complete simplicity

For me words and photographs go hand in hand. They inform each other for me. They are both ways I explore meaning in my life. These words, excerpted from The Four Quartets move me. I seek this condition of complete simplicity he describes, complete presence. And occasionally I find it. Sometimes this is how I feel when I create a photograph I really love--like I'm discovering something familiar, something I've known all along.




"With the drawing of this Love and the voice of this Calling

We shall not cease from exploration

And the end of all our exploring

Will be to arrive where we started

And know the place for the first time.

Through the unknown, unremembered gate

When the last of earth left to discover

Is that which was the beginning;

At the source of the longest river

The voice of the hidden waterfall

And the children in the apple-tree

Not known, because not looked for

But heard, half-heard, in the stillness

Between two waves of the sea.

Quick now, here, now, always—

A condition of complete simplicity

(Costing not less than everything)

And all shall be well and

All manner of thing shall be well

When the tongues of flame are in-folded

Into the crowned knot of fire

And the fire and the rose are one."
--T.S. Eliot