Sometimes the light’s all shining on me…redux

Other times I can barely see … Robert Hunter, from What a Long Strange Trip It’s Been

I wrote a version of this story in 2016 but I know a few more things now…

It was a good day the day I shot these pictures. The light was very much shining on me. I was at the Abhayagiri Monastery in northern California working on the 15,000 Buddhas project and everywhere I turned something called to me to come over and take a look.

Among the figures that called to me was this one, Buddha Siddhartha Gautama. He was sitting off to one side in a dimly lit space. The light that reached it indirect and colored by things it had bounced off of in its travels. Beautiful light in other words. I began shooting, first full face, then doing details of the hand, then bits of the face, and then coming around to the left profile to see the light that skimmed the surface and revealed the contours. I barely breathed, partly because I was hand-holding a 200 mm lens and shooting at a 40th of a second but also because I was in awe of the gift I was receiving. A few minutes later it was over but the feeling of that morning remains. When I hear “Sometimes the light’s all shining on me” I know the feeling.