October Light

"If you want to write you should learn the alphabet. You write and write and in the end you hav a beautiful, perfect alphabet. But it isn’t the alphabet that is important. The important thing is what you are writing, what you are expressing. The same thing goes for photography. Photographs can be technically perfect and even beautiful, but they have no expression."--Andre Kertesz

The light in the vineyards this time of year is sweeter than the grapes. Early rains interrupt the harvest and, on clear days, side roads are filled with the roar of transport of the mechanical pickers and lined with the cars of the human ones, who work night and day during the bringing in of the grapes. Many take as much work as they can get so that they can spend a month, or two, or three with their wives and children in Mexico before the spring work begins.

The vineyards are turning---a field of yellow where one wine grape grows, another of maroon, red, or gold. Their patchwork of color covers the hills. Soon, the fruit that remains on the vine will begin to ferment and the air will smell like wine.

In this season of beauty and change, I change, my body thinning and reshaping itself, my heart watching my lurches or unrippled flow and the urgency of seeing, now, the moment I am in, the truth of my life.

The Serenity Prayer of Alcoholics Anonymous has become my test pattern, the constant in the background of the chatter of the mind. Some days, i hear one line. Another day, the emphasis shifts. One evening, I hear a deeper meaning. I wake up some mornings with the chant of it halfway begun before my eyes open.

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, the courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

This year, it might well be the prayer of the vintner as Octobers scurries through the fields with the grapes still hanging on.

Kertesz quotation from Visions and Images: American Photographers on Photography, by Barbaralee Diamonstein 

Photograph by Luna Zeffer