. . . to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from.
- T. S. Eliot, “Four Quartets”
On June 30, I made my last visit to Cutler Park. We had sold our house in Boston, and were
leaving later that morning to drive to Corrales, New Mexico. (See “I’ll Fly Away” posted June 26 below.) I wanted one last communion with a holy place.
For me, visiting – and photographing – Cutler Park was a
kind of meditation . . . a way to step outside the bustle and stress of the
day, and just FOCUS on one thing:
watching the light, looking for beauty, and working to capture it
through my camera. For an hour or so
every time, the rest of the world just disappeared. It was great therapy.
My relationship with Cutler Park began almost four years
earlier, on August 30, 2008. My wife,
Linda, and some friends of hers would go there to run on the trails, and one
day she came back and said, “You know, you should go over to Cutler Park. There are some beautiful ferns in the forest.” So we went over in the afternoon, and I
took some unremarkable pictures of the ferns and a few other things. Here’s an example:
And here are my first shots of the Charles River, which by
now – if you’ve been reading this blog for very long – you’re familiar with.
Again, unremarkable.
Here's me taking a picture of something that afternoon:
But from that beginning, I was hooked. It was (and still is) such a beautiful
place. Little did I know at the time
that I would spend hundreds of hours and take thousands – actually, tens of thousands – of images there over
the next four years.
Fortunately, my photographic skill improved with time. That, coupled with the discipline of being
there when the light was good, has yielded some marvelous images:
October 12, 2008
September 12, 2010
August 27, 2011
And everybody’s all-time favorite, the swans from November 7, 2009:
This will probably not be my last post to Cutler Park
Chronicles, since I’ve got thousands of images and dozens of stories to go with
them. Stop back by from time to time.
And if you are interested in stories and photographs from New Mexico, visit my new blog, Corrales Chronicles, here and my new photography website, Todos Juntos Photography, here.
But for now, I’ll just share some of the images I made
between January and June this year. A
few are arranged so you can see the change of the seasons – winter to spring to
summer – in the same location. Others
are just images I like. They are posted
at my original photography website, Hastings Street Photography.
See them by clicking here.
