Today I went to First Church. This historic Presbyterian landmark is not my favourite ecclesiastical building, but it is visually interesting, and to wander round it trying to capture its feel with a small unsophisticated camera was an intriguing challenge. Using the iPhone I find myself thinking about the pictures in a way I haven't done since I was using a Practika without an exposure meter and developing the black and white prints in a rubbish tin in my study. As I mentioned once before, limitation is a boon to the creative process; if you want to think laterally give yourself less rather than more. You can't rely on your fancy gear to deliver the goods, it's all down to you. And as for these shots, sure the focus is a bit off in some of them, but I like them. Here in the Diocese of Dunedin, where we don't have a lot of resources, I am expecing the wonderful benefits of limitation to be as true of churches as it is of photographs.
This poem captures it perfectly Camino. The way forward, the way between things, the way already walked before you, the path disappearing and re-appearing even as the ground gave way beneath you, the grief apparent only in the moment of forgetting, then the river, the mountain, the lifting song of the Sky Lark inviting you over the rain filled pass when your legs had given up, and after, it would be dusk and the half-lit villages in evening light; other people's homes glimpsed through lighted windows and inside, other people's lives; your own home you had left crowding your memory as you looked to see a child playing or a mother moving from one side of a room to another, your eyes wet with the keen cold wind of Navarre. But your loss brought you here to walk under one name and one name only, and to find the guise under which all loss can live; remember you were given that name every day along the way, remember you were greeted as such, and you neede
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