The Cataldo Mission: A Single Photograph

 

Have you ever been at the right place at the right time with your camera or phone and captured a  perfect picture? Weren't you happy that you took that single, special photo? I take lots of photos so I have had this experience happen often. 

This poem describes so much about the above picture. This image is the inside of the Mission of the Sacred Heart, or Cataldo Mission, a historical landmark in Cataldo, Idaho.  I was at the right place at the right time.  If you have been to this mission, you understand exactly what I am talking about. If you haven't been to this sacred spot it is a "living tale beyond words" . I enlarged this photo and it is hanging in my SheShed.

A single photograph

—portrait of the moment—
is an inexhaustible epic,
a living tale beyond words
superior to a hundred volumes
written and fixed. 

A photograph
is consciousness painting,
the instant’s art that opens
on the unbounded vistas
of the inner life. 


-Daisaku Ikeda