{"id":2985,"date":"2012-08-05T07:43:20","date_gmt":"2012-08-05T11:43:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/2012\/08\/caretaker\/"},"modified":"2012-08-05T07:43:20","modified_gmt":"2012-08-05T11:43:20","slug":"caretaker","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/2012\/08\/caretaker\/","title":{"rendered":"Caretaker"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Some time ago I watched Bill Moyers interview the writer Barry Lopez and found his replies to Moyers&#39; questions so intriguing that I downloaded a transcript.<\/p>\n<p>When Moyers asks him what it means to be a storyteller, Lopez recalls a conversation he had with a fellow novelist, a man named Kazumasa Hirai who told him:<\/p>\n<p><em>&quot;Your work is to take care of the spiritual interior of the language.&quot; And he said in Japanese this word we use, kotodama, means that each word has within it a spiritual interior. The word is like a vessel that carries something ineffable. And you must be the caretaker for that.<\/em><\/p>\n<p>That metaphor &#8211; the word as a vessel &#8211; is true as well for the image.<\/p>\n<div class=\"tpad-img-center\">\n<figure class=\"wp-block-image size-full\"><a href=\"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/6a01156f6c1fc1970b017743ed47f4970d-800wi\/\"><img decoding=\"async\" alt=\"2093\" class=\"asset  asset-image at-xid-6a01156f6c1fc1970b017743ed47f4970d\" src=\"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/09\/6a01156f6c1fc1970b017743ed47f4970d-500wi.jpg\" title=\"2093\" \/><\/a><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Some time ago I watched Bill Moyers interview the writer Barry Lopez and found his replies to Moyers&#39; questions so intriguing that I downloaded a transcript. When Moyers asks him what it means to be a storyteller, Lopez recalls a conversation he had with a fellow novelist, a man named Kazumasa Hirai who told him: [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,3,4,5,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2985","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-art","category-creativity","category-nature","category-new-paltz-ny","category-photography"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2985"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2985\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2985"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2985"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.mohonkimages.com\/journal\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2985"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}