In search of awe and aesthetic arrest within the natural world, landscape photographer Tom Reed talks about his influences like Ansel Adams, his immersion in Japanese aesthetics and his lifelong exploration of rustic beauty.
Landscape photographer Tom Reed discusses his influences (Ansel Adams, Edgar Payne, the Hudson River School, and Japanese martial arts/aesthetics) and his books of photography—The Granite Avatars of Patagonia, Moved by a Mountain, and Summers in the Sierras.
Tom Reed delves into the ideas from his TEDx talk “Natural Beauty and Aesthetic Arrest,” describing aesthetic arrest—borrowed via Joseph Campbell from James Joyce—as being stunned by beauty to the point of losing the usual sense of self. He explores why eroded mountains can feel majestic, drawing on physicist Thomas Campbell’s ideas about organization versus entropy and linking organization to love. Reed connects his photography composition to Japanese tea ceremony and ikebana’s dominant/subdominant/subordinate principle, recounts quitting film photography after his camera was crushed, years of intense looking, wide travels (Caribbean, Belize, Alaska, Hawaii, California), near-drowning surfing in Oahu and how he finally returned to photography.
Tom lives in Fort Bragg on the rugged Mendocino Coast of Northern California, travels to wild places and spends five weeks each summer at a cabin he built in Alaska.
00:00 Introduction to Tom Reed, Landscape Photographer
01:53 Aesthetic Arrest
06:11 Inspiration from an Alpine View
08:19 Why Erosion Can Be Majestic
11:00 Japanese Aesthetics: Ikebana and Chabana
12:23 Creating the Composition
13:46 Putting Yourself in the Right Position for the Composition
14:35 Principles of Flower Arranging as Applied to Photography
16:15 The Majesty of What Stands
16:35 What's Standing Is Still Organized
19:14 On Photography: The Cameras Got Heavy
21:54 In Belize with Birdie
28:24 The Artist's Impulse
29:36 Near-Death Experience Surfing the North Shore of Oahu
33:23 Raw Beauty That Inspires Awe
35:51 A Masculine Sense of Beauty
37:57 Leaving Hawaii
38:32 A Hobo Life with the Fall Colors in New England
40:44 Building a Cabin in Alaska
42:57 The Japanese Aesthetic
43:38 Aikido and Athletics
45:25 An Aikido Bum for 10 Years
47:01 Learning Tea Ceremony
47:43 Tea Ceremony and the Concept of Wabi-Sabi
49:46 Going to Japan
51:56 How to Contact Tom Reed
Tom’s Books
The Granite Avatars of Patagonia
Moved by a Mountain, Inspiration from an Alpine View in Alaska (also an audiobook, featured in Alaska Magazine and Cirque)
The Other Side, On the Road in South America
Summers in the Sierras (limited edition)
Find these at https://TomReedBooks.com
(not an affiliate link)
Tom’s TEDx Talk
"Natural Beauty and Aesthetic Arrest" (TEDxHomer, 2011)
https://youtu.be/aB8L5a-P6NM?si=3-LmcdGe2EPJScBr
Contact Tom Reed
[00:00:00]
Christi: Welcome to Moving Along. Tom Reed is an artist and landscape photographer in search of awe, and that's what we're going to talk about today. His influences include Ansel Adams, Edgar Payne, and the Hudson River School, as well as Japanese martial arts and [00:01:00] aesthetics. Tom wrote, designed, and published three books: The Granite Avatars of Patagonia; Moved by a Mountain, which was featured in Alaska Magazine with text published in the literary newsletter Cirque. And more recently, Summers in the Sierras, a limited edition collection of backcountry photographs taken in the Sierra Nevadas. Moved by a Mountain is now available as an audiobook too. You can see Tom's photographs on his website, tomreed.com, and it's T-O-M-R-E-E-D.com, and his books at tomreedbooks.com.
And it's not Tom Reads, it's Tom Reed Books T-O-M-R-E-E-D welcome, Tom. Hi.
Tom: Thank you
Christi: It's great to have you here. Your work is freaking amazing, and [00:02:00] that's probably one of the most, banal kinds of descriptions, but it's just jaw-dropping. And that is one of the things that you talk about in your TEDx talk, right? Your TEDx talk is called, which you gave from Homer, Alaska.
Tom: Yes
Christi: it's it's called Natural Beauty and Aesthetic Arrest. So, well, let's just dive into it. Aesthetic arrest. What is that?
Tom: Well, what's coming to mind right now is cardiac arrest, right? So cardiac arrest is kind of, event a shocking event, paralyzing maybe. painful, but that's not what, what it has in common with aesthetic arrest. When you see something so beautiful, you're stunned, you're shocked, [00:03:00] and you're kind of knocked out of your sense of, kind of the continuum of I.
You know what I mean by that? We think of ourselves as a person, and we, we live the story of who we are moment to moment, day to day, week to week. But in a while, something knocks you out of that continuum. It breaks, It's like a tear in the page of the book of you, right? Where all of a sudden you're, you're left without the experience of self. the beauty is so powerful.
That,
I just made that up right now,
Christi: You just made that up? That was pretty good. Do you remember the first time that you experienced that?
Tom: I do not. going, I'm searching my memory banks for childhood experiences and, I grew up in a little, [00:04:00] little town, on a, on a sandbar of an island.
Christi: It was in New Jersey, right?
Tom: yeah, Southern New Jersey, a little town called Longport, which was a mile and a half long, and I think it was a half mile wide at its widest point and maybe 100 yards wide at the narrowest point
Christi: Beach kid.
Tom: Yeah. So experience of it all when I was a kid was probably hurricane surf
Christi: What's that like?
Tom: Just big stormy waves way bigger than you ever saw before that you didn't know was possible,
Christi: wow
Tom: breaking out as far as you can see. Yeah, and then other things like, the full moon rising out of the Atlantic Ocean can be pretty, awesome too
Christi: You talked in your TEDx talk about the shock reaction, the inspiration, which I would call like a gasp, right? [00:05:00] That that sense of whoa, just kind of like being knocked, right? Knocked by one of those big waves
And the term itself, aesthetic arrest, comes from Joseph Campbell, who borrowed it from James Joyce. Did I get that right?
But you have, have embraced it in your quest
Tom: Well, I used it because it's a phrase that people are somewhat familiar with rather than
coin a new phrase,
Christi: Okay. It was new to me, but it made sense
Well, okay. So you say that all humans evolve toward love, and this is part of this quest, is it not?
Tom: Which quest are we talking
Christi: The one toward awe. There's more than one
Tom: No. So I, the quest towards awe, you're asking me my [00:06:00] interest in seeking awe?
Christi: Yes. And this notion that of evolution, does it evolve toward love? Is love part of awe?
Tom: So, so your-- the ideas that you're speaking of now came from Thomas Campbell,
Christi: Ah.
Tom: is a physicist, boy, that's a long story. He's a fascinating guy. He was a physicist, I'm trying to make a long story short who, who got involved with was his name Robert Monroe? The Monroe Institute, in Virginia. He set up Monroe's lab to do experiments on people having out-of-body experience.
Christi: So
Tom: process of doing that, he learned how to travel out of his body, and he's been doing that now for 40 years or so. So the guy has gleaned tons of information about [00:07:00] reality. So, when I wrote "Moved by a Mountain," which the subtitle is, Inspiration From an Alpine View in Alaska, I was asking why is an alpine view considered to be inspirational,
Christi: when
Tom: typically we're, inspired by people? The writings of people, the actions of people. But here we see a beautiful mountain scene, and we say we're inspired. So, and why can it be so shockingly beautiful? So y- just you can feel it in your chest, it's so beautiful, And the mountains, especially the, the Old Circuit that's up in a glacier across the bay from my cabin these are products of erosion. So I'm looking at something that is majestic, that is there because [00:08:00] it has been eroded, so it has been degraded. This was a contradiction to me. It's like, why is something that is being broken down so moving look at? And that's the, the play on words of the title of the book, "Moved by a Mountain," because I moved there, right?
Tom: I bought land where I could see this and, because I was moved by it. Anyway I asked Tom Campbell, and he... I asked him actually to, to, I, I just posed a question to him, but I also asked him to write a back cover blurb for the book, and he wrote a back cover blurb that would have covered the whole back cover. So I said, "Wow, this is crazy. This is great. Why don't we make this the introduction?" So he wrote the introduction to the book, and he explained to me that, and, and he explains to the reader in the introduction that, the reason a product of, erosion can be so majestic [00:09:00] is because it is what you're looking at is what has resisted the erosion, what has resisted the degradation, what has resisted the, the forces that break things down over millennia. For thousands of years, what you're looking at is what still stands. And so there's this feeling of dignity and proudness, that of these peaks. But, but also, the same can be said for canyon walls. I, I, I have a lot of photo... I, I, I'm a river runner, so I, I run a lot of rivers in the West that have canyons in them.
I'm about to go do another one in, in a month. A month from today, I'll be in Canyonlands National Park floating through in a canoe, 100-mile trip through the canyons.
Christi: Ah, by yourself?
Tom: No, with my girlfriend.
Christi: Nice
Tom: be, it'll be her first time to be seven, seven days [00:10:00] in the wilderness
Christi: Yeah. So I lived for quite a while in Santa Fe so I saw a lot of those, but I never did any... Well, there's not much water there to do anything with, but So the mountains, let's go back to the mountains for a second, because when you were talking, it kind of reminded me of when sculptors talk about, removing what doesn't belong to find the, the beautiful form that ultimately they create
Tom: Well, that's a, that's a key aspect of my photography, in fact, I'm reminded right now of, of, of an event when I was at an art show I had a booth at this art show, and a person came up to me. I'm standing there be- beside my work, and a person came up and said, "Are, are you the artist?" I said, "No, I'm just a photographer." You,
Christi: Mm-hmm
[00:11:00]
Tom: You know, there's lots of majestic peaks in the world, but here's where it ties into my training in Japanese aesthetics. They have to have the right form
Christi: Hmm.
Tom: to be able to create a good composition. The thought that goes into my composition comes from my training in tea ceremony, but specifically flower arranging, ikebana and chabana.
Christi: Do you still do flower arranging?
Tom: No, I just did one a few days ago with the, the apricot blossoms that are my apricot tree
Christi: That's wonderful. They're blooming already?
Tom: Yes.
Christi: Wow
Tom: and it's, and it snowed this morning
Christi: Wow. Wow. That means you're gonna have apricots maybe
Tom: so the, the tree out there is in full bloom with snow on the branches
Christi: But do you take pictures of trees [00:12:00] too?
Tom: Yeah. I have a whole section of that at my website.
Christi: Ah, okay
Tom: but I, I go for the, the awesome ones, right? So a lot of the, the forests in my, or the trees in, on my website are, are old growth, especially redwoods, old, old twisted pines up in the Sierras, things like that
Christi: So d- when you're looking at these landscapes, do you just look around and say, "Oh, there's a composition," or is it a lot, is it work or is it just like divine, d- divinely felt or
Tom: yeah, I wouldn't go so far to say it's divinely felt, but yeah, I f- feel it. I, I'm really not looking for anything. I'm just out there enjoying myself, and something will catch my eye. Now, just [00:13:00] because it catches my eye doesn't mean it's worthy of a photograph as it is. But what will catch my eye is potential. Then I have to navigate to the position to create the composition So that, that involves line of sight, so I see something that's, that has potential, but from what angle are you gonna look at it from, and what is gonna be in the foreground and what's gonna be in the background, all that, so I have to position myself so that in, in landscape photography, the position of yourself is what creates the composition. As opposed to studio photography, you can arrange things to make, right? But you can't arrange the landscape, so you have to be in the right place
Christi: Right. And so my brain has two questions. One is about the connection between tea ceremony and composition and putting yourself in the right place as opposed to [00:14:00] putting the things in the right place. That's one question. And then the other one is, is if you ever... is it dangerous trying to get yourself into the right position?
Tom: it can be. One person's danger is another person's recreation though, so if you're good at what you're doing and in good shape and agile, then it can be fun. But It can be very dangerous sometimes for other people. Regarding the tea ceremony, tea ceremony education is composed of many different arts, and one of those is flower arranging.
Christi: Oh. Oh
Tom: a principle to, there's many principles, but the one that is most influential to me with my photography is this principle of dominant, subdominant, and subordinate.
Christi: What does that mean?
Tom: So you have the main feature in the photograph, and then you have something smaller [00:15:00] and near it that complements it, and then you have something very much smaller kind of creates the balance, kind of gives the third leg of the triangle. I don't know. It just works. It works that way.
Christi: And, and it's the same principle in flower arranging
Tom: Well, in flower arranging, like I said, you arrange the flowers, right? So you put one tall flower, one smaller flower beside it, and then a shorter flower in the front
Christi: Okay. And then, so
Tom: it-- so in, in landscape photography, you have to look for those elements and where do you have to be to include those elements in the composition? Sometimes you get lucky and it's just there, and maybe that's what catches my eye. From all my training, it catches my [00:16:00] eye Like the subconscious mind sees it before I do,
Christi: so maybe we should back up a little bit because
Tom: I never completed the answer to your one question. So,
Christi: So speak
Tom: so let me just give you a couple extra sentences there. When we were talking about, the, the majesty of what stands a- and has resisted the erosion over the millennia,
you were asking about love and what that had to do with
Christi: Oh, but
Tom: never,
Christi: I, I'm glad you remember 'cause I forgot all about it. Okay, good.
Tom: got there.
Tom: So, what has decomposed, what fell off of the mountain, what eroded away from it is moving towards entropy. entropy being complete total disorganization. But in this case, it would be rock flour, you know? No, no rocks left, even just [00:17:00] dust, So that's complete disorganization, and what's standing is still organized. When it comes to spiritual interpretation of that, the disorganization is, its separateness. When you think about it, organization, right? We talk about a rock being organized, but, there's organizations like social organizations, right? So, that's an element of humanity where people come together and cooperate. So organization is a step towards love. The highest outcome of organization would be love
Christi: That's pretty profound
Tom: yeah, this explains why looking at granite spire can be so moving That's why my book is called The Granite Avatars of Patagonia, because it's as if these granite spires are spiritual beings [00:18:00] manifested in granite in order to teach us this
Christi: And so is the rock flour the, the stuff that falls away, right? Is that, would you call that chaos?
Tom: Yes. There's complete lack of organization. They're not bonded to each molecule's-- They're not bonded to each other There's no interaction
Christi: Okay. Wow. I just-- Okay, so you've left me a little speechless. That's that is quite a feat, Tom. If you talk to any of my friends. But anyway
Tom: you can, you can always edit this part out.
Christi: Yeah. That's okay. So it's my understanding, now we're gonna go back some, some more and I'm gonna ask you for another story, and that is photography is your first love, And [00:19:00] then I think you, in your bio, you said that the cameras got heavy, and the next thing you know, you're sailing around the Caribbean. And you wanna tell us what happened?
Tom: Well, the cameras got heavy this is back in, in what? It was 1980. before digital photography, so I was carrying around not only a camera, which was not a big deal, but I had to have different lenses, right?
So there... And it's all glass and steel, heavy things. Plus I had to have film, and once I finished a roll of film, I had to carry that or send it somewhere for somebody to take care of it. And then I had to find a dark room somewhere. And, I was a geography major in college, and when I got out of college, all I wanted to do was go see the planet that I'd been studying.
Christi: Ah. Ah, I wondered, I wondered where you got the travel bug from
Tom: Yeah. I [00:20:00] was just up for adventure and wilderness and seeing mountains, seeing oceans, seeing islands, seeing volcanoes, seeing glaciers, whatever. I wanted to see it all. So, I spent a winter I went down to Fort Lauderdale and stomped on the docks until I got a job. I got a great job on a 90-foot ketch as a deckhand, and I sailed around the Caribbean all winter. But but I didn't have a camera with me because I was traveling light And we went to Antigua for two weeks of maintenance. So I called my father and asked him to send me my, camera, and he did, but it fell off the back of the truck when they were backing up, and the truck ran over the, the box and crushed my camera.
Christi: Ah, no
Tom: that was actually a break. I, I had to decide whether I should get a new camera or not, because like you said, I was getting weary of all the things that I just [00:21:00] mentioned, the weight and the, and the care for things and, mailing... having to buy film when you're, when you're in a third world country can be a, an ordeal. so I quit photography, and then I would have the urge to take a photograph and-- 'cause I'd forget that I didn't have a camera, so instead, I'd just sit there and look at what I wanted to photograph and study what I was looking at and contemplate why I wanted to take the photograph I learned a lot by doing that
Christi: Were you trying to memorize it?
Tom: No, I wasn't trying to memorize it. in fact I did memorize some because my contemplation was so intense I'm, I'm thinking right now of a, of a memory. Things pop into my head while we're talking and I just go with it
Christi: Yeah, please. I like that
Tom: I was 26, I, I was camping on a beach in Belize [00:22:00] Which is now a big resort. But back then, paid a guy 25 cents a day to, to camp on the beach in front of his house, and he watched my tent while I was out doing things.
It
Christi: Nice.
Tom: deal.
Christi: deal.
Tom: so I was, I was eating dinner with a family for $3 a night. I'd just go and sit at the table with a family and, and have, home-cooked soul food, Creole style every night. It was great. the father he, he made coconut oil, but he was also a fisherman, he had a partner in his boat and, and their, their outboard engine broke down and his partner took the engine to Belize City to have it repaired, and he never came back because it was, it was Christmas time, so he was on a binge in, in, in, in Belize City. And, and, and, and this guy that I was eating dinner with, his name is Birdie was getting more and more nervous 'cause he needed the income to [00:23:00] feed his family. So I kept telling him, "I'll go, I'll go fishing with you. I'll go f-" Finally, he says one night, he puts his hand on the table and says, "Okay, we're going fishing. We can go tomorrow." Lone sail powerboat. means only a sail, no engine. So we sailed around the Keys for a week diving and catching fish. And one day we were sailing and we had a, a huachinango, It was a, orange fish. It's called a hog snapper in English laying on the deck, and the deck was painted turquoise blue and with a, a filet knife beside it. And there was the grain of the wood running one way and the fish the other way, and the butcher knife was black and silver. And that, that image is still in my mind today, and that was was January of 1983
Christi: Wow. And it's still there?
Tom: Yeah. [00:24:00] It was
Christi: Wow
Tom: beautiful composition and the colors were so vivid and, color is not even my thing, but it was striking. So, so no, it was no intention to memorize anything. It was just looking at the composition and, and trying to understand why I chose that view instead of this other view.
And I'm, the, for your listeners, I'm holding my hands up now, the way you used to see the, film directors do with, with all four fingers pointing up, but the, the thumbs of each hand pointing towards each other so you create a rectangle, and that's how the old film directors would visualize the framing of the scene. I have a bl- whole blog entry written on this,
Christi: Yeah!
Tom: this question of why we isolate a landscape into a rectangle for the composition,
Christi: hmm.
Tom: Very [00:25:00] strange thing
Christi: It is, I guess if, I never thought about it before.
Tom: No.
Christi: I-
Tom: we... I, that's what I, I bring up. I bring up questions about things that we never thought of before
Christi: Things that we just take for granted
Tom: Yeah. I don't really necessarily have the answers, but it's worth thinking about the questions. That just thinking about the questions can be very profound
Christi: So you're in the Caribbean. Do you catch a lot of fish with Birdy?
Tom: Oh, we, yeah, we speared a lot of a lot of fish. In fact, I, I got a I, I'm, I'm spacing out on the name of the fish now. it's a re-relative of a tuna,
and it's a very, very fast fish, impossible to spear because they, they move so fast and they're so wary of humans. But I actually came around a, we were in this, in this area where there was these towers of coral, [00:26:00] like tree trunks,
Christi: Oh, wow
Tom: swimming between them underwater, came around the corner, and here comes a school of the jack. That's what they were, j-jack crevalle. They were right there in, spear distance, and I got one.
They-- He was so happy for me 'cause I kept saying, "I can't get him. I can't get him." He was laughing at me all the time, like a dog chasing seagulls on the beach, anyway, you asked me a question about losing my camera when I was sailing
Christi: I wonder, and I wanted to know how you felt. I, did you see the truck run over it?
Tom: No, no. There was a, it was insured, was a description of what happened in, in the insurance claim
Christi: Still like what, what emotions did it bring up
Tom: There was sadness, but also a sense of relief And it wasn't until digital photography got as good as film around 2004. I was in Japan and, Japan leads, the industry in, cameras.[00:27:00]
Christi: Yes, they do.
Tom: And, and that's, that's when they first came out with a camera that was a, a digital camera that was as good as film
Christi: so in between deciding not to buy another camera, what kind of camera was it that got crushed?
Tom: Pentax Spotmatic
Christi: Ah, okay I don't know where, where are those made? I don't even know. Pentax.
Tom: Japan.
Christi: Probably Japan. Exactly. That's what I was thinking.
Tom: remember, to tell you the truth. I don't think the company exists anymore
Christi: Yeah, no, I can, I can still see the logo, Pentax. I grew up in Rochester, New York, ha ha.
Tom: Oh
Christi: guess where my grandfather worked for his whole life? Kodak. So anyway okay, so let's go back to the digital thing. And in between the camera getting crushed and your decision not to buy another one, and this period [00:28:00] of going around and fishing and and intense looking, would you call it that?
Tom: Yeah, I-- you're, you're coining a phrase. I like it.
Christi: But somewhere between then and Japan and digital technology that got you back to photography, you started drawing, right? Or pen and ink
Tom: yeah, I did lots of I did pen and a lot of pen and ink drawing.
Christi: And what was the motivation there? Was it just like
the, the, artist's impulse, you have to create it?
Tom: I have to create things, yeah. I had a little bit of drawing skill. Sometimes I did well, sometimes I didn't. I was better at pen and ink than I was at painting. I did watercolors too. And I would do okay, nothing, nothing spectacular. But I, I'd got into wood carving. Did a lot of that when I lived in Alaska
Christi: So from the Caribbean you went to [00:29:00] Alaska? Were there any stops in between?
Tom: Y- yeah.
Christi: Speak
Tom: Well, I went from college to Southeast Alaska to work as a surveyor.
Christi: Oh
Tom: So there I sharpened my navi- navigation skills and this whole concept of line of sight that I was talking about earlier. that was a seasonal job, so, I went to Hawaii to the North Shore of Oahu in the winter. My girlfriend from college was a stewardess for Pan Am.
Christi: Oh, nice
Tom: So we lived on the North Shore of Oahu, and I surfed all winter
Christi: You learned to surf in New Jersey, right?
Tom: Yeah. So a little bit of an education to go from New Jersey to, North Shore of Oahu.
Christi: I can imagine.
Tom: the price
Christi: Oh, no. Broken bones?
Tom: No,
Christi: Oh, that's good
Tom: just one close call and one that [00:30:00] was stupid and I shouldn't have done. Wasn't a near-death experience. I survived it. But anyway
Christi: What happened?
Tom: Well, when I first got there, I wasn't in shape, right?
'Cause I had been, my legs were in great shape. I'd been stomping around in the woods all, all summer, but I wasn't in paddling shape, and I was surfing a, a break the other side of, Pipeline. Pipeline is a left and, but the other side of it is Pupukea, which is right, and I'm not goofy foot, so I prefer the right, especially when I haven't surfed in a while. So I'm surfing Pupukea and, And I didn't have a leash. Leashes were just getting invented at the time, and so I lost my board. And, and all the-- that water, when the wave breaks on a reef, the, the w- the water pours over the reef. It, it fills up the area between the reef and the beach, and then it has to drain out.
So it drains out in, in breaks in the [00:31:00] reef, and so you have these extreme rips going through those breaks in the reef, and that's where I was.
Christi: Ah.
Tom: So I was, I couldn't get in. And, the beach was just right there. It was just I don't know, hundred and fifty feet maybe. It was just right there. And my friends, I had three friends sitting on the beach talking, and they were all talking, and here I am drowning,
Christi: Ah.
Tom: they don't know it. And so, I said, "I just realized I'm gonna die." So I, I yelled to another surfer, and he came over, and he had a leash. and I got on his back, and, we dropped into a wave, and I got washed off the back. And as I was getting washed off the back, I reached forward, and my hand caught his leash, and so he was able to tow me in, but kind of by accident.
And so [00:32:00] we did that a couple more times, and I got to the beach and walked up to my friends and collapsed. I was exhausted. But that was just stupidity, it's just Hawaiian waves are so much more powerful than New Jersey waves. I just... I
Christi: Yeah
Tom: and stupid, but another time, I just took off on a big wave that I shouldn't have taken off on.
I wasn't in the right position, and I got, I got drilled pretty good. I was h- underwater for a long time, but that, that was all right.
Christi: did you think you were gonna die then too?
Tom: No, the thought crossed my mind that it might happen, but but it was all right.
Christi: Do you feel changed? No. No, I don't. I, that, that to me is not a sidetrack. Don't you think events like that form who you become?
Tom: well, it definitely made me more cautious about what I was doing in the [00:33:00] water. I grew up on the beach. I, y- I, I was like a fish,
Christi: right
Tom: I was a lifeguard, body surfed, surfed. I rowed surf boats in the ocean. The ocean was my playground, so... But I was always in shape. That's the thing. I, I had come from Alaska, and I had to get my paddle muscles back in shape. Swimming muscles
Christi: How come you pursued geography as opposed to like oceanography or something?
Tom: Geography is the study of the face of the Earth, and that, that's what I wanted to learn about. I don't know why
Christi: Just was. The same with photography
Tom: that's just who I am. Well, I appreciated the beauty of the face of the Earth. And so what do you do about that? You can photograph it as one option I was probably influenced by Ansel Adams when I was a teenager
Christi: Were you always drawn, to [00:34:00] those Western images, those Western mountains?
Tom: Well, the more severe landscapes, this gets back to our discussion of the TEDx presentation when I say severe, so in the, in the TEDx presentation, I talk about that I divided natural beauty into two categories. One is kind of calming and relaxing, soothing, and the other one is shocking, stunning, and so that's the second category is the one that I'm more interested in. So the Appalachians, they're soft. They're old, they're soft, they're covered with a blanket of forest. You go west and you have these vertical rock faces, that are three times as high as, the Appalachians,
it's just a different kind of raw beauty. And so that's the kind of beauty that inspires [00:35:00] awe. There's a, there's an element of awe. The original definition of awe had to do with fear and dread and terror as well as power, and that's still there. For example, we're just talking about big waves. If I'm paddling out in big surf, a wave breaking in front of me, or as I'm paddling over the shoulder of one looking down into the tube, it's an awesome experience.
But that sense of dread and awe and fear is very much a part of it, and there's beauty as well. But the Appalachians, for example, don't give you that feeling like the Rockies, the Sierras, the Alaska Range,
Even the Andes, the Southern Andes do
Christi: Do you have a favorite range?
Tom: Oh I don't know that there's a favorite. I've spent a lot of time in the Sierras and [00:36:00] it's, the Sierras got a fantastic trail system. It's, and the trails are works of art too. A lot of them were made the '40s by the Civilian Conservation Corps. They were FDR's project to employ people, and so these guys got really good at their stonework, and some of the switchbacks are just beautiful. it's a lot of fun walking in the Sierras. There's a feeling, there's a feeling of, these ancient, ancient roads in the wilderness because the trails are so good. And they're beautiful mountains, and you can get up really high. I've crossed, passes in the Sierras that are twice as high as the highest peak in the Appalachians
Christi: Oh, yeah.
Tom: So you get up real high crossing 12 and a half, 13,000 foot passes, it's crazy. Sometimes it can look like the moon up there when you get above everything, the sky is a darker [00:37:00] blue.
Christi: the altitude alone is just... And then the alpine thing. I've only-- I've been to the Alps. But there's a wonderful place outside Denver. It's an alpine park. It's like a garden of some sort, but it's alpine. All the little tiny daisies, like an inch high like that. It's, it's quite interesting.
Tom: Well, you m- you bring up an interesting thing there is because in my book, "The Granite Avatars of Patagonia," black and white full-page photographs of these two granite spires I call the avatars they are so shockingly beautiful, but in that I consider it a masculine sense of beauty that I needed something to buffer it. And so on the facing page is text, but inset into the text on every page is a color photograph of a wildflower.
Christi: So you [00:38:00] left Hawaii and went to Alaska?
Tom: Left Hawaii, went back to Alaska by way of California, where I got a job running whitewater in the Sierras. Then I
Christi: cool, cool
Tom: surveyed in Southeast Alaska again, spent a month running whitewater in the Sierras, went back to Alaska, and then I went to New England, speaking of the Appalachians, because I had never spent the autumn just tromping around in the woods in New England, right?
'Cause I was only 20 years old,
Christi: yeah
Tom: that, that was that was, these days they call it a bucket list. That, that was something I wanted to do. That was an experience I wanted to have. So I went to northern Vermont. I took a train across Canada
Christi: Oh, gorgeous.
Tom: That was fun. And, and got to northern Vermont the beginning of the fall color season and walked with the color southward. started [00:39:00] in the Green Mountains, but I couldn't see anything.
Christi: Why, why? 'Cause th- there wasn't enough color?
Tom: you couldn't get above tree line.
Christi: Oh
Tom: So
Long Trail there, I call it the Long Tunnel because you're in a subalpine forest.
The trees were only 10 feet tall, but they were dense, and you-- it was just a tunnel. It was ridiculous walking on top of these mountains. So down into the valley, and just, I just took on a hobo life. It was great. I just walked on dirt roads through the valleys at the foot of the mountains and just camped wherever I wanted.
There was lots of old abandoned farms where the house was, burnt down, and there was just a foundation, but the apple orchard was there, this is in, in the woods. And I would camp there and eat apples and try to [00:40:00]snare rabbits. and I just kept working my way south through Vermont that, for the month from late September to Halloween.
And then that's when I went down to Florida and got on the sailboat, worked all winter as a sailor, and then came back and ended up in Alaska as a whitewater guide running the Matanuska River and also working as a fishing guide. And one of the great jobs was running freight the Susitna River system.
Christi: Oh, wow
Tom: delivering a lot of construction materials to remote parcel who, who wanted to build a cabin. That was good work.
Tom: By August of that summer, was one of those rainy summers that can happen in Alaska where it just doesn't stop raining. So everybody was canceling their whitewater trips. I find
myself sitting in a trailer in Anchorage looking out the window [00:41:00] at the rain, So, so I quit and I, I hitchhiked down to Homer, and this is when the book Moved by a Mountain begins with this scene, of, of sitting in the trailer and saying, "The hell with this." I went down to Homer and found a guy that I knew from surveying in, in Southeast Alaska who was building a cabin, there I discovered the beauty of Kachemak Bay and decided that that was where I was going to buy land. So I-- I went backpacking first thing just to get that out of the way before the long winter of work.
I went up to Denali and went backpacking in Denali, one of the best trips of my life because I got lucky. Alaska has weather, and it's rare to do a six-day backpacking trip at Denali National Park and see the mountain every day.
But that's, that was this trip in early September with the, with the tundra turning, all sorts of blood red to crimson [00:42:00]
Christi: to
Tom: pumpkin to gold to banana. All these colors in the tundra was spectacular, and the wildlife was amazing. I had Dall sheep walking right into my camp.
Christi: Wow.
Tom: Anyways, I came out of that and, got a job surveying in the private sector and just spent the whole winter surveying all over the state, doing all sorts of
Christi: survey
Tom: work, most of it's remote, and made enough money to buy land, and then I built the cabin the next summer.
Christi: That's great. It's a beautiful cabin. I saw the picture in your TEDx talk.
Tom: So that's my place. It-- And, the book Moved by a Mountain is, all the photographs are taken from that cabin. Almost all of them, probably 85, 90% of them are taken from the balcony of that cabin. I tell people the view from my cabin is the best view I've ever seen from any building in the world
Christi: And you go back every summer.
Christi: We, we kind of touched on it [00:43:00] briefly, but how were you drawn into the Japanese aesthetic? How was like you came back to California in the late '90s to study aikido and became an aikido teacher,
Tom: Yeah. I went to California in 1987 to learn more about mind-body integration. So, if you want to learn something, get trained to teach it, right? So I went to a training for it to be a mind-body integration, somatic therapy is what it was. Part of that training was Aikido training,
Christi: Okay
Tom: because Aikido demands very much that you're in your body and that you feel through your body, and you actually feel people.
Christi: What drew you? What drew you in this direction
Tom: Well, I was a very physical, and I still am a very physical person. But I was aware of my limitations and aware that my limitations were not only physical but also [00:44:00] mental, that my m- mind could limit my physical ability. So I wanted
to pursue that, so I wanted to learn more about that.
There's a tie between athletics and philosophy. The tie is somatic awareness. Body awareness on a, on a deep level. So my first aikido teacher and my aikido teacher of the somatic therapy was also a sprinter.
Christi: Oh
Tom: he-- I, I don't remember if he won or not, but he was in the Pan American Games as a sprinter.
Christi: Hmm. Okay
Tom: a longtime martial artist and finally chose aikido as the one to stay with.
Aikido is a very unusual martial art. It's not a, not a fighting art. You learn it via cooperation. So it's-- I call it learning grace in the face of adversity.
Christi: Cool
Tom: again again, it's a beautiful thing. Aikido is very beautiful, very [00:45:00] flowing,
But it takes a lot of body awareness to be able to relax and be in your own body when you're dealing with another body. Threats tend to pull us out of our body. tend to make our energy rise.
So in this training, we learn to settle our energy and relax.
Christi: Rather than the adrenaline fight or flight.
Tom: So, so, I was, I was an aikido bum for 10 years.
Christi: Oh, in California. Well, back and forth
Tom: No, it was, I was, I was in a few different places. I, I was a year and a half in Northern California, a year in, Ashland, Oregon, and then eight years down in in the Ventura area. I spent a lot of time living in Carpinteria. But I did is train.
I trained seven days a week.
Christi: Wow
Tom: just did what I had to do to get by. Money was not important. Work was not important. Training was what was important.[00:46:00]
I just needed to know what it felt like to be as good as I wanted to be, and it took me that long to get, Finally, my rank was third degree black belt. And then I became a teacher, and then I had to get out of Southern California . That's, that's no place for someone who's not interested in making money. So, found a little logging and fishing town in Northern California and opened a dojo there. And, Because I did that, someone said, "Oh, you have to meet Dr. Sato." And so they introduced me to Sato Sensei, and, and I became his uchideshi, which is the same thing I was for my aikido teacher. That's... it's c- literally inside student. Right-hand man, so you get extra training because of that. So that's how I began. He asked me what I wanted to do. I said, "I'll do whatever you want me to do."[00:47:00]
Christi: That's the right answer
Tom: So he, he, he told me, "Well, you should learn tea ceremony." So I said, "Okay." So that started 10 years of training with him
Christi: Oh, wow. 10 years of training. I didn't realize that was a real commitment
Tom: Yeah, it was-- In the end, it turned out to be too much of a commitment.
Christi: In what way?
Tom: I'm, I'm a pretty rustic guy,
Christi: yeah, listeners wouldn't necessarily know that, but yes, you look like y- you're a guy that built your own cabin more than once
Tom: you're looking at me 'cause I just came in from loading my trailer with maple branches, right? Because I take it out to a farm and make biochar out of
Christi: Oh, there you go
Tom: Anyway the pure form and the original form of tea ceremony is very rustic.
Christi: Oh, it is
Tom: Yeah. Back in the day, back in the 1600s it was done in a, in a little hut with a dirt floor, [00:48:00] and simplicity really important and efficiency. These are really im- important qualities. Of course, beauty is of the utmost, but it's natural beauty and a simple, rustic, natural beauty. There's a concept of wabi-sabi also that listeners can read about, it includes kind of an element of forlornness, you know, patinas are admired, which is a step towards entropy, right?
Christi: Oh, I guess so.
Tom: you, you have oxidation on the surface of a metal, it can form a patina, right?
Christi: Right.
Tom: But these kind of things, things that are worn out from use
I was just telling my girlfriend, I, yesterday I sanded my steps going down to my basement and this is a 100-year-old house, and I sanded the steps and you have 100 years of things falling and banging and dropping and stomping on these [00:49:00] stairs. So I sanded it down, but there's still all these little dark marks of all these events that happened over the decades, told her, "I think it's more beautiful than if I put new stairs in," These stairs tell a story, so the same thing with the utensils for tea. Sometimes when they're damaged and repaired, they're, they're more beautiful than they were in the first place. Anyway,
Christi: So you--
Tom: going with
all this?
Christi: I wondered, you're talking about tea ceremony and 10 years of study with sensei, and you went to Japan
Tom: Yeah, in fact, I was just there a few months ago for the
third time.
Christi: Oh. wow. Wow. But did you continue to study when you were there, or is that why you went or
Tom: No. The, the first time I just had an opportunity, a friend of mine was teaching English in Kyoto and had an extra room in his house.
Christi: Oh, well that's nice
Tom: turn down that invitation? So, and he had, he had gave me a [00:50:00] bicycle. I got there, I had my own bicycle. I rode my bicycle around town every day for a month, going to shrines and temples and castles and museums and gardens, and I had a blast
Christi: I bet. I bet. And by that point you'd, you hadn't, picked up photography again or you had?
Tom: No, I hadn't. In f- in fact, I-- So another karate friend... i, I was a karate guy in Alaska.
there was a--
Tom: I trained in karate in Alaska and one of my buddies from the... He, he and I were the two top ranking students and, he ended up going to Japan for work and ended up staying there. And he invited me over he got a job renovating a yacht, he's a great carpenter, but he didn't know anything about boats So he invited me to over there to help him. So the two of us renovated this yacht. So I was there for three months on that trip. The first trip I got to see Momiji, which is the fall [00:51:00] color,
Christi: Ah.
Tom: the red maples. The second trip I was there in the spring. So I got to see the cherry blossoms and have picnic on their cherry blossoms.
Christi: Wow. Beautiful
Tom: the other great thing about that trip was that we were in the town that has more hot springs than any other town in the world.
Christi: Really? It's in Japan?
Tom: yeah, we'd go to a different hot spring every day after work, every day.
Christi: Well
Tom: a week, every once in a while we couldn't for some reason, but yeah, I've
Christi: must have been a transformed person
Tom: Yeah, that was a lot of fun. So I was exposed to Japanese culture a lot. At the end of that trip, I had some money from the job and that's when I realized that the digital cameras were getting good. So that's when I bought the digital camera.
Christi: And you came full circle, right?
Tom: Yeah.
Christi: Back to the photography
Christi: Tom, this is-- thank you so much for taking all this [00:52:00] wonderful, valuable time of yours to talk to me about going around and around. I don't usually, like...
Tom: ho- I hope I answered your questions. It was a lot of talk
Christi: It's just something, I don't-- I usually progress much more, I don't know orderly, in an orderly fashion.
I don't know. Suddenly we're just diving into,
Tom: Yeah, well, you
Christi: aesthetic arrest
Tom: Yeah. well. Real life is not in departments or compartments. Real life, every aspect influences another part. That's the way ecology works. You can't just isolate things. It's all interconnected
Christi: This is probably one of the more philosophical conversations I've had. Is there anything else you want to say before we go?
Tom: Oh, geez. I, I don't know. I sure want people to, to go to tomreed.com and see what we've been talking about
Christi: Yeah, for sure, [00:53:00] because the photos are rather astounding.
Tom: Thank you.
Christi: They do take your breath away.
Tom: Thank you.