Dewitt Jones, National Geographic photographer, opened the 2007 Arts Conference with an inspiring presentation that melded his experience on the creative process with his breathtaking images. Dewitt has graciously agreed to allow us to make that presentation available on DVD for a very limited time for $45 plus shipping. If you’d like to order a copy, you must do so by next Monday, July 16. Click here for details. On the subject of hope, Dewitt recently wrote an article about finding hope in nature for a photographic publication. As a follow up to our conference theme, Hallelujah: What’s Right with the World, he’s given us permission to share it with you here as well.

My back hurts! I wish I could say I strained it during a good hard hike or carrying my cameras to the top of some fabulous mountain, but it's deeper than that. I've had an unfused lumbar vertebra since birth (spondylolisthesis), and as I get older, it's finally catching up to me. I've tried everything except surgery, and it still hurts. The odds are good that the pain will just be part of my life going forward.

So how does one deal? I'm a pretty optimistic guy, but there are days when it really gets me down, makes me feel about 100 years old, darkens every step I take. Optimism? Come on, how many affirmations can you intone before your brain starts screaming, “Hey, it hurts! Don't tell me it's all getting better, that it will all be just fine! It hurts! Make it stop!"

It's at times like these that I'm really glad I'm a nature photographer. Not so much the photographer part, but the nature part. I've spent my life hanging out among trees and waves and mountains, and it's the lessons I've learned there that really help me now. I recently read a quote by  Vaclav Havel that articulated a feeling that I've so often had while  wandering in nature. “Hope,” he said, “is definitely not the same thing as optimism. Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.”

I sit in nature surrounded by flowers and songbirds, clouds and granite, bracken and bacteria. Held in that great panoply of wonder and possibility, the smile that graces my face is one of hope. A certainty that it all makes sense from the macro to the micro, from the heavens to my unfused disk.

I know others looking at the same scene have found quite the opposite. Nature is a scary place for them. The law of the jungle: Eat or be eaten. Hope? Forget it. Life is nothing more than the chaos of atoms bumping into each other. No sense here, just nonsense.

Even Barack Obama called his new book, The Audacity of Hope. Great book, but audacity? Not for me. Too much time hanging out in the wilderness, too much time drinking in the beauty. The way I read it, nature publishes hope every day.

I remember one night while teaching a seminar at Point Reyes National Seashore. I stepped out into the parking lot behind the visitor's center to take a break from my students. It had been a long day—technical problems with my projector, one lady had turned her ankle on a hike. Just life, but enough chaos to make me start doubting myself and what I was doing. Had I lost hope? No, but I didn't quite “have” hope, either. I headed over to my car to get a folder of notes. Then, as I turned back, there before me, the new moon was setting over the ridge line. I grabbed my camera.

From my right, a single cloud appeared, the only one in the entire sky.  Wistfully, almost playfully, it skipped along the tops of the trees (okay, maybe a cloud can't skip, but this one did!). When it reached the perfect  point between trees and moon, it actually seemed to hesitate. “Come on, push the shutter!” it called. I did. Then, not with a voice, but with a  feeling deep in my heart, it seemed to add, “It all makes sense, on levels  you can't even imagine. If you forget, just come back outside, and I'll remind you.”

I walked back to class with hope in my heart and a heck of a shot in my camera.

Optimism and pessimism are mental attitudes. Hope may have a mental component as well, but it seems larger than that. A bowl large enough to hold both optimism and pessimism, both yin and yang-hold them in the  soul's deep resonance with the underlying nature of things.

We often lose our optimism when we feel we've lost control of our lives.  But, in the final analysis, perhaps it was folly to think we ever could  “control” them. There are far too many unintended consequences and unfused vertebrae.

However, we can control our perspective, and the perspective I find in nature joyously confirms my sense of hope. Over and over and over again.