Mellow

There is a kind of calm that is different from the calm you stumble into accidentally. This piece is about the other kind. The calm that comes from returning, deliberately, to something you have learned to trust.
 
The walk that started this collection gave me two photographs and a practice. After that afternoon I began going into my garden with my camera not because something was pulling me outside, but because I had learned what this quality of attention gave me and I wanted to keep having it. That is a practice, intentionally choosing it, rather than falling into it.
 
A camellia in my own garden, the light falling at a particular angle across one flower, illuminating the centre while letting shadow give the soft white petals their depth. The challenge I set myself was to fill the entire frame with only that: the simplicity of the petals, the shadow that gave them shape, the warmth at the centre. Nothing else. I had to hold very still. Any movement from me or the flower in the breeze and the moment was lost. I had to stand at exactly the angle that kept my shadow off the light I was trying to preserve.
 
That discipline, the patience, the precision, and the choosing to return, is what this piece holds. Mellow is what it looks like when you stop waiting for the right moment to arrive and start building the conditions for it yourself.