Yesterday’s photoblog prompt, tranquility, nearly stumped me. Of course one can’t literally photograph tranquility but only the conditions from which (one believes) tranquility might arise, but once photographed, those conditions seemed to me no longer tranquil but merely contrived, something I was trying to sell y’all (or, worse, myself), rather like the Biblical Aromatherapy Sampler for which I received an advertising flyer in the mail yesterday. The problem, I think now, is that tranquility cannot be pursued, grasped, grabbed at; one has to let oneself be drawn into it, into a state — whereas the very act of photography is a pursuit, a grasping and grabbing, an abstraction of one moment from the flow of time, a cropping of one scene out of the world — and tranquility also involves a feeling of wholeness or oneness which is the polar opposite of such abstraction. To snap a photograph and label it “tranquility” is to make tranquility into an object to be grasped. And you can’t grasp tranquility. You have to let it grasp you.