Doane Gregory

This is a photo of my friend Bob driving away in our big blue tractor after pulling me out of a snow bank. Well, actually it was my car he pulled out, not me. I'm a big guy, just not that big.

It's good to have friends in high places, particularly if they have a tractor and you're stuck 20 miles down a dirt road in a snowstorm with night approaching. It may not be an award winning photo, but in the unlikely even that it did win one, I would give it to Bob. Because he deserves an award.

Although my photography work has taken me to many places in this world, whenever I can, I return  to an island the size of Manhattan, just west of Vancouver B.C., in a body of water once known as the Straight of Georgia, but recently renamed the Salish Sea. The Coastal Salish people understood the intrinsic worth of this island, and the 450 others in the immediate vicinity. Dates of their original settlements vary between two and six thousand years; anyway you cut it, it was eons before the first white settlers,mostly Scottish and English, landed here in the early 1860's. As was (and still is) our custom, it didn't take long to force the oyster-shucking, mostly peace-loving residents of this fair archipelago to give up their ancestral homeland, thanks to the "the cunning use of flags" (thank you Eddie Izzard).

Above is a detail from a massive cedar canoe built by the present day descendants of the original ancestors who once thrived upon these sacred waters. And whose spirits, many believe, still move among us.

"You can only go halfway into the darkest forest; then you are coming out the other side."

                                                                                               Chinese Proverb

We celebrate this day as the halfway point in our journey through the year; the demarcation between the gradual ebbing of darkness and the return of the light into our lives and our homes. It has been the crossing over point in all cultures throughout human history, a time of renewal and celebration transcending all religious and philosophical ideologies, and uniting all peoples in the belief of a brighter tomorrow. Unless you live on the equator, of course, in which case, it's just another day.