ReVision

On April 28 2008 I started my blog, Available Light. I had intended the blog to be a record of a sabbatical I was about to take, but events overtook me, and it became, instead, a journal of my walk through cancer. In each of the posts over the following 16 years I used at least one photograph, and on 28.04.08 it was this one:

I'd taken this shot on a drive around Otago Harbour with my first serious digital camera, an 8mp Canon D300, and I was pretty chuffed with it. The photo, I mean, but also, I suppose, the camera.

Originally I was going to call my blog ReVision, because I had a little enterprise going at the time called ReVision Photographic, through which I bought and sold second hand film cameras. The name has a kind of poetic resonance for me: Look again; take a different viewpoint; shift your perspective. ReVision sums up my view of the spiritual life, which is, I think, a process of unlearning; of identifying and letting go our inner perceptual filters, in order to grow into a different, more accurate seeing of the world. This aggregate of meanings is encapsulated in the New Testament word μετανοια (metanoia) - usually translated "repentance" but more accurately meaning "think again, "think above" or "think anew".

But in the end, in the great race for a catchy name, the photographic term Available Light also appealed, and won, and the blog moved away from my original intentions and morphed into a kind of public, general diary. But now, Available Light has run its course, and although I'm not going to delete it, I won't post there any more. What hasn't gone away, though, is the impulse to look again, μετανοια, Re-Vision.

My own spiritual journey is Christian, and draws on the metaphors and stories and symbols of the Anglican tradition in which I have lived for over half a century. Additionally, there are three great streams which have influenced me, and nurtured me for many years:

• Narrative: the telling of stories and the study of the structure of narratives; narrative as the primary way we humans communicate, and as an overarching metaphor of life.

• Pilgrimage: intentional, sacred journeys as metaphors of the human condition and as a powerful means by which the inner journey is progressed

• Photography: learning to see and to share what I see as a way of following Anthony de Mello's three great rules of the spiritual life (1. Awareness. 2. Awareness. and, 3. Awareness.)

You've got to expect that these three will be fairly prominent here.

So lets give it another shot, shall we? Once more, from the top, with feeling. ReVision.