There are times outdoors when I unexpectedly come upon what seems to me at that moment to be a unique wide vista. All at once everything is united there before me, from the distant horizon right up to the ground at my feet. Sky, clouds, hills, rocks, grass, and me – big and small, high and wide, far and near, all become one when seen from this spot at this time. I see it as a super abundance and feel it as overwhelming in its goodness, in its promise.
 
Trying to express with spoken or written words what is experienced in such “WOW!” moments somehow never makes it. Music at times comes close, but it too is a little inadequate. We have really needed a new kind of language to help us share what we see when we truly do see – when we perceive the super abundant. That new human language is photography – which means “to write with light.” There is no other creature on earth that can perceive as personally as we can, and in our development of expression we have invented photography – making use of better and better cameras.

You may recall my last writing on perception [“Perceiving the Good and the Beautiful,” October 2009], in which I described how I once upon a time suggested to children the use of a simple cardboard tube as a “perceptor” to embrace and to appreciate some reality as a single subject. It did not take us long to realize that the lens of a camera was also such a perceptor – and connected as it was to a camera loaded with silver salted film became a magical perceptor that could capture and then enable us to share with others powerful photographs of what we had perceived. Soon my students began to bring in cameras borrowed from their parents and we moved from being creative writers with ink to become creative writers with light.

When I first went to school, my grandmother gifted me with a beautifully carved maple wood pencil box complete with pencils, a ruler, and a pink rubber eraser. She knew I was about to be schooled into becoming a writer with pencil on paper. Later, when I was first going into college, she again gifted me – this time with a wonderful portable typewriter. I used that typewriter right up through writing out my doctoral dissertation. But as helpful as these writing tools were to me – and they truly were – they never enabled me to express the ineffable – those personal experiences that just cannot be put into words: spoken or written with ink. I got that ability when I became a photographer.

Now, of course, photography has become digitized writing with light on silicon chips making such better than ever in capturing and sharing what is most significant to us as persons as we live together in community. The leading edge of human study today is visual anthropology, which, of course, makes great use of photography. I guess what I want to recommend to you is the wisdom of gifting your children with a camera so that they, too, can develop such meaning-filled expressive power. Nothing gives me more joy than when my own children share with me their photographs – and I am enabled to share in the rich experiences of their own heart/mind/soul. Such photography helps us truly become one family and that is good!

Paul Clement Czaja, Ph.D., has been involved in the Montessori movement of alternative education for more than 45 years. Dr. Czaja was on the founding faculty and, eventually, headmaster at the famous Whitby School, The American Montessori Center, in Greenwich, Connecticut, from 1960 until 1979. He has been involved in Montessori teacher training for many years, and has worked with Montessori public charter schools as well as independent schools. He can be reached at czaja36@yahoo.com.