important. I discovered this month that having space from the busyness of business to soak whatever I’m writing about in the subconscious of my mind before putting pen to paper is quite essential to having something meaningful to say. I tried a bunch of short, sixty minute blocks of early AM writing this August, before a long day’s work at the photo biz and I seemed to just go in circles, writing, re-writing, and never quite clear on or satisfied with it. The Late Night Letter, which often feels to me like a ceremonious outpouring, draws the attention of my conscious and unconscious mind a day or two in advance and when the night arrives, I almost always have something that feels ready and important to say. What’s been welling up the past few days — that I wrote about a few months back but feel drawn to point at again — is this idea of living with one foot in our culturally constructed paradigm (money, laws, taxes, numbers, social norms, road lines, time etc.) and the other foot in this more spiritual, “primary” reality (the eternal now, the understanding that our Earth is incomprehensibly smaller than the spec in Horton Hears a Who!, the miraculousness of the animating force of life in all living things around us and in ourselves etc.). It seems to me that Walt Whitman did something like this. While I fall back into the culturally constructed paradigm constantly and loose sight of the primary often, more and more the past year, I’ve been able to not just think or philosophize about “primary reality,” but to actually experience, feel, and live it. I am more excited about this “primary reality” and somehow managing to place a foot in it than just about anything else right now. It makes the everyday feel miraculous, and from miraculousness, gratitude and wonder perennially stream. Just something to chew on. Ya dig? Til next month! With love & stoke, Ethan
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