Perspective can be tricky
Every few years I get myself up before dawn, pack my camera bag, and head out to the tulip fields in Skagit Valley. I don’t go every year because I don’t want it to become so repetitious that I fail to see in new ways. Even in the early hours before anything is open, there are other photographers about and people trying to avoid the traffic rush, but it’s rare to hear another voice. There is something about being in the quiet fields in the early morning that lends itself to deep thinking and slightly quirky analogies.
The scholar Joseph Campbell described three groups of people in his book The Hero with a Thousand Faces 
- Those who heed a powerful inner call and slog through life’s misfortunes in pursuit of it
- “The multitude of men and women [who] choose the less adventurous way of the comparatively unconscious civic and tribal routines”
- And “those who know neither an inner call nor an outer doctrine whose plight truly is desperate”
I think it’s fair to say that the last group contributes a fair number of cases to the family court system. Too often in trying to help, we speak from a single point of reference, similar to looking down tulip rows to the horizon. There’s no getting around the fact that the curve of the earth combined with the nature of the human eye will create the optical illusion that parallel rows appear to angle towards each other to a single point on the horizon. It seems like an inevitable destination. The illusion is so powerful that even knowing this, most of us are still a little startled if we walk straight down the row into the field only to find that it doesn’t finish anywhere near the landmark that originally marked that point. A person standing ten rows away will see the rows come together at a different place although possibly with the same erroneous landmark. The reality is that each row ends in a different spot and that whatever the goal, both parties are probably going to have to step over some rows to achieve it.
I don’t know how many photographs of tulip rows marching towards that vanishing point are taken each year but it’s a lot. I can tell that because almost all of the other photographers have their cameras safely attached to a tripod at chest height. It easily could be that they are seeing something that I’m not, but I can guarantee that they aren’t seeing what I am because it’s impossible to do so from that kind of vertical and horizontal distance. Unfortunately there are a lot of photography books that imply that a tripod is what distinguishes a ‘real’ photographer from a tourist and it quickly becomes habit along with avoiding the mud (some of those unconscious civic rules Campbell referred to.) But sometimes getting your knees dirty and breaking a few of the unspoken rules can lead to a whole new perspective. Suddenly the tulips aren’t diminutive and sweet but giants reaching for the sky or an entire universe of water droplets on a single petal. In the same way, some kids need the rules of organized sports while others could be more positively influenced by watching Star Trek reruns and others still by being given a camera. Trying out different perspectives may open new doors and new solutions.
