I’d long had a friend on Facebook on Facebook, Gretchen Lee Collins, whom I’d never met. I knew she’d lived for a time at the Furnace Mountain Zen Center in the Appalachians east of Lexington, where I’d gone to a couple of meditation retreats over the years. At the time of this photograph, she lived with her partner, Martin Mudd, along the Rockcastle River in the Kentucky Appalachians, close to the border of Tennessee, where they were caretaking a nature center. They lived quite rustically. I asked to visit, and they invited me down. We hiked the trail behind their home, and later in the day, Gretchen took me down the road to another trailhead. I went in alone, with my Sinar F2 4x5 in the Gregory backpack I’d purchased to lug the gear comfortably into the woods. I’d come to a dry creekbed when I spied the boulder on a slope. Rock always attracts my attention, and this was a big block of sandstone, the shaded side covered in moss. That’s where I found this figure. I shot it both on Kodak TMAX 100—which I’ve printed here—and on Kodak Portra 160. When I was the photography artist-in-residence at The Bascom Center for Visual Arts in Highlands, North Carolina, I used their Epson photo printer to make a 13x19 print of the color version—I mounted it and put it in a leftover frame I had and gifted it to Gretchen and Martin when they came to visit family in Louisville.