TexasGirl Photography

I’ve been thinking about how control is one of life’s biggest illusions. Power is another one; I’ve learned it isn’t real. I’m pretty sure every single person on the planet joins me now in being painfully aware of this. The only thing I can even come close to managing is my own actions and decisions, including how I react to things.

When I was younger, in my early 20’s, I used to consider myself a planner. That’s when my time was my own, when no one else had any claim to my hours, so I could portion them out as I chose. Those days are long, long over; now everyone in our house is governed by sets of rules and regulations that mean we can’t even think about weekends, holidays, or summers without getting permission. Honestly, it’s a drag. Life, however, passes from one season to the next before you know it, and recognizing that kicking and screaming about the present state of things will only make everyone (including myself) miserable, plus it wouldn’t change a dang thing, I’ve thrown my own dreams and expectations and pretty much all planning out the window.

So, when we can, we travel. We drive. We camp. And funnily enough, the traveling is a dream from my youth come true. This blessed time puts thoughts of control and planning on the back shelf; it’s all about the present, which is the greatest gift. Changes in my own photographic drive have shifted, uncannily coinciding with our change in circumstances, focusing less on cities and people and more on the natural world.

Nature, the beauty of the planet, and especially the stars, is where my passions began. I’ve never stopped staring at the horizon or watching the sky, but like the narrator in Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey – my all time favorite poem, one that hit me like a ton of bricks in my formative years – “nature then. . . . . to me was all in all” but I am most certainly “changed . . . . from what I was when first I came among these hills.”

I used to walk outside and feel overwhelmed with joy in the beauty of the day. A certain nostalgic scent on the wind was all it would take to set my spirit spinning and send me running for a pencil & paper to write. I am not the same as I was. That internal life of mine has become encrusted with grown-up concerns and distractions so all encompassing they nearly suffocated it out of existence. I have been trying to get it back, to peel away the layers and bring it back to the light. I long for the simplicity of feeling that ultimately drives everything I do.

Pointing my camera at the things I see, scenes full of the everyday drama of life in the desert, the mountains, by rivers and lakes, and in trees, is all I can do right now. I don’t consider myself particularly successful in communicating a message of beauty, but I am working on it. It’s in the journey of seeking and in the attempt itself that I remember who I am. It reminds me that control isn’t real, isn’t worth fighting for, and that real power belongs only to the One who “impels all thinking things, all objects of all thought, and rolls through all things. Therefore am I still a lover of the meadows and the woods and mountains; and of all that we behold From this green earth; of all the mighty world of eye, and ear,—both what they half create, and what perceive; well pleased to recognise in nature and the language of the sense the anchor of my purest thoughts, the nurse, the guide, the guardian of my heart, and soul of all my moral being.”

Quotes from Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour. July 13, 1798 BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH. All photographs film, from Big Bend National Park, March 2020.