Our Fingers Measure The Sun

““Faith is the bird that feels the light and sings when the dawn is still dark.””

— Rabindranath Tagore

Fire Sale no. 51: 3 June 23

Fire Sale no. 62: 15 June 23

Fire Sale no. 74: 27 June 23

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Less than a month ago, I wrote the following entry in my morning pages journal.

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3 July 23

Stretch out your arm. Tuck your thumb into your palm and crook her wrist so that your fingers sit flat to the sky. Place your pinky over the sun. That represents an hour of the sun’s movement, one hour of light. Each finger is a fifteen minute window.

Two hours until the sun pushes above the top of the oak tree in my back yard, but that break in the branches… that fifteen minute window opens up in about fifteen minutes.

This is how I look at the world, how I relate to light.

The sun burns with nuclear fusion: four hydrogen atoms fuse together to create a single helium atom, shedding the energy not needed in the newly formed nucleus.

Energy. Heat. Light.

When that light arrives, it is eight minutes old.

And the oak tree in my backyard absorbs the sun’s energy, converts it through photosynthesis into sugars and oxygen. It sheds the oxygen we breathe in. The sugars power its growth.

The live oak was small when we moved into this house in April 2006. The kids were, too. Brendan was almost three and Sarah, not quite one. They have birthdays this month — 20 and 18. My kids are no longer children.

Breathe, Trey. Breathe.

Actually, there were two oak trees back then, but we had to cut one down because it was fucking up our foundation. Not the first nor last thing that rattled my family’s walls.

All that wood… pulp and kindling.

This page comes from some old tree. I print my photos on old trees, as well. The best of me goes into trees, like sugar and sunlight, and every breath I exhale.

When you touch flame to a bit of old tree — branch or page — it burns. John Muir called it the release of hundreds of years of sunlight stored up. And I’ve always appreciated that image.

The light of our day, of this day, gets stored away and when the time comes on some future cold, dark night, the tree gives back what it was given.

That is creativity, the creative life.

Somewhere in the cosmos exists and energy that is related, the sun to my tree. The Greeks called that energy “muse", though you might call it something else. Nevertheless, that energy radiates outward and a forest of artists convert it into growth, into wild ideas — crooked and perfect as leafy branches.

Trees grow toward the light; creative people grow toward the energy.

And, in time, we too get cut down. I’m beginning to think of my work as a storehouse of all the light that touches me. The point is to welcome the moment you get set on fire. The point is to shed your light for someone to find on a future cold, dark night.

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At the time I wrote this, I hadn't yet fully formed the details and the ideas that became Fire Sale had yet to harden. However, you can sense my searching on that early July morning.

I'm struck by the confluence of so many things...

We bought our home in April 2006 and without realizing it, I began shooting the first images of Fire Sale in April of this year…

I chose to start this project in July — when so much of what I love has been born. Surely that wasn’t coincidence but subconscious. I've discovered others, too.

The morning of April 25th, I chose a morning walk photo I thought would make my wife smile. It somehow lines up as the image which will be offered on our 23rd anniversary. How do things like this even happen?

I’m standing at the starting line, committing to one hundred days of intentional creative action. I expected growth to come through this, but already I sense the rings of my tree expanding.

If you're not familiar, Fire Sale is part pop up shop, part creative collaboration and part philosophic practice using the vernacular of nature's cycle of creation and destruction and the nature of light, stored then released. Each day I offer a single print of one image shot 100 days earlier for sale. If it doesn't sell that day, I burn it and use the released energy to make something new.

You can find more on this collaborative philosophic experience by clicking here.