In the prairies, Giants still walk, and still fill up at the C-Store in Comfrey, Minnesota.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is where the giants store themselves.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

These guys hang out where the giants let them. They knew the earth. They know the pleasure of each other's company.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The guy in the blue shirt said he was wanted by the police, and if I took his picture, the taxpayers would have to feed him in prison. I wanted to remember these men, and the way souls are sometimes set down gently by the hand of time.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

When grasses die, they leave beautiful husks. When men die, their abodes decay, and become symbols of a fall from grace. Plants die into grace. Man dies away from it, and does not return. But that is his choice. That is how he chooses to put language and identity between him and the innate beauty of his bones.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sam gets away from me to speak directly to the sky, making it his. I rummage around in my things, wondering where my sky went.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The shadow is a moment on the stones years and centuries.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Between us, we have changed the century, the millenium. We have changed the planet and the idea of humanity. Can you see that? In the 41-year-wide space between us?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Someone has stripped and tied these saplings together to dry in the sun. Who will receive this gift?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Be mindful.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Dead grasses are space time diagrams of the speed of life.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The prairie grasses leave these amazing structures behind when they die.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Everything you need to know about growth is in this picture.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The prayer of upraised arms.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Amazing things happen just above my head.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sam is a prairie grass. He is perfectly adapted to his enviornment. When we judge him, we are judging the forces that enfold and protect him. We ignore these things at the peril of our souls.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

I challenge you to see.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Billion year old ripples caught by the camera of God.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is what the nomadic peoples of the American middle ages saw: the bottom of a billion year old sea.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The frame within the frame reminds us that boundaries are invented, limits are political, edges are a matter of choice.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Stone and lichen.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Yuwintapi. Raising your arms in prayer. Raise your arms in prayer now. Feel it. It changes you.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The perfect symbol. With this symbol, you don't need any others.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

There are carvings in this stone, but they are merging with the effects of time and water. The ancient power of the stone returns and sweeps all human pretence aside. We can try to preserve it, to store ourselves against time. Or we can accept the indifference and majesty of time as a gift.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The turtle. He might be a cartoon, or a symbol of inhuman forces.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The stone itself, the lichen and striations, have become more important to me than the mystery of the carvings. At my age, I am beginning to think that what people did 1000 years ago is not my business. What injustice you commit today, is.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The person who made this carving thought his throwing stick was so important, that it needed to be immortal. What do you own that is that important?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Foreground and background. That is what we think constitutes perception. What if the message is the transition from stone to lichen in the background? How do we teach our machines to understand that simple thing?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

You think you are really alone in the universe. You can't help thinking this.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

These are symbols carved into the red granite in Jeffers Minnesota by an unknown tribe of Native Americans. We don't know what they mean, or who is speaking to us. We look into the faces of Native Americans in Minneapolis, and we don't know who is speaking to us. In Jeffers, it is a tourist attraction. In Minneapolis, it is a human calamity.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

We come to a place where the Native Americans felt the age and immensity of the Earth and spirit, but we must read about it to be sure. The prairie and red rock ridge have become the ghetto of reverence.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

In the silence of the prairie, you become ready to hear again, as for the first time.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Be mindful.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The tall grasses are crushed by the heavy late snows this year, but they will revive. What late snows have crushed you this winter?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Between the Buddha and the tubducky, we are watched over and blessed in our journey.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is the inside and outside of a Minnesota road trip. At the end of this road, there is a world you want to believe in, but don't want to live in.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

City slickers see this sign and laugh, then go in to the store for a good deal on cards.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This is St. James Minnesota in early April. We went down to the infirmary, to see my baby there.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

How do you store yourself? What do you preserve yourself against? Will the hand of time set your soul down gently, at the end?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

In Duluth, the angles are funhouse geometry. You don't know left from up. It is like San Francisco that way. This tipped sidewalk and sentinal hydrant challenge you to keep your bearings. It is a trick that many port cities like to play on drunken sailors.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Don't I just look the harmless old guy?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

On the brink of manhood. On both sides of the brink of manhood. The world pushes and pulls. Sam advances and retreats.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sam took this picture. This is what Sam sees.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The bird is a moment upon the days and years of the lamp.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Anchor and lighthouse. Two of the technologies that man has used to answer the weather, the seasons, and the waters of the planet for thousands of years. What of our technologies will attract tourists and seagulls a thousand years from now?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

The textures of an anchor that worked the bottom of Lake Superior for 70 years before becoming a spectacle for tourists.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

This anchor can hold a 1000-ton boat in hundreds of feet of water. Sometimes.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Bird.Half aloft.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Where are the lighhouses on the new electronic seas: the Internet, the worlds within worlds within wires and molecule-sized switches?
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow

Sam is given to reflection. He finds the other side of the mirror to hold the image he seeks, the answer to the question the moment frames.
copyright@2006 Jeff Beddow