Confused, instintive

Morning

Roof

Birches

Streetside

Blue

Today was a blurry day, one thing after another. But also a good one: things happened, were understood, got resolved.

I have been reading the book The Zen of Creativity: Cultivating Your Artistic Life by John Daido Loori, in a Finnish translation, of which I wrote some impressions. I have always had some attraction to the zen way of approaching the world, although I have never done any meditative practice. This book cleared some things, but also made some things more muddy. Not bad for a book.

Loori was a photographer who used zen to approach his art, and his art to approach zen. The book was personal, interesting, but also to some degree a bit of a letdown, as I felt a little bit of americanism there, a kind of success-oriented thinking which felt strange in connection with zen.

I have never approached photography in the same way as Loori, from deep meditation, but it is interesting. What I have tried to achive, sometimes, is a sort of instinctive approach, where I use the camera without thinking what I'm doing. But that is not zen.