It's here, it's there, it's everywhere!

Garrison Keillor used to have a wonderful saying: "To an English major, everything is material."  No matter how mundane or bizarre the events in our lives, some piece of the writer is always set slightly apart, wondering what in this moment might contribute to a story.

The photographer's equivalent is an exercise I first discovered in Freeman Patterson's photography classic, Photography and the Art of Seeing.  The student is given a wire hoop, made of a coat hanger bent into a circle, and told to toss it into the air.  The space it then encloses when it lands becomes each student's area for studying nature and making photographs. Which implies, of course, that for the artist subject matter can be found absolutely anywhere, even in this view of the street from a balcony in Jersey City.

So if the person who seeks stories can find them anywhere, and the person who seeks art can find it anywhere, wouldn't it also be true that the person who seeks the spiritual can find it anywhere as well?  I'm just sayin...