![mysteriesmanners:
Edith and Elijah, Danville, Virginia, 1971
When Gowin was 2, the family moved to Chincoteague Island, where he wandered the marshes sketching birds and plants and marveling at the changes he saw in nature. In his early teens, he saw an Ansel Adams photo of a burned stump sprouting new shoots, which the minister’s son immediately knew was an image of resurrection. “I had never thought of a photograph as anything but a representation of what it was,” he muses. “I was defenseless [before it]. I thought it was Christ. This was the body dead and resurrected. But it had been transformed: It was not the same matter it left the world in. That was closer to my own theology, too.”
…
He was saved, in a way, the night he went to a dance and met Edith Morris, who became his wife in 1964 and remains among his most important photographic subjects. Theirs is a collaboration of equals. Even now, when he talks about their marriage, Gowin’s voice trembles with emotion: “If you are married, if you think you love somebody, that’s the sacred moment in your life,” he says. “Treat it as if it’s sacred.”
Some of their dates took them driving down into North Carolina — “just holding hands and kissing every so often, the way you do,” says Gowin — where they visited a black church out in the country, and he shyly asked for permission to take some pictures. The minister appealed to the congregation. “Amen!” the people roared. (Source)](http://25.media.tumblr.com/dce96587c7955399c6666347f6a55ab9/tumblr_mn0xx0MjGT1qzuh4qo1_500.png)
it is
wonderful
how things work: I will tell you
about it
because
it is interesting
and because whatever is
moves in weeds
and stars and spider webs
and known
is loved:
in that love,
each of us knowing it,
I love you,
for it moves within and beyond us,
sizzles in
to winter grasses, darts and hangs with bumblebees
by summer windowsills
without moving I can see it all:
in your life I see everything that lives."-
Pablo Neruda
bees, my
skin smells
of sun, the
insides of
roses. I want
to eat that
light. Every
thing that
grows does.
When you consider the radiance, that it does not withhold
itself but pours its abundance without selection into every
nook and cranny not overhung or hidden; when you consider
that birds’ bones make no awful noise against the light but
lie low in the light as in a high testimony; when you consider
the radiance, that it will look into the guiltiest
swervings of the weaving heart and bear itself upon them,
not flinching into disguise or darkening…
I always like summer
Best
you can eat fresh corn
From daddy’s garden
And okra
And greens
And cabbage
And lots of
Barbeque
And buttermilk
And homemade ice-cream
At the church picnic
And listen to
Gospel music
Outside
At the church
Homecoming
And go to the mountains with
Your grandmother
And go barefooted
And be warm
All the time
Not only when you go to bed
And sleep
