I especially love photos I take when I come across an image that perfectly reflects what is going on inside of me, as well as what I see outside of me. Photography is an emotional thing for me, I began taking photos when I met Maria and every one is a love letter to her, then and still. I believe photographs are a reflection of what is going on inside the person with the camera as much as anything.

Like writing, photography is always shrouded in mystique and an aura of complexity. People are always telling me they are not writers and they are not really photographers as if they need some special certificate or graduate course of approval. This never sits well with me, I never understand or accept it. I never took a writing course in my life or graduated from college or took a writing workshop. I decided I wanted to be a writer, and so I became a writer. I decided late in life I wanted to take photos and so I became a photographer. I told Maria many times I am not an artist, and she laughed at me the same way I roll my eyes at other people when they tell me what they are not.

In this life, we are what we wish to be. There is no magic in taking a photo unless there is magic in your heart. There is no magic to writing if there is not magic in your head. Encouragement is an ideology, a philosophy. It holds we all hold creative sparks – creativity, ambition, achievement, love. Nobody gets to decide who we are, that is our mission, our sacred tasks.

When I saw this barn at dusk, it perfectly reflected what I was thinking, that we live in two worlds, the world we seek, the world we have, and we are forever balancing these two impulses. In the creative life, there are always obstacles to work – money, distractions, obligations, fears. In the spiritual life, reality is always introducing on the search for peace and constancy.

But the core of it is this – our work, our aspirations are our identity, our voice to the world. They are not things that others can give or take away. Only we can do that.