Gjenskinn — to gleam, to reflect light - These Things
The longer I live, the more deeply I learn that love — whether we call it friendship or family or romance — is the work of mirroring and magnifying each other's light.
- James Baldwin
From a series on the apparent energy of light in atmospheres. November 2025
The other day riding my bicycle around downtown Boise on a falling toward winter warmer than usual afternoon and considering the chemistry on the thin sheets of plastic in light tight containers in my backpack wondering at the importance of the performance of time in relation to the amount of light directed onto these to make a photograph—that chemicals change in specific patterns and layers when exposed to light—a metanoia, like the opportunity to live through another Winter Solstice—to be exposed again to the light.
And too in our quotidian world there’s a region in the west coast of Norway called Hardanger where in the 1600’s Ole Jonsen Jaastad made a violin with an additional four strings that aren’t played and simply resonate under the fretboard creating an ethereal sound similar to an aeolian harp vibrating in the wind. These instruments have been used there to evoke the feelings felt to live through the changing light for hundreds of years. Here are a few of our favorite folk-inspired ambient albums that feature the Hardanger fiddle.
Gjenskinn (listen on Band Camp) - Nils Økland Band. This album sounds and feels like Winter Solstice for me.
Neve (listen to a track on YouTube / Amazon Music) - Georg Buljo and Nils Økland. Buljo chants these tunes in the Saami yoik tradition that presents the embodiment of people, animals, and/or places rather than songs “about” these. “Neve” translates from Norwegian to “snow.”
Over Tones (hear a track on YouTube / listen on Amazon Music) - Benedicte Maurseth (Hardanger Fiddle) and Åsne Valland Nordli (voice). The video on YouTube shows the Hardanger Fiddle up close which also looks similar to the stringed instruments played by the people of Tuva which I find fascinating considering their northerly proximity.
These things recently inspired me…
How to break away from someone at a party - via the AOM website. But really, hope to run into you this holiday season :)
Pantone’s 2026 Color of the Year. Looks like many of us are looking into color for a little reprieve from the otherwise of the everyday.
10-minute challenge: The Two Fridas. Do you know this series from the New York Times? I freaking love it. A little art lesson and meditation and often on works I think I know. So cool to find these moments.
The photography of Yasuhiro Ogawa. There’s a photo in his series titled “Into the Silence” that appears to have been shot from a train of a man in the station during a snowstorm—it’s beautiful in its layers and density which forces a simplicity of focus on the snow for me. It’s like listening to John Zorn’s “Electric Masada” that moves between moments of intense introspection and reaching out that is beyond me intellectually to follow in real time and then into a meditative trance—these, like Ogawa’s photos—wash over me providing moments of peace.
Happy holidays and happy Winter Solstice—
Oh!
The photo I found on the Olympic Peninsula last fall, “It only takes a little light to see that this is not the end—,” is now on display at the Griffin Museum of Photography in Boston through Jan. 4, 2025.
