Thursday

Sometimes a golden fish swims by

Fish pond, Barnet, VT, 2009

What to Know and How to Know It
photos and article by Mary Lang

“Sit and do nothing. Every once in a while a golden fish swims by and lays her golden eggs. You’ll know.”
~ Chogyam Trungpa Rinpoche

In the fall of 1973, I started taking classes at Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and also started coming around the New York Dharmadhatu. It’s probably not a coincidence that these two paths that have determined so much of my life began at the same time. Back then I was frantically determined to understand what life was all about, even though, looking back, I feel like I knew nothing about anything. Over the ensuing 40 years, I have become so grateful that the combination of the disciplines of meditation and photography has given me a deeper understanding of my own mind, and of magic, and has helped me to know what to pay attention to and what to trust.

My art is about how I perceive the world, and how I perceive the world is as a practitioner. And as an artist who makes things – photographs – I am also trying to communicate the truth of my perception so others might see it too. I guess that makes me a Shambhala/Dharma artist, although I do not practice Miksang or other Shambhala art forms, per se. I photographed our community – “the scene”- for more than a decade, I photographed my children and my neighborhood and called it ordinary magic, and I have photographed empty, lonely landscapes all along. Meditation and photography were always there, one informing the other, but only about ten years ago did I find the courage to explicitly state that my photographs were about what I was learning from my practice.

At about that time I started photographing water, spending hours and days wading in water, standing next to water, watching water. I was drawn to water as subject matter because of what the photographs showed me: reflections that dissolve, the ungraspable edge of a wave, an uncertainty between what’s on the surface and what lies beneath it – intangible, impermanent, and luminous – just like phenomena itself. In a world characterized by rigidity and fixed ideas, I thought that contemplative photographs about the groundless nature of water might inspire a similar fluidity of mind in the viewer. They seemed like a way to communicate the dharma through art.

Click on any photo to view as a slide show.

Now I find myself turning my lens not just on water, but on small moments of stillness or coincidence in ordinary life as well. This is a collection of random images, whose only coherence is that I recognized some aspect of ordinariness transformed and tried to put a frame around it – a golden egg of perception. This path of photographing in places grand and small, paying attention to the details of the phenomenal world, continues to remind me that the world is not about me. My responsibility as both a meditator and an artist is to go deeper into those experiences, let intuition guide me and open to the magic of the moment – basically to trust the situation and get out of the way. It is a journey both humbling and inspiring, and in the end, more about practice than art.

To view more photos, please visit my website: www.marylang.com