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Rhythms. They are the heartbeat of life. Whether it is the roaring of the Yellowstone river through the LeHardy rapids or the slow steady waving of tall grass in the Gibbon meadows the rhythm is there. I remember as a kid being incredibly tuned in to the rhythm of my world. The noise your feet made in new tennis shoes as you walked down a hot blacktopped road, the echoes of a crow calling way back in the woods, the sounds of tires on the highway coming into your room late at night, faint in the beginning, then louder, then fading away again as you lay on top of the covers, too hot to be covered up.

I don’t know if we hear those rhythms as much any more, or pay attention to them if we do, and if we do hear them they’re usually all fast and furious and mostly discordant. When everyone lived a more agrarian lifestyle, rhythms were huge. When to plant, when to harvest. Get up when it’s light, go to bed when it’s dark. We don’t farm any more or least the majority of us don’t so there’s not much opportunity to experience the natural cycles around us. The nearest I came to being aware of and working within the natural rhythms was when I was building landscape ponds for gardens. If you’ve ever had one you know that they have a mind of their own and they run the show, not you. If you fight them they will never cooperate but if you learn their rhythm they will do exactly what they’re supposed to at exactly the right time and you become a caretaker rather than a opponent. Nature tells the pond what to do and when to do it and it is always right. Once you learn that life gets easy.

Summer has it’s own set of rhythms and they are usually longer, a deep cycle with a low strong beat. It makes for long, slow, lazy afternoons and provides time to lay in the grass and let the warm sun wash over you, thinking of nothing, just being. The rewards of being a photographer, especially one that concentrates on the natural world, is you get to hear and see the rhythms of life once more even if it is only reliving them through your images.