had to share...

photo by me. summer solstice 2008.

was just reading from storming the gates of paradise: landscapes for politics. really, rebecca solnit says everything i want to say. she's oh so brilliant like that. she moves the heart effortlessly through the voice. here's a little something she writes--my heart has been feeling this for a couple years now, and she finally put it into words for me:

Ursula K. LeGuin once noted, "To light a candle is to cast a shadow." Conversely, it's in the dark that faint light shines, starlight, candlelight, fireflies, the bioluminescence of the sea. I don't want to reverse the binaries, to make darkness good and light problematic. I want a language and an imagination where they are not enemies but perhaps dance partners, whirling each other around this globe that spends half its time away from the sun in night. I want people to remember how photography works, the medium that depends on perfect darkness within the camera to capture the image, for an image of boundless light would be purely black, and exposure in perfect darkness would show just the white of unexposed paper. The visible world depends on both.

Wonderful, isn't it?