Along the Way

long the Way Making a Case for the Miracle of Tawny Gold

As a professional photographer and an amateur philosopher, my favorite color used to be green, which I associate with growing plants and the Great Fresh Outdoors. Being less cognitive than Sigmund Freud, I am not above reevaluating my convictions and finding that "tawny gold" has muscled into first place. I don't know why you'd be interested in that, but since I am on a roll, I will continue in hope of converting anyone who likes green-growing green to tawny gold, or at least to evaluate it in a new light.

Now you may feel tawny gold is a bit heavy on the poetic or descriptive level. If you're not living in Arizona where overcast skies sometimes rate as a slack-jawed phenomenon, I can understand why.

Basically, tawny gold occurs in Arizona twice a day, at sunrise and at sunset, painting the skies and landscape and regularly making geologically created tawny gold even tawny golder. It doesn't last very long, sometimes minutes, but mostly seconds. Due to having wasted a decade of my life watching late-night TV and sleeping in the next day, I have seen more sunsets than sunrises. Although an unlikely scientific fact, tawny gold seems more prominent during sunrises.

With television performer Johnny Carson out of it now, I aspire to rise with the sun, and always do so when I'm out-of-doors. I am by reflex out there To catch the tawny gold of the sunset, unless I am somewhere like Fisher's Landing on the Colorado River where for a dollar I am invited to join in the potluck dinner. This cavalier attitude comes from knowing chances are excellent the sun will set again tomorrow. As a strong advocate of tawny gold, I am sure psychologists will be saying that instead of my stress levels going down, they must be climbing, dreadfully, because, supposedly, it's colors on the cool side of the spectrum that promote a reduction in stress. That is, if you lock someone in a tawny-gold room, at the end of a couple of months he will be screaming and kicking at the walls. At the end of a year, he will much prefer green. As I delve deeper into the human psyche, mine, I find there could be factors combined with tawny-gold experiences that make tawny gold a better anxiety eliminator than growing green. You catch yourself dropping everything, forgetting everything that ever was, to watch tawny gold come into the world and fade out of it. You may momentarily move onto a plane where you are thinking of nothing but tawny gold, and maybe not even that. This is akin to what the Zen people call Nirvana and which in turn, it is said, can contribute to mental health. (But that doesn't mean you don't have to go back to work tomorrow.) As a photographer, you may get so swept up in tawny gold, you forget to take the picture. Although idealists may argue otherwise, that can be important, too.