I’ve Done the Same Thing Every Day for More Than 12 Years. This is What I’ve Learned.

Many of us know the feeling of resolving to do things differently in our everyday life. Photographer Mary Jo Hoffman understands what it is to make a daily ritual out of that resolve. On January 1, 2012, she began a “one-year creative effort” in which she committed to capture a photo of a found object in nature and post it to her blog each day. Since then, it’s turned into a more than decade-long relationship with the world around her.

By making creativity her accountability partner, Hoffman has continued to explore the alchemy that happens when you regularly create space for stillness and awareness. She describes it as “placefulness,” or “state of peaceful and attentive engagement with the analog world.” For her, the beautiful and bewitching state of placefulness is grounded in the dailiness of  ritual. Her experiences, her epiphanies, and her exquisite photography are captured throughout the pages of Still: The Art of Noticing, from which the below is excerpted.—YJ Editors

From the start, the rules for Still were simple and explicit: found nature, minimally manipulated, photographed in natural light, on a white background, every day.

No location off-limits. No natural subject too small or too ordinary. Urban alleyways, riparian wilderness paths, my backyard. Obscure prairie wildflowers, jewel-winged dragonflies, broken-necked sparrows at the base of glass doors.

Those were the rules. I would follow them every day.

As it happens, I have, at one time or another, broken every one of those rules, save one: I have not missed a single day.

Dailiness takes all the pressure off any given day. There are no important or unimportant days. There is just one day after another. There’s nothing you have to do today but show up. If you don’t finish, or don’t do your best work, or screw up completely, guess what? You have tomorrow.

What dailiness did was keep me, more often and more consistently than ever before in my life, in a state of noticing. Driving my son to school, I knew already that my day would be easier if I had picked a subject by lunchtime rather than by late afternoon. And so I scanned the roadsides between Shoreview, Minnesota, and the east side of Saint Paul, noticing that the swamp thistles along the highway were fading, that the asters were in bloom, that the maple tree on Hodgson Road had just begun to turn from a scarab-bright mix of green, yellow, orange, and scarlet streaks into a torch of red flame.

On my morning walks, I noticed feathers, individually and in messy plucked mounds. I noticed how much more interesting a particular beetle-damaged leaf was when it had been reduced to lacework than when whole and healthy.

In winter, of necessity, I noticed the colors of twigs and branches, the sculptural qualities of dried grasses, the outlines of last summer’s thistles against blank snow. I had always loved flowers, but now I fell in love with seed pods—the sickle-shaped beans of locust trees; the plump, crowned, self-satisfied fatness of poppy seed heads; the winged samaras of maples and elms. I fell in love with galls—willow galls like miniature gray wasp nests, and those round swellings that look as if goldenrod stems have tried to swallow golf balls.

My daily walks exploded these fixed, unnecessarily idealized, and in some sense almost infantilized images and forced me to see beyond the obvious.

This kind of paying attention eventually took me beyond simply observing my surroundings in order to beat the clock that day. What four thousand images (and counting) have shown me is that the daily discipline of looking at the world eventually becomes the habit of living in the world.

This feels like a return to a kind of knowledge we all once had, when we truly understood what it was to live in a single place, and that knowledge was inherited from one generation and passed to the next.

I know I still haven’t answered my own question: Why submit to the burden of a daily deadline for much of the second half of my life? Why not give myself a little break, now and then?

OK, so I was superstitious. When a streak is broken, it’s as if a spell has been broken along with it, and so often the magic behind what has been done so well for so long disappears forever.

Stubbornness played a role—an attribute I possess in equal measure to my rebelliousness. I did not stop, in part, because I would not let myself stop, out of pride and a blind sort of refusal to give up.

But here’s the real reason. And I believe it more every day, even though it sounds like something etched with a burner tip into the wooden plaque above the sink at Grandma’s lake place. The reason is this: You are what you do.

Put another way:

If you think about becoming an artist all the time, then you are a thinker.

If you dream about becoming an artist, then you are a dreamer.

If you read about becoming an artist, then you are a reader.

If you study art, then you are a student.

If you do dishes or vacuum or declutter your house in order to avoid making art, then you are a cleaning crew.

But if you show up every day and make a little bit of art, however incomplete or unsatisfying or misguided or not how Georgia O’Keeffe would have done it, you are an artist.

Dailiness, I’ve come to believe, is more important than training or education or workshops or mentorship or MFAs. You don’t get better at what you are told to do, or shown how to do, or educated to do. You get better at what you actually do, over and over. You didn’t learn to tie your shoelaces with your eyes closed because your mom showed you how to do it. You learned because you tied a whole lot of shoelaces, day after day after day.

In fact, I have begun to wonder if dailiness will not in the end be the body of work that will be my legacy. That whenever I am done, for whatever reason, I will have left behind thousands of small eye blinks, each a record of noticing the world on a particular day, and one enormous accomplishment that will be their collected, cumulative weight.

I could live with that.

Now, if you’ll excuse me, I have a photo to make.

Excerpted with permission from Still: The Art of Noticing, written and photographed by Mary Jo Hoffman and published by Monacelli.