When I worked in the Napa Valley wine industry, most of my days ended in a similar way. The guests who had spent the afternoon sipping exceptional wine on a deck drenched in sun would make their way back to their hotels, and my team would settle into the slower rhythm of cleaning and resetting for the next day.
Sometimes, before I joined them, I would stand at the edge of the deck and look out, filled with appreciation for the beauty I was immersed in.
The vines began about thirty feet away and seemed to run a mile toward the Mayacamas Mountains. In late fall, the sun set right around that hour, casting a warm glow down the rows while the sky worked through its pinks, blues, and oranges. That view became my muse.
For four years, I had been keeping an obnoxiously early morning routine to learn the craft of photography: the fundamentals, color theory, light, editing, the history, and everything in between. At the tail end of that span, I received a phone call that would change how I looked at the view.
Meadowood Napa Valley had graciously accepted my request to photograph several of their rooms. Of all the genres I had been studying, I felt most drawn to interiors and architecture, and I offered to do the work for free, hoping to build a strong portfolio piece. When their director of marketing called to review the images, she went through them one by one, telling me which ones she loved and why, and where others fell short.
Then she insisted on paying me.
I was taken aback, dumbfounded really. I could never have anticipated that turn of events, and it was exactly the nudge I needed. Her encouragement gave me confidence that this might be a direction worth following.
Somewhere in the middle of that call, she mentioned a conversation she had recently had with a Napa vintner about documenting the vineyards across a full year: the evolution of the vines, the changing palette, the feeling of each season.
Something in that idea caught hold of me, and a pulse moved through my body. I didn't understand why at the time, but I have always trusted that inner spark. When something stirs my curiosity that way, as if to say pay attention to this, I follow it.
I saw it all at once, a barren, seemingly lifeless vine becoming a robust green canopy, the whole cycle running behind my eyes in less than fifteen seconds.
I had studied wine for years and learned the life cycle of the vine. But I had never committed to watching that cycle unfold in one place, and I had never stayed long enough to feel its rhythm. I hadn't seen the value in doing so until that conversation.
I returned to my muse with fresh eyes and knew it was a place where I could practice.
I never photographed it. My camera stayed home. Something in me understood that this was the kind of lesson that arrives sideways, the way a skill reveals itself only after you have practiced the motion long enough to stop asking what it is for.
So I began to look, taking in the same view at the same hour. The first things I noticed were the easy ones: the leaves changing, the temperature shifting, the sun dropping below the horizon a little farther along the ridge each week. Over time, I began to notice subtler things.
I started following a single shoot, watching how it draped across the wire differently depending on the season. After days of steady rain, the puddles between the rows would join and widen until the vineyard held what looked like a shallow lake. And after harvest, the canopy thinned so gradually that it took the better part of four months to register, the vines settling into rest a little at a time.
By December, the grapes had been harvested and the vines had entered winter dormancy. The fruit was gone, and the coming season's growth remained out of sight. Within the roots, trunk, and permanent wood were the reserves that would support the vine when spring arrived. Even in that dormant season, the life of the previous year was preparing the next.
The winter rain was welcome. The air cooled, and the vines took a stoic posture, bare and open and receiving.
Winter pruning shaped the growth to come. As spring approached and temperatures rose, the buds began to swell, their protective scales opened, and the first green tissue emerged. Those buds had formed during the previous growing season, so what appeared to be a beginning had already been taking shape for months.
Occasionally, there was time to walk a row and study a single vine: a Cabernet bud loosening its brown scales, a seam of green wrapped in pale down, as though the vine had kept a little spring folded inside its winter wood. I was drawn to this continuity, to the way each part of the cycle carried something forward.
The tender shoots were vulnerable to frost. As they grew, leaves expanded, flower clusters became visible, and fruit set followed, with small green berries beginning to develop. There is so much contained in the familiar phrase the growing season, and I wanted to give myself time to see it.
Through summer, the berries grew. At veraison, they began to soften, the reds changing color and the whites turning translucent, and the vines moved toward ripeness and harvest. Harvest brought the removal of the fruit, but the vine's work continued. Healthy leaves kept gathering energy, replenishing the reserves that winter and the following spring would require.
Eventually, the leaves fell and dormancy returned. The cycle had come around again.
A year into the practice, I was watching the pink and orange of a fall sunset when the questions arrived. Had my observation skills changed? Had I deepened my own capacity to see, and if so, what was it for?
I couldn't answer those questions at the time. It would take years to understand what returning to that view had taught me.
What I had been practicing, without knowing it, was the seeing of change. Nothing in that view had ever been still, not for a second, though it took a year of standing in one place to convince me of it. The solidity I thought I was looking at was my own assumption, corrected week by week by a row of vines thirty feet away.
That truth is so integrated into the fabric of life that we tend to dismiss it as irrelevant. The vineyard made it visible to me, but seeing a thing and understanding it are not the same.
The understanding came within this last year, through my daily study and practice of Buddhism.
I don't know if I would have come to it on my own. Absorbing those teachings day after day helped me recognize what I had been watching from that deck: change unfolding continuously, even when I couldn't perceive it.
Time worked on me the way the seasons worked on the vines.
I did not make a single photograph that year of the vines, yet it may be the most useful year of looking I have had. The practice has become part of how I make photographs now: staying with a space long enough for the frame to be revealed, giving a familiar view the time it needs to become more deeply known.
It is also what draws me back, year after year, to places in Charlotte and beyond. I return to see what has changed, knowing now that some of the change takes place in me.
Perhaps that is where deep seeing begins: with a specific place, and the willingness to return.
