Shades of Memory - Entry #6

Traditional photography as I've said before an almost alchemical process for me and it is the culmination of chance as much as it is vision. It sometimes quite beyond vision. In near twilight I wandered in a little cemetery, available light fading fast. The cemetery, having once served the early pioneers of the area is isolated and forgotten now by the march of civilization and no car will take you there. Not a quarter mile away, a great wall of earth holds back enough water to drown the entire metropolis of Dallas, and who knows how many ancestral grounds lay hidden away forever beneath its murky waves. As a walked in those finals dregs of day, I turned my camera on a great bending tree, the dying light casting a silhouette of complete darkness in my eyes. It was not until I processed the film that the magic of that twilight moment was apparent to me. The sun, having set the tree alight made a faerie's garden of otherworldly translucent leaves and a lawn as white as snow. It seems to me, a vision of a plain beyond, not as I saw it but as it exists in memory, a paradise of shade, a timeless bower.