Japanese Garden, San Francisco

The photos I made during this most recent visit to the Japanese Tea Garden, at Golden Gate Park in San Francisco, are unlike most of what I’ve made before. This time there was more concentration on details, the corners of things, shapes seen at the edges, or cut off by the sides of the frame, or hiding behind a tree or a stand of bamboo. I felt very connected to the ideas of wabi-sabi on this visit, and was looking very attentively at the small things.







I also spent a lot more time in the meditative Zen garden section than I usually do. Feeling the need to calm and center, to reconnect with a meditation practice, to just be quiet and see what was there. It slowed me down, and even though I wandered through the rest of the Garden, I kept coming back for more sitting quietly, more contemplation, more inward silences.









paths to nowhere
across the four elements,
seeking a home



koi shelter in
a cove of the quiet pond,
waiting for rain