Ode to Swamps

While uploading a backlog of photos to my galleries, I was amused to discover the preponderance of swamp photos I have. Evidently, I"m unable to pass a swamp or marsh without feeling compelled to immortalize it with a photo. Between Tampa and a recent road trip to Baton Rouge, LA, I found plenty of swamps to satisfy my affinity for leafy green bogs.

“To love a swamp,"wrote author Barbara Hurd in her book,Stirring the Mud: On Swamps, Bogs, and Human Imagination, " is to love what is muted and marginal, what exists in the shadows, what shoulders its way out of mud and scurries along the damp edges of what is most commonly praised."

It is precisely that "muted and marginal" feel of swamps that I love - a thick organic quietude that invites reflection, introspection, and a certain degree of calm awareness. There are vague and seemingly sourceless sounds in a swamp - a plop, a strange trill, a rasp, a rustle. Water mysteriously ripples, sending out broad bands of little waves across the duckweed. A branch dips. An owl hoots.

Hurd wrote, "There is magic in this moist world, in how the mind lets go, slips into sleepy water, circles and nuzzles the banks of palmetto and wild iris, how it seeps across dreams..."

I love the magic of these moist worlds, watching the seasons move through them as defined by water levels and wildlife, through thick canopies and thin, and through the lens of my camera.

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