*
The word offered for the photograph was “composed,” and with it “somewhat reserved.” He had asked, idly enough, what it might mean to stand with the arms behind the back, one hand holding the opposite arm or the fingers loosely laced, and the answer came back to him as a reading of himself beneath the arch of vines, his hands joined behind him around a phone. He found he could not accept it, though he could not at once say why. The posture was there in the image, and he did not dispute it. What he disputed was the inference, which placed behind his back something he had not been holding.
What he had been holding, if anything, was the day. It was warm and clear, nearly free of humidity, and the person looking at him through the lens was someone whose company he was glad of. He had been unguarded. He had been content. He had stood there savoring the place, the company and the weather, and the question of what his hands conveyed had never arisen, because nothing in him had been arranging itself to be seen. The hands, he thought, had little to tell about that pleasure: they had been elsewhere while he was there.
To say so corrected the reading, and for a moment he was satisfied with the correction. The satisfaction did not hold. He could call what he had felt openness, or receptivity, and the words would help someone understand. They were accurate enough, but they were not the afternoon. However carefully he named it, the naming came afterward and from outside, as the photograph had. He had only replaced a worse description with a better one, and both stood at the same distance from what he had lived while the photograph was being taken.
Here the matter turned, almost without his consent, toward the writing. He enjoyed it: giving form to what he thought, making something he could hand to another. He did not want to pretend otherwise. Yet he wondered whether the activity had become a substitute for a quieter life, one less occupied with presenting what he thought and lived, and whether that was simply what devotion to a craft cost. Beneath this, less comfortably, he wondered whether his esteem for himself had come to depend on what he produced, as though accomplishment could confer a value the life he was already living did not hold. He turned the thought over and found that his pleasure in the work did not answer it. The pleasure was real, but it was beside the point.
Then, without his summoning it, there was the field. He was standing in high grass some fifty years earlier, and the wind was moving through the grass and against his body. He was enveloped. He was not thinking. Nothing held him, not his art, not his poetry. The surroundings were present and so was he, and that was enough, without explanation and without anything to be made of it.
He held the two moments together, the field and the arch of vines, and was struck less by the years between them than by what they shared: in each, the place had taken his attention without asking anything in return. Only now, as he examined them, did the question of accomplishment take any hold. Neither moment had raised it.
He noticed that he was writing even this. He did not take that as a refutation, nor as an answer. He still enjoyed bringing his thoughts into images and words, and he still did not know how his devotion to them stood in relation to his regard for himself. What he had, alongside the uncertainty, was the knowledge that he had once stood in a field needing nothing from it but its presence, and that beneath the vines, with the lens held by someone whose company he was glad of, he had stood that way again.
Ricardo F. Morín
November 6, 2026
Healdsburg, California
Tags: attention, contentment, Memory, Perception, photography, Presence, self-regard, writing
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