a brief meditation on time.

In 2023 I spent three months of my life working on a ship. It was the last trip of my career as a navigator. That three months was like a thin place. A seperation of the past me and the new me.

Time on a ship is strange. I had thought that since my first trip away when I was sixteen. Every day is more or less the same. The routine becomes entrenched in your psych. Saturdays are steak night with icecream. Sundays are for pizza. The seasons are switch every two weeks as you change hemispheres.

This ship, this last ship, was sailing from East Asia to Australia and back. That same loop over and over and over. I began to look at this loop as a sort of Buddhist prayer wheel. Each loop became a meditation on time and distance.

I wanted a way to portray that strange liminal feeling of time on the ocean. I took this photo using a Solarcan. A beercan looking pinhole camera. I strapped it right above the bridge. Right above where I would spend eight hours a day.

The photo I created reflects this meditation. The sea appears as a mirror to time. The wild storms and white horses are smoothed out by the passage of time. And the Sun, the original timekeeper appears to dance about the sky.

james

july 2026