Maria and I took the three dogs and we went out into the deep woods not too far from our farm. I brought my new Achromat Lens, a difficult but brilliant child. I’ve never had a lens with such a complete mind of its own, it cares nothing for what I am thinking or doing and even less for the many modern conveniences of digital photography.

I am but a vessel, a means of transport, the lens takes the photo it wants and does with it what it will, life a gifted and angry adolescent child who has just discovered how dumb his father and mother are. I am the bumbling idiot flipping dials and changing ISO’s and cursing. We went on our usual path, nearly overgrown with brush and ferns from the summer rains.

The Achromat liked the brilliant afternoon light that shot briefly through the forest as the sun began to set.

The canopy is thick, and the forest is in shadows, but there are places where the sun comes through like fire, and Achromat liked the rays and picked up the rich colors that lit up the forest. Maria and the dogs walked ahead.

I came home and had my nightly reading of the Kabbalah, and what is the first thing I opened to?
“The Greatest Path,” a meditation on love.

“When you desire to eat or drink,” says the Kabbalah, “or to fulfill other worldly desires, and you focus on your awareness of love, then you elevate that physical desire to spiritual desire. Thereby you draw out the holy spark that dwells within. You bring forth holy sparks from the material world. There is no path greater than this. For wherever you go and what ever you do – even the most mundane of  activities – you serve love.”

Looking at this photo, I think I was on that path today, my lens saw it long before me.