The rain had a way of simplifying things—muting distractions, sharpening the eye. I moved through Zion as a tuning fork. In The Creative Act, Rick Rubin talks about a hidden current of creative energy running beneath all things; the artist’s job is to attune to it. With each pause, each frame, I was responding to rhythm, to tension, to shape. At 35mm, I could reach into the landscape and pull out lines—where cliffs converged, where trees split the air, where color fell off into shadow like a verse reaching its last word.

as the rain polished the rock face to a burnished glow, I stepped closer to frame the surface like sculpture. I wasn’t thinking about scale or destination—just form. Just color. Just texture and breath. The vertical striations in the stone, the jagged break where time had sheared the wall, the soft green echo below—it all aligned into a composition only God could plan. I just noticed it. Rubin calls this awareness a kind of spiritual listening, and that day, soaked and still, I understood exactly what he meant. Zion wasn’t just a subject—it was a collaborator.