Fine

Hello, how are you.

I’m fine.

Fine is a blur made of leftover chorizo taco bowls, sleepless nights, a creative restless maniac mind that won’t stop but few places to put the energy. A late night drive to Marion to take pictures of a lightning storm, but I wait 20 minutes for 11 gallons at the Marathon so now the lightning’s headed to Cincinnati and I go home. Ridiculous dates with a stuffed animal named Dylan. A note in my phone consisting of a strange list of ideas about pringles and jail time and nonexistent boyfriends and bad attitudes. Polite emails exchanged with photojournalists and not-photojournalists. Guilty third coffees and non essential sugar, an obsolete YMCA schedule on the fridge, canceled flights, canceled AirBnbs (this is a very difficult time for your host, please explain why you are canceling in at least 200 characters), canceled drinks with friends, canceled being at my daughter’s side as she gave birth to a girl on Passover. Canceled life as I knew it before This, making room for a new That. The weirdness that is Tiger King (why the hell did I even watch that), a 4 night Jameson Coke streak, construction crews, peanut butter with a spoon, Shut Up and Play The Hits. I don’t remember what happened before mid February. It stays light later, and that makes the days feel longer which is hard sometimes, but then the nights are shorter which is good. I go for walks on the Greenway and when I wear my white baseball cap everyone looks at me a little differently and I wonder why.

Hello, I’m fine is a little tears now and then but a lot of silly when almost everybody else seems way too serious, and not minding whether that makes me unPC or not. Fine is a little face with a perfect chin, her name is Josephine. It’s thank you for sending that funny text about your gift wrapped tires and making me laugh. Fine is burning the blueberry pancake candle. Putting the laundry in and washing the guest towels as if you were here, and picking up the Joseph Campbell book, right where I left off.

pura vida

Traveling back into my memories of my first trip to Costa Rica in November 2019, I look for something tangible and can’t make out a shape or a form or a thought, or even a chronological order of events that make sense. I only see a shimmering pool of feelings and impressions and senses. I dive in and I’m immersed in another world, lost in vibrant hues of blue and green. I’m enveloped in heat and steam and thick yellow light. I feel cold rain pelting my face and hot water flowing over my skin, silky tendrils of seaweed and kisses from a school of tropical fish. I feel several electrifying seconds of free fall, diving into an emerald pool underneath a waterfall in the jungle. I swim over and beneath it and let the force of the water pummel the top of my head and I can’t open my eyes so I succumb to its power, and for a moment I know what Bill Callahan meant when he sang we stand under it… but we don’t understand it. I melt into the torrent and I become the waterfall, flowing into freshwater and river water out to saltwater and I feel the shock and the tingle and the quiet. My body responds to the temperature, hardening and softening. I wish I could drown here without drowning, and I drift, let the current take me because I would rather go where the water prefers to go.

In this pool of the senses I keep swimming and swimming, looking for a story that I can share with you. But I find no story here.

I’m standing in a Catholic Costa Rican church with tears in my eyes because there is someone kneeling and praying alone in front of a statue of Jesus with his arms held open, while the light falls soft all around through pink stained glass and I’m overcome with this beauty in the asking.

I’m soaring above the jungle treetops on a creaking and twisting rope and the wind is whistling in my ears and I can smell earth and wetness and flowers, and I wish I were not attached by a harness and three safety clips so that I could let go and start flying.

A man brings me a traditional casado in a little soda and I smile and say gracias. He says, as all Costa Ricans do, con mucho gusto. Rather than de nada (no problem), con mucho gusto, meaning with pleasure, and there is a warmth in his eyes that meets mine so it doesn’t matter that we don’t speak the same language.

I’m standing on a beach in Montezuma and a piece of my heart is with a baby sea turtle struggling to make his way home. The waves push him back and he keeps moving forward. So tiny. So tenacious. So utterly impossible, his journey. I feel myself holding my breath until I watch him finally disappear into the sea, tumbling into a wave and my heart leaps with the possibility of beginning and I lose that piece of me with him.

At night, yellow ylang ylang flowers release their fragrance to hang sultry in the tropical air, intoxicating, luring the moths and I. Who knew that there were flowers that also prefer the darkness in which to share their beauty?

I’m opening my eyes in a soft bed in my parents’ guesthouse, naked with a cotton bedspread over me and there are green silk curtains barely moving in early light and everything is warm and heavy and silent except for birds singing. In this moment I feel both the intense ache of loneliness and pure delight in my solitude. I wonder how it is possible to want someone’s arms around me, sharing the peacefulness of this moment, at the same time that I am perfectly content with the empty space in the bed beside me.

My finger brushes a tiny fern in the grass and it retracts, shy. Who are you, I never gave you permission to touch me, are you safe? I feel a sting behind my eyes, oh I understand. And a piece of me is left with her too.

How do you translate an experience of the senses into words made out of 26 letters, strung together into coherent sentences that are somewhat grammatically sensible? How do you string those sentences together to describe an entire ocean you cannot completely understand yourself, as if you’re a reporter detailing the facts of a matter? It’s a bit like trying to explain how you fall in love, I suppose.

In Costa Rica, they often say pura vida. Pure life. It has a multitude of meanings, but mostly it’s a way to express acceptance for the present. All is good. These people live neither in the past nor the future. They have built a culture like a colorful fabric, weaving together their individual lives with their ancestry, their extended families, communities, and with nature. They are happy because they never need to worry that they hang on any one thread alone. They need very little, because they already feel rich in so many things that are free. The mountains. The plants. The music. The gatherings. The gifts of the sea.

I’m at the mouth of an underwater cave near Isla Tortuga on my 10th free dive attempt to see a reef shark. I’ve not been overly careful, and my leg is burning where I scraped it on a coral covered rock two dives ago. But my curiosity brought me back here, and I have kicked harder and gone deeper this time. The pressure is too much to stand but I will myself to stay anyway, awestruck. The guide is taking my hand, pulling me into the opening. The shark is inside and motionless except for his tail moving ever so slightly. Black eyes watching me. The electricity of being so close, wanting to swim closer, to reach out and touch but not having enough oxygen. The guide’s eyes meeting mine through our masks, the exchange of mutual delight and adrenaline. Him putting his hands on my hips and sending me back up quickly for oxygen. Me breaking the surface and gasping the air and laughing and shouting like a crazed woman I saw him! I saw him! In that moment I’m delirious with joy and I’m kneeling in pink light in front of a Costa Rican Jesus with his arms held wide. He’s smiling at me and shaking his head. Pura vida.

The ocean welcomed me, but only so far. Too deep into her secrets, and she pressured me back to the surface. Too reckless, and she clawed me like a tiger. She drew my blood into hers but her sting afterward was a kiss.

I know you love me, but you have so much to learn, she said.

I look at her marks on me and I hope they leave scars.

dancing solo

Having some fun lately experimenting with a little self portrait series in colored lights.

requiem for an enigma

This is a story about a girl who’s been called an enigma her whole life. And who very much realizes she is one, even to herself.

The truth is that I don’t fit well into any one box. I have already lived multiple lifetimes and most would consider these out of the usual order. Few would guess the things I have lived through, both good and bad. I am always honest, sometimes to a fault, but don’t feel the need to share everything. I don’t consider myself defined by anything external, and therefore I float easily between worlds and have a very diverse group of friends. I feel I belong everywhere and nowhere.

I was a child who grew up in her own head because I felt dissonance between the world I was born to and who I was. I was not affirmed, so I learned to affirm myself. I conformed to certain things in order to feel safe but inwardly I stoked a hotbed of rebellion. I questioned everything, believed in everything and nothing. I was a risk taker and somewhat reckless. I still am. I ran outside in thunderstorms and tornados to experience their power and dared God to strike me down. I was in two major car accidents but I still drive much too fast. I learn from experience, and yet even after being burned I will take the same risks over and over. I am probably one of the most resilient people you will meet. Some might say headstrong.

I love power when it is used for good, but I dislike the spotlight; I prefer subtle influence. I am a passionate and sensual person, and highly attuned to my own body. When I love, I love with complete abandon. I open up slowly, layer by layer, but try to force me open and I flee. I only ever give what I want to give, and I expect no more from anyone else. By the same token, I consider my greatest gift my intuition, and I likely know a lot more about you than you think I do.

I’m fierce and exacting about what I want from myself and my work. I’m obsessed with quality because I care deeply that people have a good experience. I look up to no one and down on no one. I love human beings and I want to understand them. I crave depth. I ask questions of everyone because I need to make sense of the stories I see around me. Everyday life plays out to me like a movie, and every person and thing an interesting and complex character I want to know beneath their layers. I try to discover the soul in everything I see, no matter whether it’s a rock or a person. Photography has been a way for me to do this.

I am a deeply spiritual person. I believe in God, and I have felt flooded with his/her presence in a Catholic cathedral just as well as in the Costa Rican jungle. I do not hold to any particular religion because none of them seem either wrong or right to me. I believe in the idea of reincarnation, in the rebirth of souls for the purpose of growth and becoming, and many of my beliefs relate to different pieces of different religions. I dread people asking me certain questions, like: what is your faith? What is your political persuasion? What’s your favorite this or that? Because these questions I can’t answer. I have no favorites. I have very many things I love and appreciate equally. I put things together and create my own version, but I enjoy entertaining other viewpoints and find validity in many that do not look like my own.

I love to dress up. I have owned fabulous dresses that I never had occasion to wear. And yet I feel equally myself in sweats and a baseball cap. I am comfortable in many different hats. I know how to hunt and clean a deer and I also know how to mingle at a fancy party. I enjoy both equally.

I am descended from both a notorious pirate and an English queen. I also come from peasants who kept warm in the winter by sitting in cow dung. I am fascinated by all cultures and I want to absorb them, eat them, wear them on my body. I don’t want to just travel and see places. I want to become everywhere I go. I am sometimes frustrated that the color of my skin, or the language I speak prevent me from completely fitting in. I feel a constant need to experience the full spectrum of human existence. This makes me always very restless.

My only fear is one I already know will come true, and that is reaching the end of my life and not having lived all of the lifetimes I believe I was meant to live. I don’t know if I will ever score that film, or write that book, or be an infamous spy, or dig up buried treasure. But I have such an ache inside of me to be so many things, to do so much more than I think I will ever have the capacity to do.

poems for self

I also write them, here.

neptune

It's fascinating to me how some art can slice straight through all of my layers and hit me straight in the heart. Like an arrow shot skillfully through a very narrow opening, it completely misses all of my evaluative processing, so that I don't really judge what it is about it that makes it good. My first reaction is only to feel something.

I wrote on my blog years ago that my best pictures were made in a moment when my heart broke. I believe some of the best art is made when the artist is broken in making the work - not only in terms of sadness or grief, but when the beauty so overwhelms them that they create from the most vulnerable place, the inner child.

Merriam-Webster uses words like subdued and interrupted to define brokenness. I saw an interview with John Frusciante some time ago, where he talked about how art already exists outside of us - that we don't "create" art, but rather we are a channel through which the art seeks to finds expression. If this is true, then art does require our brokenness. We construct the adult we want to be to protect the child we are inside, but it is often that very adult in us who judges and criticizes, who overthinks, rationalizes and creates fear. This is what needs to be subdued for the inner child to have the courage to bring the art to life. 

Perhaps this same process of brokenness is what allows us to feel art deeply - even art that we might otherwise dismiss. Jeanette Winterson wrote about this in her essay Art Objects: "When you say 'This work has nothing to do with me,' 'This work is boring/pointless/silly/obscure/élitist etc.,' you might be right, because you are looking at a fad, or you might be wrong because the work falls so outside of the safety of your own experience that in order to keep your own world intact, you must deny the other world of the painting. This denial of imaginative experience happens at a deeper level than our affirmation of our daily world. Every day, in countless ways, you and I convince ourselves about ourselves. True art, when it happens to us, challenges the 'I' that we are."

It takes courage not only to make art, but to let it in.

“A writer’s heart, a poet’s heart, an artist’s heart, a musician’s heart is always breaking. It is through that broken window that we see the world.”

— Alice Walker