The Gift

Well, I was up early taking photos, it's Super Bowl Sunday, and I've got a poker game tonight—a recreation I find particularly satisfying—so I'm not going to attempt to respond to several interesting comments that have come in, although I will do that, probably tomorrow; and I'm not going to venture further into the realms of theory, although I've got to say that's the direction I seem to have been drifting toward in the last week or so. The reality of blogging is that I have to approach ideas in increments, and some of the ideas we are now tossing around, about Web 2.0, School 2.0, the unschooling of schools and the like, are baggy enough that incremental incursions are ultimately not going to be enough. At some point I'm going to have to try to stitch some of these threads together into something like a blanket. But perhaps not yet, and definitely not today.

Instead, shifting gears from the abstract to the concrete, I'd like to simply post two photos from this morning. This one is of Ala Moana Shopping Center taken from the Ala Moana Beach Park. I brought along my tripod this time and this is the very first picture I took today, and of them all, the one that I'm happiest with. It makes the shopping mall look a great deal more magical than it has any right to be. I also like it as a kind of tone poem, the way the way the whites and blacks and browns and golds balance each other.


The second is a more straightforward scenic, taken just as the sun was starting to come up behind Diamond Head. I wound up taking about a dozen photographs of this fisherman, but in most of them I was behind him and he was obscured by the mountain, but as I was walking away I turned back and there he was, outlined against the sky and water, and so I set the tripod up quickly and got this shot. I'd like to think of this picture, or more accurately, this figure in this landscape, as in some way an oblique commentary on learning, on craft, on the rewards of being alive on this planet and being given the gift of being able to pay attention.