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Nine revolutions around the sun for “Traversing” this week, which lands us on the doorstep of our Ninth Annual Holiday Photo Gallery. Today, we will wander as we please, linger where we want, and emerge all the better in the spiritual and aesthetic nourishment that is so fundamental to our very survival as self-reflective creatures with an eye always scanning ahead toward more joyful horizons.

May these shots from stellar photographers around the world be worth more than any 1,000 words I could pull together as we inch ahead, ready or not—because time just does not care—toward 2022.

With the good news being: still here!

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Poof! Good-bye, 2021…by Doug Wheller

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She’s a lady—and an imposing one, at least from this angle…by dr.larsbergmann

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Apparently not his first rodeo…by Klim Musalimov

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Just another crazed cumulus…by National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration

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Into the mystic in Mya...

Once a year during the holiday season, we turn more into a photo rather than word blog, with the objective being nothing more than the pure pleasure of beholding striking images that tell a story, tickle our funnybone, raise a goosebump or a question, shake our grasp or deepen our take on reality, or otherwise address our endless curiosity about the world beyond our own skin.

So, without further ado or yapping from here, let us proceed to the pictures!

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Peaches and Dan by Larry Rose. In case you were wondering, “Peaches” is the one on the left…

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Surf’s Up! by Magdalena Roeseler. Wave, Camera, Action!

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Praying Mantis by Rosie Kerr. Seems it’s trying to sell us something, but what it might be?

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Cave Opening by Kiwi Thompson. It may require seemingly endless trudging, but look what awaits!

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Sprouted! by Manuel Schinner. The space between the big and second toe is called a “sandal gap,” but...

I’ve noticed something of late: In both my work and my blogging life, I pore over so many thousands of photographs through the course of a day and a year that I have sometimes begun to feel jaded and not all that impressed. “Another 9,000-shades-of-orange sunset, yawn…”

That of course, is when I need to give myself a not-so-slight whack on the head with my vintage edition of “Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind,” and remind myself—yet again, and again—how truly magnificent the world is, and how much we owe to photographers who help us see and think about it more attentively, with greater appreciation for its depth and breadth, detail and wonder.

So! Welcome to Traversing’s Seventh Annual Holiday Photo Gallery, guaranteed to bring you, if not great luck and fortune, at least a smile and, I trust, an involuntary “Wow!” and “Ooh!” or two. The pixels, please…

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Good to the Last Drop, by Joel Valve

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Cootie and C...

“Recently, photography has become almost as widely practiced an amusement as sex and dancing,” wrote the culture critic and free-range intellectual Susan Sontag in 1973. Were Sontag alive today (she died in 2004), she would surely be slapping her forehead and bemoaning her abysmally inaccurate “almost” qualifier, given today’s specter of nearly everyone in the industrialized world carrying high powered cameras that sit snugly in their pants pockets or purses, mere add-ons to the smartphones that power their 24/7 connectedness to the world.

Surely, no one anywhere can possibly be having sex or dancing at even a minute fraction of the rate we pull out our cameras to amuse ourselves.

For better and for worse, we are awash in photography, perhaps the greatest democratizer of all art forms, a chance for most anyone to scratch a creative itch and record for at least his or her own posterity a moment in t...

I launched this blog just after Christmas five years ago with the intention of seeing where it went over the course of the next year. When that year was up, I felt moved not only to keep on going, but to compile a Holiday Photo Gallery that would highlight the work of photographers in the Flickr world who had done so much to enliven these pages and assist in exploring the themes and questions I had been posing to myself and to the readers who had joined me in this venture.

That initial Photo Gallery, meant as a one-and-done at the time, begat a second, to which I appended the word “Annual” in order to commit myself to taking a bit of time at this time-squeezed juncture of the year to pause, to marvel, to exclaim, always involuntarily, “Wow, look at that! Amazing!”

And “amazing” is what these photographs are again, in my estimation, all in their own way, just as the four previous iterations in this collec...