Four Corners

The only place in the US where four states meet is at Four Corners Monument.

I went to Four Corners as a mystical adolescent, contemplating where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet. There was a cross-section of kiosks there, places to buy things in the middle of what I remember as desert.

It wasn't just one location, or two. Nor three. But it was four.

Several decades later, I find that profound.

Instead of just looking for where a crosshatch might take place, it might be worth considering where four corners of our life meet. It might be a good place to set up a kiosk or so.

Because at the cross section, the winds blow in interesting directions, especially when surrounded by open terrain.

Arica, Chile in 2017

Nope, it doesn't exist.

There it is.

It sits back there and assumes that a more perfect version of this moment was possible.

It's a moment of fiction.

It's a moment of incomplete living, because the more perfect moment of this specific time and place doesn't exist. What does exist is the reality of human lived experience—which, when happening, made its own way in the world.

The perfect version of it doesn't have a name or a place. It doesn't exist.

Grieve it and let it go.

This is what we have, this…here.

Note from our recent photo exposition: this moment couldn’t have gotten better.

Wider and stranger than you think

Comfort doesn’t need to be the human default, but it appears to be. We crawl back to it after tragedy because the stretch outside feels too hard.

When you act, no one else can occupy your exact space and time. The laws of physics don’t allow it. No one else can fill where your body is, making its exact movements.

That space is yours. That evidence is yours.

You’re still here. You can still contribute. Behind every mental projection of the world is the actual world—wider and stranger than you think.

Fill the space.

From our recent photo exhibition “Memories in Iquitos”