Tuesday, November 27, 2007

Enjoy the silence

I’ve never been able to sit and watch the ocean or a sunset without having my mind wander into myself and ponder my place in life, the universe and everything else. What you see in this photo is a front row seat to encounter not only the swirl of water, wind and sky, but the swirl of activity happening within.

The old chair sat discarded on the edge of the beach, so I pulled it over into a patch of sunlight and shot a few frames. I often cross-post photos here and on Flickr. Last night, a commenter mentioned that this photo reminded him of the chair that Depeche Mode frontman David Gahan used in the video for Enjoy the Silence, a song about letting some things remain unsaid between people who love each other.

In the video, Gahan, dressed as a king, chases the sunset to a number of locations, each time setting up his beach chair and sitting briefly to view the sights before him. Yet it is not the sunset that he is chasing. The video echoes the themes presented in Antoine de Saint-Exupery’s novella, The Little Prince, which contains the line what is essential is invisible to the eye.

So pull up a chair, sit for a while and look for those things which cannot be seen. You can’t miss them.

Click on picture to enlarge. Photograph © 2007 James Jordan.

2 comments:

Wanda said...

What a stunning picture. I just wanted to jump in the scene and sit a while!!

Nancy Bea Miller said...

Nice shot. I like the softening of the edges, is that done with a smudge filter?