Much as I miss the color and light of Spring and Summer, I also appreciate the beauty of what I call the Winter Pasture. The artist’s job is to find beauty and light and color; the Winter Pasture can be exceptionally haunting and beautiful, primarily through the eyes of a Leica.

In chaotic and stressful times, wrote Joseph Campbell, the mythologist, a sacred place is an absolute necessity for anyone living in our time. Thomas Merton said the same thing, so did St. Augustine.

“The function of art,” wrote Joseph Campbell, “is to reveal this radiance through the created object. The artist’s function is the mythologization of the culture and the world.”

A sacred place is an absolute necessity for anybody today, wrote Campbell. I have a sacred space; I have never written about it or spoken about it. Maria has a holy place, her studio, and at least one other, I’m not at liberty to say.

“You must have a room, or a certain hour or so a day,” Campbell wrote, “where you don’t know what was in the newspapers that morning, you don’t know who your friends are, you don’t know what you owe anybody, you don’t know what anybody owes to you. This is a place where you can simply expand bring forth what you are and what you might be. This is the place of creative incubation. At first, you may find that nothing happens there. But if you have a sacred place and use it, something eventually will happen….”

Campbell also called the sacred space  a “bliss station.” Our life has become so economic and practical [and technology driven] that as one gets older, the claims of the moment are upon us and are so great, we hardly know who we are. We are always doing something required of us, or expected of us, or demanded of us.”

Where is your “bliss station,” Campbell asks? “You have to try to find it. Get a phonograph and put on the music you really love, even if it’s corny music that nobody else respects.”

Campbell wrote this more than a generation ago, but it seems tailor-made for America in 2021. I have my sacred space, my bliss station. I leave the world outside. It is shaping and perhaps even saving my life.