In Search

I love the drive from Portland to Montana and back. The topography changes every 100 miles or so. The gorge. The endless plains and farms. The forest. The mountains. The valley in the hills.


I took too many of these photos while driving.


It is good thinking space though. The way the land stretches before you as if there are no more limits. I wonder at the ease of my vehicle and think back to the days when crossing 600 miles would have taken more than a month rather than a portion of my day. The last two times I have driven to Montana, I have been outrunning the rain. The first time, the lightning and thunder came in a few hours after I did. This last time, the rain took a few extra days on the trip. But it was the same rain. I am sure of it.

When I drive to Montana, I often leave the windows up. That is, until I reach the state line and cross from Idaho to Montana. When the window rolls down, there is an intense blast of pine and cedar. You are in the mountain pass. It is full of spruce and ponderosa. As you descend to the valley and meet the river, cottonwood trees greet you on the wind. I smell them always before I see them. Nothing smells more like home than river and cottonwood. Add the whistle of a train and the rush of water, and I am either profoundly homesick or already home.

Montana feels like home in a way that Portland never will. To start, all of Montana is home, even the places that I have never been to. Yet, Portland is an island inside of Oregon. Moreover, the topography of Montana calls out in the secret language of familiarity. In Portland, there are only places where I have lived and worked and spent my free time. Storefronts, book stores, parks, hiking trails, even grocery stores, but never the ground or sky by themselves. As I leave the Interstate for lesser roads headed to my house, I greet meadows and marshes that have always been empty, cliffs that have lost only a little weight, and lakes and rivers that tell me how much snowfall there was last winter by their wax and wane.

On this trip, I also smell the familiar smell of fire smoke. It reminds me of the summer that so much of the state burned that my uncle came from Arizona with his team of firefighters to help quench the blaze. The weekend that he came to visit our house, he looked so tired. He had aged 20 years in the course of a few weeks. He had hardly slept. It was the first time that I was aware that my uncles were mortal. I was so surprised to see him a few years later and see that he had reclaimed much of the youth that had left him while fighting those fires. That was the summer that the sun turned red from the thick layer of fire smoke--red all day long.

Where I stopped to take these pictures has no name. Only a mile marker on a highway between two small towns. It exists in what you call deafening silence. An orchestra of crickets pulses with such intensity as to cover the sound of approaching cars until they are upon you.

This post is far from finished but I am releasing it. I have fallen behind and it may take many more weeks before I have organized all of the thoughts that are attached to these photos. So, here you go. An abrupt end to my road tripping. One of several sagas in my chosen unemployment.

P.S. This is where my sister first learned to walk.

wildflowers

Cassiopeia 

These plants have been my project for the summer. It's funny. I didn't plant tomatoes, but they grew. Seriously. I didn't plant tomatoes. I planted strawberry plants and chilis. The chilis were eaten by slugs and the strawberries survived. ...then the tomato plants sprouted up from the ground like a time capsule left to me by the last tenant. One of the tomato plants gives me softball sized fruit and has a trunk thicker than my wrist. They have a will to live that is admirable. So I have agreed to take care of them. Besides my most faithful bamboo plant, I also have a eucalyptus bush, a citrus mint plant, a lenten rose named Alexandria, and two pots of flowers that live outside next to the wildflowers. The potted plants are named Cassiopeia and Molari. There are about 5 homeless bees that sleep in my flowers. And I have a mouse that lives in my tomatoes and strawberries that I have named Demeter. This is my house. These are my favorite facts of life that stand between me and the loneliness. 

I had a lonely day last week though. So I went and I took these photos where the sidewalk ends

:

Still Trying.

Plums and things

Can I tell you a secret?
Even if I haven't decided what that secret is yet?

We all have secrets and I tend to carry around more from other people than I ever do my own. In fact, mine tend to be rather silly things and I like it that way even if it can be a little embarrassing. So here it is:

I as a social introvert have forgotten how to be by myself. Somehow in the struggling to stay in community while learning how to date while trying to get all of my homework done while no one is around...I just forgot. I leap past solitude to sheer loneliness even though I have a thousand enjoyable activities that I would prefer to do alone. I go looking for companions and either lay aside what I wanted to do or else find frustration in the fact that no one is available.

This puzzles me.

I have never been the kind of introvert who would do well living in the woods alone in a cabin for months on end, though there was once a romanticized version of myself that could have. I have always enjoyed the company of just a few very close friends above either groups or solitude, but I have also always known that I needed it all. I do not know when I began leaving solitude out....real solitude. Not read Grudem in the bath  before class solitude. Not 30 minutes to quickly process my life before I leave or someone comes or whatever else. Not cleaning your room solitude (though it may include that).

So I went on an adventure to teach myself, to reacquaint myself with my own company. And I took these photos sometime between 4:30am and 7:30am:

I found some plums.

I took a 1990's style self portrait. It's blurry because it's artistic to be out of focus...or at least it was in the 90's.

 

I traipsed through vineyards and farms. I got my car good and muddy. I watched the sun rise even though it was over cast and all you could see was the heat behind the clouds trying to burn a hole through the blankets to let the light in. It was beautiful in its own way. 

...and then I went back to bed. 

 

seeing

I was a photographer once.

And once, I was the friend of a girl who could only see the stars. We left each other because I could not live in the dark while she was blind but for the stars.

I have always wished I could take photos exactly as I see them. But I cannot, you see, I cannot. I cannot make that glass eye record my interpretation. I could fit a world onto a blade of grass, but the camera does not see a world. It sees a blade of grass. I can manipulate the frame, the color, the light, the physical context; but that world is only there for those of us who do not need a camera to see these things. I cannot teach that glass eye to see.

It is often like that with people too.

I wish I could make that girl see herself the way I saw her, brilliant and all lit up with stars as if she herself were one of them. I can manipulate the pace, the tone, the words, our physical context; but that brilliant girl can only see the way she always has before. My eyes are as foreign as glass ones. She cannot see the world she herself carries within her.


It would seem, I cannot teach anything to see.

But I have to wonder, does that matter? I would like it to. But the fact is, I keep on seeing just as I have before. There are worlds I study, and those which I myself ignore. And I guess, if I give over teaching, I may be taught how to see.

Seeing.

I have begun taking walks as prescribed by my mother. I forget why. There was some very important health reason. Muscles? Maybe... Stress relief? Sure... Better sleep? Could have been... Less headaches? Sounds right... Anyway, yesterday being the exception, I have been walking about 20-70 minutes everyday. I feel like I am seeing the world for the first time some days. I used to look at the details of other people's worlds and lives. I am only now reclaiming that. Here's my album.
I realized that I stopped taking photos in the city because I don't like being watched while I work and here someone is always watching; and because everyone is a photographer here, I felt like I had to know what I was doing. I needed to choreograph my seeing; but that's not how seeing works best. You should see the objects and people on their terms, put them in their best light and angle, and forget about how you look in this process.
And so I walked and kept on walking. I saw and I kept on seeing. I saw so much that I forgot I could be seen.

And then I saw things that I could not photograph. I saw where wealthy neighborhoods fell away into *other* neighborhoods as if a line had been drawn. Feeling seems a lot like seeing when you begin to see abstract concepts. You close your eyes and the feeling is still there with senses that have not yet been named, telling you about the worlds out there.

Overflowing.

I promise...
to do more seeing
and less talking.

There are too many words here.
Too many so as to take the place of Oxygen.
So let us look
because our eyes are not yet full.

Intermission Over.

chili oil. not related to pie.

Today is a very important day.

Today is the first day I have made a gluten free pie crust that actually did exactly what it was supposed to.

Today is the first day I follow all the directions on the recipe because I do not have to 'get creative' to make it work.

Today is not the first day I have made excellent crust.

strawberries for pie

all the flours for gluten free crust

It is however the first day which I find myself actually wanting to use a rolling pin. And that, that is worth celebrating.








I wrote the above words and took these photos *last* Saturday...and it was an important day. But I really do not know what I was building up to with them. I had an idea of giving reasons for why I don't have a food blog and I probably was thinking about how all of my creativity goes into food these days. This morning's invention in my not awake but not asleep state being chocolate chip pie crust. In the shower, I contemplated putting berries into banana bread. Raspberry banana bread. That's where it's at. With chocolate. Or Nutella. Or just with butter.

However, I am not the sort that should start a food blog on my own. I am easily distracted. To take photos AND write AND cook is asking too much. You will notice that I have no photo of my finished pie. I forgot. In the birthday-ing and the eating, I forgot. Some processes should not be interrupted for photos. Sometimes photography is the natural outcome of the way you live and watching the world around you. But sometimes, sometimes photography gets in the way of the living. You begin seeing so much, begin saving so much seeing for later...that you hardly have any at the time. I don't like that.

Anyway, I've lost myself again. I will be found in the pages of my newest endeavor: Radical Hospitality. It is a book which is both validating so much of what I have always wished I could express and challenging me to be a bigger and better person than I am right now. Why can't healthy things feel only exciting and wonderful? I have growing pains already which only mildly encroach upon the excitement.

It is a new time of life for sure. And soon, very soon, I will be heading home...except, everything is different. Therefore, there will likely be the requisite musing about home and place and people about ... two or three weeks from now. For now, I leave this virtual page with two quotes. One which has followed me from a poet I heard earlier today: "Becoming a person who does not do things just because I can."

I do not yet know its significance in my life and ponderings but for now, it has gentle muse-shaped claws which are hanging on until I have the space to think about it. I think it is related to becoming someone who is free, who thinks enough about what they do and who knows themself well enough with honesty that they are not subject everything and anything which makes a demand of them. Life is so much more than keeping other people happy.

And the second, from Ray Bradbury since he passed away this week and there are few people who I would  love to spend a day, or a lifetime, trying to see the world in the eyes and the shoes that he did. I love the way he looked at and described life.


“We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” 
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Ok, and a third:

“If you hide your ignorance, no one will hit you and you'll never learn.” 
― Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

Brain: In Pictures. [Translation Accompanied]

I have exploded.

This morning, this afternoon, my brain has finally erupted, unclenched, and given me hell.

I, I am trying to pack. 

I am more than a little excited to go home for a spell, even if it will be a cold one.

But my brain, my poor brain. It wants to leave nothing unfinished. I had to give the old man a face lift...

He's not done yet . I need to teach him to smile with old man mischief.
Oh, and eyelashes would be a kindness.

And I had to go through my class notes and keep what I liked...

oh, composites class

Then I had to take pictures of the remaining art that I have been ignoring...

edge of the world

and projects that have [temporarily] failed:

And food art...can't leave that out.

So there you go. Eventually, I plan to assemble poetry and stories which have hitherto been under wraps and stuffed into whatever void is willing to hold them and hide them from my restless mind. As it is, I am due to be on a train in 3 hours and have a bit of progress to make between now and then.

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.