Most of these photos come from the inside of a train window as I traversed Melbourne today.
It's not infrequently said that train travel quietens the mind and lets a deeper and more receptive state to be felt.
It's the rhythm, some say, the rocking and the rolling -
even now, when trains shoot and glide and jolt without apparent rhythm -
or else there's a feeling of being safely encapsulated, of being transported.
From a train we see others' backyards and may take comfort that not everything around us is front.
We're going somewhere, and in going to that somewhere, we can go as we are.
A train view affords a wider, more encompassing, less judgmental perspective.
Train travel isn't simply hypnotic and lulling; sometimes it's bold and dramatic. There's alot more out there than our non-traveling lives allow us.
It's not only the inconvenient and neglected we get to see from the train, but very often the grand or the subtle and the stretch of history that lets us feel we belong.
This isn't much of a shot, I guess, but it's here because it's near where I grew up, right next to the station I went to school from. So the past is reassuringly present.
This final shot is somewhere I walk now and then, as I did today, and does not come from a train. But it could easily be a train-view, unexpectedly and humbly elegant as it is.
