Beauty is never a commodity. We don't pay for it with money, but with our own LIVES.

After years spent exploring beautiful natural areas, I've come up with an adage I think is relevant: "You have to PAY for your beauty."  This might include such things as enduring mosquitoes, deer flies, ticks, persistent drizzle, thunderstorms, extremes of temperature, doing a 15 or 18 mile dayhike to get to a beautiful destination, acquiring cuts, scrapes or bruises.  In photography, it means waiting for long periods of time until the light is just right, getting up before sunrise, and hiking in the dark by headlamp after sunset.  On windy days, it includes waiting for the split second when that flower becomes still enough to photograph, just before the next gust arrives.  It also includes having to delete thousands of photos where the light or breeze was NOT just right.

But working with cactus brings new meaning to the adage.  Almost every time I find myself lured into photographing a cactus plant, I end up with hundreds of tiny spines in my fingers.  Fortunately, I have a pair of tweezers on my Swiss Army Knife that comes to the rescue in situations such as these.  A few times, I've accidentally sat on a neighboring cactus, and acquired inch-long spikes that went straight into my . . . well, you get the picture.  After this past trip, I returned home with a leg full of prickles, and had to enlist my wife's help in removing them.

For me, there is something very "right" about this situation.  Beauty is not something we can clutch, possess and own, not even in a photo.  Rather, we have to sacrifice something of ourselves into the experience in order to make it truly ours.  In other words, it has to "hurt." For me, a true experience of beauty involves union, and this experience means that part of me must  "die" and dissolve into the beautiful thing in order to be reborn within it.  For unless I become part of the beauty I'm photographing, I don't really experience the spiritual dimension of the encounter.

Beauty is never a commodity.  We don't pay for it with money, but with our own LIVES.

Photo: Purple pad of a Prickly-pear cactus, with a backdrop of sandstone cliffs glowing in last light; Needles District, Canyonlands National Park, UT; November 25, 2012