If you judged only by the number of morels plucked from the soil, then my first morel hunt of the season was an absolute bust. I saw one small grey morel, no larger than the first knuckle of my thumb. I found three times that many ticks on my clothes–so if this was a tick hunt, then it would have been slightly more successful.

However, if you just count it as a walk in the woods, it was an unqualified triumph. I went with my brother Roger Lee, who may be a tad too impatient to be a good mushroom hunter but has a nicely cavalier attitude about being in the woods. Some people hover around you when you’re in the woods–afraid to get too far away from you, afraid you’ll get lost or they’ll get lost. Roger Lee just wanders off with the casual assumption that somehow you’ll manage to meet up again somewhere. I like that.

It was Roger Lee who made the Find of the Day. A tipi frame, almost camouflaged by being as bare as the trees around it. Centered below the frame was a small circle of rocks to serve as a fire-pit. Clearly somebody had camped there in the not-too-distant past; the need for a fire suggests last autumn or possibly even during the winter. The tipi was in a good spot–protected from the wind, a few yards away a small brook, isolated from view, far enough from the road to be inconvenient to find but close enough that fifteen minutes of steady walking would get you there.

But the tipi frame wasn’t the Find of the Day; that was just an interesting object. The woods are full of interesting objects–things that are thought-provoking but not particularly surprising. That’s one of the many reasons to walk in the woods.

No, the Find of the Day was lurking a short distance away–maybe fifteen yards–hidden inside the hollow trunk of a dying tree.

The tree itself was an interesting object. It was bent and broken–maybe the result of an old lightning strike, maybe from some sort of rot, maybe ice damage, maybe an infestation of beetles–who can say? But it was bent and broken open, and the interior of the trunk was hollow.

The natural thing to do with a bent, broken, hollow tree trunk, of course, is to look inside. Which is exactly what Roger Lee did. You’d have done the same thing your ownself, you know it. What he saw inside, that was the Find of the Day.

I’ve written elsewhere about my fascination with a chunk of curbing wrapped in a length of red PVC wire. That object must have struck a chord with people, because since then I’ve received a number of emails from people describing similar found-objects, sometimes with cameraphone photos showing bits of concrete bundled in ribbon or stones tied up in wire like some sort of primitive holiday package. I find them all strangely fascinating.

This is what was tucked away in the hollow of that bent tree:

I’ve no idea what this bluish stone is, although it appears to have been shaped at some point in the past. I’ve no idea why a length of twine is so tidily coiled around it, although the condition of the twine suggests it was done fairly recently. And I’ve no idea why it was stashed n the hollow of a dead tree trunk, although it clearly was stashed; it didn’t just wind up there by accident.

Somebody did this purposefully. Somebody deliberately placed the stone in the hollow of the tree, and just as deliberately encircled it with a length of twine. Most likely it was placed there by whoever was camping in the nearby tipi–but that’s just an assumption.

All I know is that this is strange and lovely and it moves me in some peculiar way. The Irish have a saying: Níl sa saol seo ach ceo is ní bheimíd beo ach seal beag gearr. It’s a misty old world and we’re only in it for a short, sharp while. It’s stuff like this that keeps it sharp.

Yesterday was one of those cold, windy, wet, altogether miserable days. It snowed, and the snow turned to sleet, and the sleet turned to rain, and the wind blew hard enough in some of the narrow streets that at times the snow/sleet/rain was actually flew upwards.

So I went for a walk. Partly because it was Thursday and I belong to a group of folks who traditionally walk on Thursdays. But I’d have gone for a walk regardless of the day, because the snow/sleet/rain layered enough wetness on the streets and sidewalks to make them reflective. Even better, we’ve reached that time of year when it starts getting dark early—which is a thing I both love and hate.

It casts a gloomy pall over the world. Despite having watched every episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer (most of them more than once), I’m not generally a fan of the dark and the foreboding and the brooding. But it’s a condition that makes for great visuals.

There’s a tipping point, of course—especially when it comes to puddles. Like most folks who’ve picked up a camera, I’m intrigued by puddles. But a puddle that’s too big lacks mystery. It just becomes a reflective surface. But a puddle that’s patchy, that’s barely there, that’s unpredictably disrupted by the contours of the surface—that’s the puddle for me. That’s a puddle with character.

That’s a puddle that will get me outside despite the snow/sleet/rain, and despite the wind and despite all rational thought.

Some day, when all my other projects are finished and I’m casting around for something to do, I’ll develop a taxonomy of puddles. A systematic classification of puddles based on the similarities and dissimilarities of their morphological features.

But no, of course I’ll never do that. I don’t really want to think systematically about puddles. I just want to look at them. I just want to walk around in the gloomy half-light of early evening, freezing my aging ass off in the snow/sleet/rain and look at puddles.

I am drawn to piles of stone.

Much of the appeal is that a pile of stones, no matter how disorganized or haphazard it appears to be, is clearly a product of human intervention. Outside an avalanche, a pile of stones doesn’t happen by accident. Somebody put them there. The exact placement of the stones may have been a matter of chance or convenience, but nonetheless they were put there—and put there deliberately.

People have been piling stone on stone for millenia. Literally. There are cairns and megalithic structures dating back to 9000 BC. Piling stones has always been a means of communication. At first, a pile of stones was a simple way to mark a trail—a device for telling others which way to go. Humans being human, the simple eventually became elaborate. Trail markers became boundary markers—a device for telling others where not to go. As the messages communicated by the piles of stones became more elaborate and sophisticated, so did the piles themselves. People began to pile stone for artistic and spiritual reasons.

And we got Newgrange in County Meath, And we got the pyramids at Giza. And we got the cathedral of Notre Dame in Paris. What is a tomb or a temple, after all, but a sophisticated pile of stones?

Obviously, the piles of stone I photograph haven’t any intentional meaning. They weren’t put there for any religious, artistic or social reason. They were just dumped there. Raw material at a construction site.

But the actual reason the stones are piled in any particulat place is, for me, entirely irrelevant. In my mind, I always choose to attach some sort of social significance to the stones.

Not seriously, of course, but inventing some meaning for the pile changes the way I see the stones. By giving the pile some arbitrary purpose, the stones cease to be mute construction material waiting to be used. Like those earliest piles of stone, they become articulate; they convey a message.

And they become beautiful.

Maybe this is one of the reasons I became so engaged by that chunk of curbing.

One of the things I love most about Utata—the peculiar collective of photographers I’m involved with—is a project we call Iron Photographer. We’ve been doing IP projects since April of 2006. Every two weeks Jamelah Earle and I come up with three elements—two compositional elements and an artistic element—which our members try to put together in an artful way.

The IP process begins when Jamelah and I chat about the elements over Instant Messaging. We purposely refuse to come up with a list of possible elements in advance; we want the elements to grow organically out of the conversation. Sometimes one (or both) of us isn’t in the mood to be creative, and the process is messy and awkward and a jangle of nerves, annoying as a paper cut. Other times the process is like the very best jazz, improvisational and intelligent and funny and entirely unpredictable. Sometimes it starts off one way and ends another, or goes through two or three iterations of each. But somehow, we always manage to come up with something.

The elements can be…let’s call them idiosyncratic. Something with stripes, a food item, shot slightly out of focus (IP 47). Something white, a chair, shot in a gothic style (IP 102). A plastic bag, something red, shot in square format (IP 118).

What’s amazing to me is how often the members of Utata can take the most impossible and bizarre elements and find incredibly creative and artful ways to put them together. They do it so beautifully and with such consistency that they’ve forced me to become a better photographer in an attempt to keep up with them.

There’s nothing quite like a community of smart, funny, creative people to keep the creative juices percolating (if juices percolate—which under most circumstances, they don’t but in Utata percolating juices wouldn’t raise an eyebrow).