Between grief and nothing I will take grief. –William Faulkner
Some weeks ago, as many of you likely were preparing for the Christmas holiday, I found myself again seeking solace in the desert, struggling to come to terms with the loss of a loved one. Somewhere else, thousands of miles away, a luminous thread of consciousness, as delicate and beautiful and noble as I had ever known, flickered its last and left my world forever darker. I had been here before. In other such times I sought comfort in wild places after receiving similar news and excusing myself from human company. This time the news found me already in the wild, alone in a desert canyon of magnificent and austere beauty, and without even the possibility of communicating with others – just me and the rocks and the fragrant brush and the silence and the stars and the expansive desert stretching into a deep darkness far beyond my ability to see. I am grateful to have had this time to mourn in solitude in that welcoming wilderness on that beautiful and agonizing night.
It seems odd now to just pick up where I left off and so I hope you will indulge me this one post about nothing in particular, just putting words to recent thoughts before returning to the business of photography.
After such events we are always apprehensive about returning to former routines, and for good reason. Experiences like these are important not for any life-changing realizations, which are better left for more inspired times, but because they make us pause and reevaluate our priorities and reconsider our convictions; they require us to place hard values on things we are uncomfortable thinking about in such literal ways; and they force us to acknowledge what came of the choices of the past.
My point in all this is not to seek sympathy, but rather to put as fine a point as I am able to on the indispensable roles held for me in such times by wilderness, solitude and art. After some decades of life I recognize that such thoughts may not resonate with most, but I also know of others like me who are content with just a few significant human relationships and for whom life in the midst of humanity is unbearable – people who need such introspective moments as are to be found alone in deserts and mountains and forests and rivers and anywhere else yet unspoiled by industry, or when immersed in creative work for no other purpose than to nourish and sustain a part of ourselves that will otherwise wither and wilt, and without which our lives will be greatly diminished.
We come to these places not only to be by ourselves, but to be ourselves – whole and separate, with nothing to prove or to explain, and so that we may face our challenges and inspirations without distraction, without being beholden to appearances and traditions, without the noise and clatter and prejudice of the human hives, without the constant tugging of matters trivial and mundane, and without concern or conjecture about what was and what is yet to come.
Artist Everett Ruess roamed the desert that is now my home some decades before I was born. In 1931, after his early wanderings in the Colorado Plateau, he wrote to a friend,
“These days away from the city have been the happiest of my life. It has all been a beautiful dream, sometimes tranquil, sometimes fantastic, and with enough pain and tragedy to make the delights possible by contrast. … A love for everyone and for everything has welled up, finding no outlet except in my art. … Alone on the open desert, I have made up songs of wild, poignant rejoicing and transcendent melancholy. The world has seemed more beautiful to me than ever before. … I have rejoiced to set out, to be going somewhere, and I have felt a still sublimity, looking … into the coals of my campfires, and seeing far beyond them. I have been happy in my work, and I have exulted in my play. I have really lived.”
Ruess continued his wilderness wanderings for three more years until, in the autumn of 1934, he vanished without a trace. His camp was found in the remote and beautiful sandstone canyon of a verdant tributary of the Escalante river. He was twenty years old. When I was that age I was a soldier wondering whether my life will ever be rewarding. Indeed, life had to take some very strange and improbable turns in the decades since, and before I could say with the same confidence that I, too, had really lived. It is a transcendent and liberating realization, and one I could not accomplish without spending a considerable portion of those years in wild and remote places, seeing and experiencing them, and myself through them.
Like Ruess, it may well be that my greater legacy will not be my art but rather yet another story of an improbable wanderer bewitched and transformed by this landscape, lured by the hope of finding meaning and redemption in its soulful wilds. And I have, and that is enough for one man and one life. Even if it all comes to an end tomorrow, I am grateful for having lived such a life, and for the beauty and pain and people that made it possible and that helped me become who I am.
I generally shy from offering life advice because to live as I do one also has to think and feel and believe as I do, and I concede that such an attitude likely is not shared by most. I lived my life under a simple and ruthless creed: never settle down, never stop running, until you find a life that is meaningful to you. And that means, among other things, refusing lives that others may find sufficient or more proper, and in so doing perhaps also offending those whose lives you deem unfit for yourself. And so I wish to make clear that I have no aspiration of being considered a role model. I have undoubtedly made many mistakes, and I make no claim of piety or special wisdom. But I did succeed, and if that entitles me to offer but one bit of advice, it is this: regardless of anything and anyone else, do not let yourself down.
And so I venture further, not for the sake of accomplishment or appearances. I had already seen and done more than most and I have nothing to prove and no concern for any legacy. I am where I need to be and my priorities are sound, and my life is interesting and rewarding and exciting to me, and I am at peace with my choices and my convictions and my shortfalls and my pains.
I no longer visit wild places, I return to them; they are my home and my sanctuary, the source of my strengths and convictions and the wellspring of my inspiration and my support in troubled times – the only places where I am able to find the peace to tear myself apart and put the pieces back together and make sense of my existence. They have not let me down yet. And one day, hopefully many years from now, whether by choice or by chance, I may finally walk into this good wilderness never to return, and I am comforted by this knowledge, and it factors into my decisions and my work and every aspect of my being.
And with that, wounded as I am, life – in all its glories and tragedies and imperfections – can go on.
