how long does it take to come back and meet yourself?
how many wrong turns, breathtaking views, how many detours can you take before you end up home again?
how long do you run from what can't be outrun?
where do you hide from your own beating heart?
breathe in.
breath out.
remember who you are?
remember the clay you're shaped from.
ten years to face what can never be faced.
a decade of hiding from your own breaking heart.
only to feel it break again as if no time had passed at all.
as if you closed your eyes
and opened them in the dim light
of a parking garage.
in the passenger seat of a car.
listening to the last words ever spoken.
how many songs and conversations to cover what can never be unheard?
how many years of silence would erase it?
these are the words that made you.
and you can never be unmade.
i let this project dwindle and die. i felt too bored with my photos, too frustrated with my lack of exciting subject matter. i wanted more. life as i captured it felt dull to me. my photos were dutiful and uninspired. i felt like i was letting people down. why even do this anymore? something that became such a chore.
i forgot that the value here is not in the individual image, although sometimes they are beautiful, because sometimes life is beautiful. no, the value here is the collection of photos as a whole; the longevity, the consistency, the documentation of years and years. the value is being able to look back over a life, to watch a life unfold, to document a life.
i forgot that sometimes life is boring. sometimes it's simple, and uninspired. sometimes life is a chore. what makes me sad in retrospect is that in my silence, during the almost year long absence, beautiful and important and wonderful things did happen. things that should be part of the bigger picture of my life. and of course i have pictures of these things, but they are glaring omissions from this archive. that saddens me. and motivates me.
part of the problem is, i think, i began to get a lot of viewers and followers and i began to care what they thought. i checked my stats and analytics all too often. what started as a project just for me to share with friends became something that i was doing for other people also. sometimes that pushed me to take better photos, but mostly it stimulated my ego, not my creativity.
so i'm trying this again. yet again. maybe i needed the silence to come back to the calling in my heart. maybe i needed to remember that it's only in the amassing of years that this becomes magnificent, not because each photo is exciting and amazing (but wouldn't that be nice also). maybe i needed to move past numbers and stats and re-inspire myself.
i'm turning off my analytics, i don't care if i'm popular in russia. i don't even care if you're reading this. although i'll keep writing to you.
i realize now who you are.
you are me.
at the end of the project.
whenever that is.
but not yet.
my first day on the road got me across california, through the sierra nevada and to the edge of the desert. i woke up before dawn in falon, nv and hit the road with a mission. when driving highway 50, the loneliest highway, i always made it a point to stop at the shoe tree. often i would leave shoes, and every time i would stop, take photos, check in. this morning i decided to try and get the morning light of dawn.
15 years ago on my first solo road trip from washington to colorado i had arrived at this same place at this same time and taken the best pictures i'd ever gotten of this tree. this tree. this tree and those photos are landmarks in the story of my life. it was taking and later enjoying those photos that made me decide on photography as a career, it was subsequent journeys that made me realize gypsying as a calling. it was on this highway i felt most at home, most free, and recognized myself fully. and it was this improbable feature of the barren landscape that represented all of this perfectly.
a tree in the middle of the desert - with nothing to speak of for miles. a 70 foot cottonwood, growing out of a wash, by a lonely highway, surrounded by sage and sand and covered - i mean covered - in shoes. i love everything about this. the desert, the ruggedness, the survival, the road, the romance, the symbolism. i loved thinking about this tree. i loved thinking about those shoes and the people that wore them; the dances they danced, the miles they walked, the places they went before ultimately meeting up in the middle of nowhere to hang on a tree in the desert. a signpost for travelers. a heaven for good shoes. a trophy of a tree.
yes i've romanticized it a bit.
I hit the ground running this morning - got up early to move my car and drove it straight to my storage unit and started sifting through things and packing them up. After all this time (I haven't been near the place in almost two years) I kind of forgot what was in there. I hoped it would fit in the car.
As I moved around, loaded, unloaded, packed, took the elevator up and down from car to unit I experienced this strange feeling of nostalgia. "How could this be?" I asked myself. I'd only ever been here a handful of times. It wasn't a home or a particularly nice building. It was always a chore coming here because it meant transporting things up, down, around, in and out. Then I realized. I only ever came here when a great adventure was about to begin. I came here before setting out on the road, before going to New Zealand, upon my return, on trips either from or to Humboldt, or long drives across the desert; always on my way to something grand.
This time was no exception, except this time - I was never coming back. I felt it in my bones and the moment I got here; San Francisco was not my home anymore or ever again. It was bittersweet in that way that only good memories can be. And that bittersweetness extended to my storage unit. My days as an adventurer have changed shape.
With my headlamp and a giant coffee I worked away until the afternoon when sanity demanded that I take a break. Then I decided to spend too much on lunch at my favorite sushi spot and go for my favorite walk in my old neighborhood.
The Presidio is just as beautiful and lovely as ever - although a bit busier. I reminisced as I walked, about the time when the whole block was still abandoned and falling apart and no one ever came out there - a whole forest in the city all to ourselves. My feet carried me naturally over the old trails they knew so well. I didn't even have to think about where I was headed. Until I got to the cliffs above Baker Beach and.... something was very different. I usually hopped the fence, walked down through a forest and got to the bunker using a secret trail. This time I couldn't figure out where to hop the fence at first because - the forest was gone. They cut down all those beautiful cypress trees above the beach.
This saddened me.... alot. A plaque informed me that it was for native reforestation efforts, which I support. But those trees were so beautiful! For a hundred years or more they were so beautiful. And the protection and secrecy they offered was gone. No more secret trail, alot more tourists.
Luckily my other favorite secret spot was still there, still hidden away, mostly undiscovered and still offered this amazing view.....
Goodbye San Francisco! Goodbye unit 2106!
change change change change. that is the name of the game.
seasons, weather, light, people, moods, ideas, beliefs.
the things that don't bend, break. the things that don't change are overthrown. there is no space in this world for that which cannot evolve.
i felt like i'd gotten pretty comfortable with that fact. death, life, evolution. but then a big one came again, ruffled my feathers a bit, ripped me from what i'd been clinging to and revealed to me the places i'd started to stagnate. it's always a beneficial thing once you get through it - but fuck is it a difficult process.
so here's an update - it's been a while. i no longer live in costa rica, residing instead in the small and absurdly charming town of lafayette, colorado. it's the opposite side of the rockies from where i am from and grew up - which is strange. to be on the wrong side of such a forceful landmark, in such a wild land.
i struggled trying to get back in the swing of things - society wise. after being off the grid, out of the country, and gypsying around it was really uncomfortable to deal with the normalcy of traffic and workweeks, and answering phones. i never thought about this when i set out on my journey - the diffculty of returning. i got an office job. i quit it two weeks later. i no longer fit in an office. apparently after you go out to see how big the world is you can no longer shrink back into your former dimensions. i've stood on the edge of too many cliffs overlooking too many spectacular views. i couldn't sit at a desk and stare at a screen again.
this realization was terrifying. along with the realization that there isn't much in the photo industry going on around here - comparatively. not feeling ready to start shooting weddings and family portraits i turned to my other skills. so now i teach yoga and i work on a farm.
as with everything in life there is both good and bad and it's a tradeoff. we have a lovely home, but i miss our costa rican home. i have a garden. i've hardly left town all summer. my family is close. my friends are far away. i work outside. i make a fraction of what i once did. you get the picture - let's focus on the good because there is alot of that:
life is lovely. i live with the person i love the most. we have our costa rican dog, who makes me happy everyday and our good spirits. i am back in my mountains - where i feel most at home and most alive and i've been exploring them all summer, probably more than i ever have. i eat nothing but delicious, organic locally grown vegetables. i see my dad all the time. i have regular yoga students again and am going through the uniquely, rewarding process of building a relationship with them. i am working on some big projects to be unfolding over the next year or so.
life - in other words - is moving right along.
i miss you.
i found this quote today. it seemed fitting.
"for a seed to achieve its greatest expression, it must come completely undone. the shell cracks, its insides come out and everything changes. to someone who doesn't understand growth, it would look like complete destruction."
~cynthia occelli
