I do not have to grow up
And I know it.
But I cannot keep the world young.

That, I realize, is what I really want.
It is a tragic case of miscommunication
Between cause and effect.

Digging in my heels will only make me
Terribly alone
--and covered in dirt.

Life is not ever one single thing,
That's just how our memory records it,
Editted and glamorized.

Instead, it is the quiet pounding
Of a thousand hearts
Headed hopefully home.

And every one of those hearts
Spins ever onward
At full tilt with our globe

As we race ever and always
Around the only star
That gets to rule and reign time itself.

We can stop all of the clocks
And break all of the alarms
But the world will never stay young.

Brilliant Archimedes wrote,
"Give me a place to stand,
And I will move the Earth."

But that is not the problem, is it?
Try to hold this Earth
Stationary.

Try to keep her still.
Yes, unwind all of the watches
And let us together lose track of time.

But neither you nor I can stop it.
And we will never be free
So long as we spin.

So shake the Earth from orbit,
If you can find a place
To stand so far away from home.

Or better yet,
Let us sail
Straight into the sun.

Let us make it explode
With all of the star light and wonder
Held in our own aging eyes.

There, in the dark of newly emptied space,
We will finally be free of time and change;
But we will also be left with no where to go.

uneditted: for the love of trees.

I do not know why photography is so difficult for me these days; but it does not flow naturally. It is a struggle to continue to see and to make what I see visible to those who look at the it from the other side of my camera. It was not always this hard; and I have a litany of half reasons trying to justify it. But at the end of the day, all I have to offer is that my mind's eye is blind being so full of ideas for the other things I want to do. 

Two separate window projects.

A sketch for a friend.

Experiments in painting or pastel-ing stars.

A whole world that I am trying to get out of my head and onto paper.

And this faint desire to pull several of these ideas together for a kid's book which I am having a hard time believing that I can do...not that that is relevant. (I am getting better at just doing something because I want to and not because I think I can. Sometimes belief arrives a bit late.)

As I write this, I have received another text from a friend in California who has a project for me.

And photography keeps sitting in the corner, looking abandoned. Over and again, I keep getting asked to do photography, but I do not know if I am artistically capable. It is not the direction my mind's eye is turned. The mind's eye is a really fickle thing. At least, this is true for me. It follows passion quite closely.

And so, if one wants me to do a certain project for them, to make this or that, one has to make me fall in love with the ideas supporting it and leading it. It is interesting to me how much love has to do with which projects get done. It is an appropriate metaphor in so many ways. If I do not get to work when I first fall in love with something, it can be difficult to remember what it was I first loved. I need to feed the infatuation until it can become a love that has the weight of time and testing attached to it.

I do not know what this means for me and photography. Perhaps we are taking a break. Perhaps, I just need to make the time to fall in love again.

control and oblivion

As of November 1st, I started keeping a journal of pain. I do not know what else to call it. The journal is not for emotional pain or psychological pain. Just physical pain (unless I have reason to believe that they are tied together). It has started to worry me how many of my hours and even days I give away to pain but I hardly keep track.

I am so busy running to the next day hoping to feel ok then, to feel like a functioning individual, to feel human and then trying my hardest to dwell there for as long as possible and forget the grinding of gears, the shorting of circuitry, and the complaining of parts desperately in need of maintenance that I do not know how to give...that I am quite certain that I am missing something.

This is my attempt to take a step back. To live less in survival. To stop swinging from 'things will never get better' to 'I hope this never leaves'. Because things will get better and then the better will leave and life will keep on living.

I need to be careful, though, not to fixate on my pain as I write it down. I need to not make any goals as I study myself. Because I cannot tap into another source of stress. This is more about honesty and remembering things which I have hitherto tried my best to forget because I do not want to have the answers available for myself much less for the people around me. I do not want to feel broken and I do not want anyone else to know that I am. But I do. And I am sure that they do.

And I guess in some way this is my attempt at reclaiming my life. Maybe a journal is progress... and maybe it is just there to make me feel like things are moving forwardly... like I am allowed to move forward... like I am not choosing blindness as I move on. I cannot be bound much longer to the constant stopping and starting of life; and I cannot keep making my life about how well my body is cooperating with my intentions. At some point, I have to stop caring about all of that and get to living.

"To live is the rarest thing in the world. Most people exist, that is all." ~Oscar Wilde

So I will let the paper do the caring, let my ink pay attention; but as for my life... it will not be found mapped out on paper and it will not be confined to the days when I feel like it. I have already allowed too much of pain to dictate who I will be on a given day. It is so easy to do.

My pain journal, in a way, is a confession and hopefully my repentance. If I am honest enough about the pain, if I let it in, if I stop ignoring it... I think it will not fight so hard to be heard. In a way, by giving it a voice, I hope to free up more life for actually living. And that really is all I can ask for at the end of the day: I want to be allowed to live. Everything else after that is peripheral. Descriptors and clauses. Commentary and opinion.