Vineland, New Jersey

From a scrap of receipt paper, asked for at a wonderful Italian restaurant in Vineland, New Jersey on July 5th.

I never want to forget the way it felt driving down the E40 today in New Jersey. The sun was getting golden and I drove, for once able to relax without falling asleep. I soaked in slow jazz, let it roll around in my bones as I passed the most amazing cornfields, whooshing past the big white farms with flags waving high. Road that stretched long and just wide enough; greens and golds and sunwashed blacks and handwritten signs for fresh fruit that all made me want to drive a snail's pace and never leave the road.

I want to remember the colors I saw and the jazz I heard while they still ring in my limbs--they turn stale so fast, and I forget why I ever cared.

It's the 5th of July, and for the first time in my life I missed the 4th. It got lost somewhere in Baltimore, or airborne next to a man whose dad is about to die here. That's why he flew in. To say his last goodbyes to a father he doesn't live close to--does he love him, I wondered? There was sadness in his eyes that said yes. Very much.
...
I guess this is what I'd do if I were single, now--go to restaurants by myself and write and eat delicious food while people were weirded out by me--I'd be the person the people watched, like this table of loud east-coasters with Jersey accents next to me. They all have 'usuals' here; pastas and salads and bread and wine; they call the waitress by name even though she isn't wearing a name tag. Vanessa. She's kind and doesn't patronize me because I'm here alone and writing on her receipt paper.

I want to make time for this in my life: quality alone time with myself, mindfully eating and lolling the thoughts around. Sitting, with water pooling in my mouth; I move it slowly, let my tongue go swimming. Feel the life-imparting wetness over my teeth, seeping into my gums, finally swallowing.

So far away from my usual desperate gulps, this way is abundant. It knows there will be enough water to fill my belly and my life, full of oceanic treasure and a fresh spring of great ideas and ample opportunity.

Once, I knew you deep.

There are a lot of unpublished drafts on my side of Freedom. Yes, I just italicized the title of my blog like it is a legitimate publication.

I've been coming here a lot in tiny fragments, and then angry confused tornadoes, and then slowly dripping controlled syllables. None of it fit to show.

I've been trying do describe this summertime, drenched in sweat and water, perpetually sticky, subsisting on a diet of potato chips and watermelon and ice cream and netflix tv.
I've been trying to tell about the way photography fills me up when I feel like it shouldn't; that's what music is supposed to be for.
I've been trying to be excited about student teaching come fall semester, and it is working.
I've been writing little ho-hum sentences that lack luster, and I get frustrated and go away.

I've been rereading my old self--the one who wrote better and longer and loved pens and paper instead of shutters and film developed at Walgreen's. I've reread her fears about marrying the man I am so blissfully married to--and I'd forgotten how scared spitless she was. So scared to make the wrong decision after already making so many...
I've been thinking a lot about lost things. Things and people I once spent a lot of time on and now have nothing to show for it. When we run into each other again there are zero words exchanged that would let anyone believe that once, we invested in each other. Once, we cared really a lot about how each other's day was, and we talked about politics and dream vacations and music that changed our lives. Once I knew you deep, and we spent hours we would have otherwise slept up talking, on the phone or in laundromats or in our tiny apartments.
And now you're a hippie bum in China,
you're a polished married man,
you're a mother of two babies I don't know at all,
and you're...
gosh, I don't have a clue in the world where you are.

I don't regret that I don't have any reason at all to talk to you or her or them--but just wonder where all those minutes and all that energy we spent on each other went in the universe. Did it dissipate into shards of glitter, float up and clump with some corner of the sky, or could it really have only vanished? All that would be left is the minimal brain space we allocate to each other now, once in a blue moon when we pop up on each other's facebook feeds, or are at the same mutual friend's baby shower or wedding or other celebration of love we no longer share, friendly or romantic or any other kind.

Maybe I'd like some placards announcing my accomplishments in relationships: with neatly printed names and timelines, interaction birth and death dates to neatly seal things up. Then, when I wondered, I could wander over to these official things and look and remember over an icy glass of tap water how crazy deep I loved these people, right or wrong or convenient or no.

I've been holding back.
I've been pushing myself.
I have trouble letting old things and people go, and in the same moment
I am the one who snips the string.

the early morning light.

there's something about the early morning hours in the summertime. when the sun wakes up with you and you feel pleasant to meet the day. oh hello, your heart smiles. i feel glad that you're here.

there's something magical about walking outside to a pleasant temperature, being comfortable in shorts and a tee shirt instead of having to layer a silly number of thick fabrics that make you feel itchy, however adorable they look on pinterest. there's something beautiful about knowing your lover for life is sleeping gently  in the other room, while your monkey mind had to wake you up earlier to say things about precisely that.

there is something about running in the early morning light, with cars whizzing past, going to work or the gym or i don't even know where else. i feel part of the world, and simultaneously i am my own.

i spend a lot of time alone these days, working alone, being the sole owner and in-charger of my business. i don't have to roll my eyes at stupid comments people make, because i don't hear them.

but what i do hear is my own voice and thoughts, which can be just as stupid, petty, annoying.

it seems like the most successful people have never gone a different direction. they had their vision right from the start and then just worked hard, bam. but i think that is a lie.

it's also strange to be by yourself all the time when you think of how much other people rely on other people to tell them how they're doing. it's strange to try to get that information only from your insides. you wonder at first if they're wrong, and assume they have to be.

and then you start to realize how much you have inside of you. it's not just organs and a soul and guts, but a lot of strength you didn't know was there. because being a full-time creative is the hardest and most exhilarating thing. I've always wanted 'hard', because that meant i was gettin something killer in return. in return for the hard work. here's the thing, is that some people work hard forever and they never get the killer thing. they realize they need to go in a different direction, and even though that vision is still murky they know they ache for it.

i know i ache for it, is the thing.

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.

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.

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.

Honest Artistry.

At times I wonder if the scariest things are the most important to do just because they are scary.

Arnold Shoenberg started writing atonal music because he felt morally obligated. He felt it was the most honest, truthful thing for him, felt it would be absolutely one million percent wrong to go back to tonality. And he wished a little bit that he could keep writing late 19th century Romantic music, beautiful edgy melodies. But he couldn't.

I heard those things in class today and I got the shivers, because I feel the exact same obligation to honesty with all my arts.

All my writing, all my photographs, all my songs and my creative juices feel obligated to flow in the direction of the purest honesty. And sometimes people hate it. And sometimes people are indifferent to it. And sometimes I care, and mostly I don't--because it's not about anything except being true to those particles in me that call for a certain kind of art at a certain time of the day or week or century. And even though those German composer saps always talked about taking dictation from God, spontaneous inspiration oozing out of them, I feel a shred of that, too. I feel me, though, directing my camera and my pen and my hands as I keep creating--and I'm voracious for it.

Sometimes it weirds me out, this whole being-an-artist thing. Sometimes I feel crazy and lonely and completely wild, sometimes out of control and ridiculous and brash. And then I think: Silly, it's just photos. It's just words. It's just little things. But I made them and they are out there in the world for me to never take back and that part feeds me, and my insatiable urge to make things, pictures or sentences or songs, keeps carrying me forward into a chasm that's so scary and thrilling I can't get enough.