Piquant. Pleasantly spicy, enough to get your attention without scalding the mouth. I would still like to be able to taste the rest of my meal, thank you.

I've been wondering how this might apply to my photography. Certainly I don't want it to be bland, yet there is much to be said for celebrating the simple ordinariness of life, adding just the right amount of spice to food I thought was bland, not to overwhelm the palate with spice, but to reveal the flavor concealed in the apparent blandness.

Thomas Merton talks about poets who never succeed in being points and religious me who never succeed in being saints precisely because they never succeed in being themselves, always trying to write someone else's poems or live someone else's sanctity.

I find I keep trying to take someone else's photographs.

For me, being a photographer is part and parcel of being a saint. Among other things God made me, he made me an artist. To be what God made me to be, I must be an artist. That is who I am. (This applies, of course, at work writing code and chasing bugs just as it does when I am out and about with the camera, but that's another discussion.) An essential part of my approach to life as a follower of Jesus Christ is that I approach life as an artist. As with becoming a contemplative, that takes silence, solitude, and the expectant waiting of prayer. I must listen before I speak, and before I release the shutter. Then I may finally take my own photographs, piquant, with just the right amount of spice.

Let's see where that takes me.

Fountain at Charles Towne Landing, Charleston, SC
Yashica-D, December 2014