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.

Human

I am discovering something, or rather a lack of something: I do not actually know what it means to be human...and for myself, what it means to be a woman. What is more unsettling to me is that I do not think that this is just the age I am at or where I live or even just who I am right now. I do not think there is any rule that says, "You will eventually figure this out." As best as I can tell, we are too often a species content with not knowing. I really hate it when it is not comforting to not be alone.

I want to know. I do believe that I need to know if I am to build the sort of life that I want. I have a lot of cheap answers and maybe even some good ones but nothing has been sorted. This is not the kind of thing that will resolve itself without at least the small effort of seeking. And I am excited, at least, in part. It is my project for the summer. It may last longer, I can hardly hope to know that this will all be wrapped up beautifully at the end of the about 70 or so days I have left of summer before I am back into classes and routine and schedules.

People do not usually make sense, but I have long justified this by saying that I do not know enough about them...that I am merely reading them out of context. But now, I want to know what it is that we are...and what we should be...and if there is any hope of bridging whatever gap there may be.

I believe that people have the right to be themselves. As a whole, we are not honest enough or secure enough most days. Too many of us are who we think we should be without a clear idea of where these standards came from or why. But I think it is important to be different...not for different's sake, but for honesty and beauty and all the makings of art that somehow pour out of the souls and minds of men and women. There is a way to see our similarities without laying aside what makes us different and unique.

Doubtlessly, I am a product of Western society; but I hope that I am not so entrenched in culture so as to never meet with Truth. I am what I am, and I cannot pretend to be anything else. We will see what this search brings. As I said, I am excited. I am also a little be wary of finding what I do not want to know--but more than anything I am curious. There is a life that I am looking for, and I will give up so many things to have it; but how will I know it if I do not even know who it is I should be?