Saturday, April 28, 2012

Death Star

I love doing photography because I can control everything. But at the same moment, I control pretty much nothing. I don't control what locations or website templates are available or how long my stomach stays full from the food I feed it. I don't control how big my hands are or really how fast they can type. I don't decide the weather or the moon or tides or the sun and stars and most of the time I'm just fine with that--just fine to enjoy the sun and stars and tides the way they are. As is. Like the section of the store DI. Large As Is. A star could go there, maybe. And even if it was dead I would care for it. Even if it was on its last dying star breath I would want it to know how valuable it was, even if there are millions of kajillions of other ones that appear exactly like it. I would want to give that star a voice, let it say the final words of what it is like to be a star, a dying star on its last star breath, in the Large As Is section of DI. I would hold it up from the cement floors, turn off all the fluorescent lights and unplug the array of dingy lamps, and I would cradle the dying star in my small human arms. I would sing it things if it wanted, but mostly I would listen.
Mostly I would pay attention, and give that star the decency of someone being there when she died.

And maybe that's what we're all afraid of--dying alone, gasping our last gulp of oxygen without fanfare and just peacing out, unnoticed and unrevived. I don't think we're afraid that no one would care as much as we're afraid that no one would be there. We want holding in those last gulps maybe more than anytime.

Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Coffee With Milk

I love this poem by Natalie Goldberg. I want you to know it too.

Coffee With Milk

It is very deep to have a cup of tea
Also coffee in a white cup
with milk
and a hand to go around the cup
and a mouth to open and take it in
It is very deep and very good to have a heart
Do not take the heart for granted
it fills with blood and lets blood out

Good to have this chair to sit in
with these feet on the floor
while I drink this coffee
in a white cup
To have the air around us to be in
To fill our lungs and empty them like weeping
this roof to house us
the sky to house the roof in endless blue
To be in the midwest
with the Atlantic over there
and the Pacific on the other side

It is good this cup of coffee
the milk in it
the cows who gave us this milk
this
simple as a long piece of grass

.............
I want to live life this way. Aware, present, seeing the magic all around in the simplest of things.

Friday, April 6, 2012

A thousand percent crazy.

The walk is imperceptible. The walk to beauty. The walk to real, brave artistry.
And it is a walk because you never arrive and that's part of the obsession. The obsession with making things. Beautiful and meaningful things. Words and sentences and songs that are my own and not regurgitated from schooling.

I am crazy. Not even a little crazy, but totally and completely one thousand percent crazy. I wish I could let my life reflect that instead of kindly and calmly putting on normal clothes, attending classes and doing my homework like a normal person, and calmly moving on with my life, day after day.
I want to be wild.