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by the light of the spirit
Some photographers will carefully plan when they’ll be in a specific place because they’ve got an exact idea of where the light should be coming from to get The Best Photo. There’s apps and stuff to help you figure it out down to the exact minute and accounting for things like mountains or buildings that could block the light.
I am not one of those photographers.
My technique is far less technical and involves wandering around to see what’s interesting and would make a photograph.
And when I go past a church I didn’t even know was there and the afternoon light is flooding a window on the far side of the building, I like to think the light appreciates my faith in its ability to do the right thing. Without an app.
San Antonio Catholic Church
El Porvenir, New Mexico
photographed 11.10.2025
marbled
This one hits hard – a simple concrete cross with glass marbles pressed into it. It made me think about the grief that led to its construction: the making of the form for the concrete, mixing up the concrete, some little kid give the important job of sorting marbles by color, pouring the concrete into the form, carefully pressing the marbles in, moving the finished cross to the cemetery, placing it in the ground…all of those scenes are vivid to me, as vivid as though I had witnessed them.
Trujillo, New Mexico
photographed 11.11.2025
fire damage
And here’s a close up of the damage from the huge Hermits Peak/Calf Creek forest fire – that’s Hermits Peak, looming above the dead-standing trees. The ridge on the top of the peak is rimmed with dead trees, too: the scope of the fire is really hard to understand. But you don’t have understand it, really, to feel the power and the terror of that kind of fire.
fire damage and Hermits Peak
near El Povenir, New Mexico
photographed 11.10.2025
cholla, ribbon, church
Right about where the road is closed due to lingering danger from the 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Creek forest fires, there’s a little church settled into the trees. You probably can’t even see it unless you’ve already gone to the end and had to turn around.
The (locked) gate was decorated with pieces of cholla cactus in the shape of a cross, with a yellow ribbon looped around it.
As far as I could tell, the church doesn’t have a name.
El Pornevir, New Mexico
photographed 11.11.2025
fiddle
We didn’t stay long at this cemetery: right after we got there, a group of three or four people pulled up nearby. Normally this wouldn’t have bothered me, but one of the group, an elderly woman, walked over to a set of headstones and was sobbing. It started to seem like we were intruding on something that too private for us to be a part of…it was time to leave.
The woman spoke to me, asking, “Do you have people here?” I told her no, and offered my condolences on her loss and her sorrow. She told me that her family had brought her to the cemetery “for the last time” so she could say goodby to her parents and her son. She was moving from Las Vegas to Tucumcari and would be “too far away” to ever come back.
Tucumcari is 76 miles away.
Trujillo, New Mexico
photographed 11.11.2025
One Day | One Image 