A Diary of Secret Yearnings

Footprint

A photograph of a canopy of many trees as looked from below, seeming like enough trees to surround the photographer. There's a bright backlight of a white sky, somewhat more discovered to the top right, while elsewhere there's also a strong presence of obscured trunks and branches, and the leaves with the backlight vary in colours from shadowed black to shining green, and the trees are clearly tall, and some branches extend from the left side of the sky to right side. On the right, mostly vertically but slightly diagonally, and partially hidden by the trees, there extends a single cable or power line from top to bottom.

We were visiting Inari mountain. There's so much you could say about how it feels to be there, so many sights you'd want to etch within yourself.

But I am often reminded of this one unassuming photo I took. Seems like it could be from anywhere.

There were the summer afternoon's sunshowers
there was the freshness of the air and the bright clouds
there was the foliage
its perfume mixing with the earth's, enhanced by the rain
beams of light piercing through endless, shimmering leaves
a lovely chiaroscuro world

More than anything, there was that hopeless impulse: to photograph.

The brightness of the sky contrasting with the cover of shades of green, the sunbeams raining down, that special sense of space when you're being surrounded and covered by things such as these. How naturally it makes you want to look around and above to take it all in. And then you want to capture that space, that feeling. How natural it becomes to take your camera out and get...

A photo that hardly conveys any of that properly, if at all.

But I am reminded of it, because years later I was going through a friend's incredible photos of a different trip, to a different destination, taken by the hands of someone with a much better handle of their camera. And among them there it was. The same picture.

Yes, the same picture! as much as a another picture could be! the canopy's shades of green, the backlight, the branches crossing from one side of the sky to the other beholden by captivated eyes.

There it was, that same hopeless impulse.

I felt such a sense of kinship, of a certain knowing intimacy.

What was important wasn't the photo itself, but the person below the tree crowns, eyes in wonder, enraptured by the interplay between light, shadow, nature and space, and yet perhaps there too were the sounds of water droplets and the creaks of trees, perhaps of bugs or birds singing, and certainly the scents of forest, and most undeniably the thrill of traveling.


The photo like a footprint. In that simple, unassuming, almost accidental mark, hides the fact that there passed a whole beast of my same species, and the ground at that moment sustained the whole weight of their entire self, and of all those emotions that arose our shared hopeless impulse to push down and leave a trace of it all.

And so we can go back to it and once again place ourselves back in that moment.
And so may others of our same kind find it, and fit onto it as they may, and be called back to that same world too, and stand where we stood, as they too have stood,
and so may they feel that same kinship, that same knowing intimacy.