Jerry Kolber’s post below jives perfectly (is it blogdipity??) with my recent thoughts on a quote from one of Ian McEwan’s books about the meditative experience of writing. I wondered if writing or painting or composing or are direct routes to a kind of “accelerated meditative concentration.” It can certainly feel like it. I’d like to add photography to the list, with a twist. 

I picked up a gently used Nikon d300 from a friend last week and spent the weekend walking Greenpoint and Williamsburg taking photos, absorbed in the buildings, light, and color of each neighborhood. 

The Nikon d300: Sexy and rugged, like me
I haven’t taken photos for years, so my intention was to go out and shoot anything that caught my eye while I familiarized myself with the myriad technical capabilities of the d300. Pretty soon I was in an old and familiar place, utterly absorbed in my environment and the process of trying to reproduce with the camera the nebulous but certain meaning of a loading dock, a window with lace curtains, the late afternoon light on the onion dome of the orthodox church that abuts McCaren park. Is this like meditation, I wondered?
Yes and no. Writing as meditation is an easier sell because of the interiority of it, and the emptiness one is left with after the act of creation. Photography is perhaps more like flower arranging or another zen practice centered in the physical world because of one’s interaction with an environment. Whatever I’m shooting is my object but I’m not simply observing it, I’m reaching for an aesthetic ideal, using technology to try and capture it forever instead of letting it go. In this way, photography is a gesture of  anti-impermanence: it seeks to preserve and memorialize and elevate the fleeting, trivial, and shifting. 
Whatever the case, it’s a genuine pleasure. Walking my neighborhood, hunting the landscape for a shot made me realize how little attention I’ve given it in the past. I noticed things I’ve missed on dozens of previous trips up the same block.
Photography aside, I think blogdipity is going to blow up.
“Blogdipity” – the chance occurrence of two perfectly related blog posts by different authors on the same group blog/blogs in the same sub-culture. May be related to collective blog consciousness.