... and the view of our little town, nestled in the San Jacinto Mountains, from up there. While this is a nice general view of this place in which we happen to be stuck, saying regularly that there are worse places, this town and these trails hold far more significance for a soul who was crammed into this place when they were 12.
My wife hopped around at her whim most of her life and found herself here ten years ago, but she's the type of person to hit all these trails immediately, so in reality she knows my mountain better than I do, while I'm the type of person who has been putting these trails off for 30 years, because why would I want to go for a long, exhausting walk when I could be treating photos or writing?
She has felt the aching stir of her nomad soul, pushing her to escape, while I managed to escape twice, then was kicked out, and yet, here we are, hiking the trails that eluded my motivational drive for three decades, like Tahquitz won't let us escape until we truly understand him. Maybe that was always the curse that so many people speak of? Maybe this devil, trapped underneath Southern California granite is just lonely?
I've clearly been using the current social climate to take a step back from my work and really enjoy my family, but as a family we've been enjoying this mountain so much more that we have been wondering why we wanted to escape so bad? We are beginning to truly appreciate where we are stuck.
This particular trail wouldn't have been possible with the kids, as we were trudging through feet of snow near the top, but the goddess and I needed a little escape from our escape, and luckily we still have some support from our beautiful, and relatively unaffected community (good luck finding toilet paper) up here so we can get away and take a deep breath, when most are observing the world through closed blinds.
I am not a trail soul, yet, but I am relentless, whether I can breathe or not, and with this beautiful soul leading me, I can conquer anything. The next little baby step in my own personal realignment should be pretty epic. La vita รจ bella.
I have been praised for my creative relentlessness, but it exists to such a fault that I don’t really know how to interact with people on a basic, human level. All I ever knew how to do was communicate and feel creatively. Even in writing this down, I feel like I’m doing something wrong because I understand the function and futility of it all, but I have to because this is how I process on a deeper level. I also refused to really put my work out into the world because I really was just doing it all for me. I needed it.
The dissonance came from me needing to process, and no one wanting to read that, because why would they want to? The deeper need to be the tortured creative that I chose to be as a child, and the single-child-who-was-praised-for-their-talents attention that I needed never lined up, but it was the perfect formula for the misery I needed to be what I wanted to be. Now I’m finally starting to step away from that, and I’m just like, “wait a minute, who the fuck am I, exactly?” I’m not who I want to be, but I’m also not who I always was, and everything feels like a pin being pressed into my voodoo doll by some ex lover in a rickety, Louisiana cabin, with the faint sound of a banjo playing from next door.
My life has been a miserable conundrum, and in trying to accomplish something I keep destroying everything, because I thought everything needed to be destroyed to truly fulfill that hero’s journey, but I was mostly a tyrant, a detached manipulator, an addicted lover, and a fucking masochist, to get all pyramidy on you (that's a word now). I guess you could say everything did need to be destroyed in order to learn and grow, but, standing in this charred rubble, I can see it was me that needed to be destroyed the whole time, and my hair is on fire.
This isolation has forced me to really stare at myself, and for a while I just wanted to break all these fucking mirrors, but I’m really starting to feel grateful for this opportunity to see the beautiful things I have in my life and appreciate them. All of that lined up perfectly with me feeling like I needed to step back from everything and reevaluate anyway. I was thinking I needed to reevaluate my purpose, but it was my priorities that were out of whack. I was so blinded by my drive that I didn’t realize I kept driving all over my family.
In the worst of it I was actually annoyed that they were in my way, which is a pretty awesome thing to come to terms with, like lay-down-in-the-street awesome, and while I refuse to admit that the only value I put on the love of my life was that of a muse, for a while, in the beginning of us, I was pretty put out by going places or doing things that didn’t involve accomplishing something and going home with a product. Anyone who has experienced that level of relentless, creative madness can more than likely understand how lucky I am that she’s even still around.
Looking at myself, at my work, and this drive, has made me realize how fortunate I am that the universe gave me this firecracker. I just wish I would’ve stopped lighting the fuse earlier in this journey, but if I did we wouldn’t be here.
I am no longer worried about what people think, or how many people are even paying attention, because I don’t really feel like I’m trying to get anywhere. I’m having a hard enough time just trying to be here, because I’ve never really done that before.
It’s about time I started being relentless about my family, because without them anything I could ever accomplish creatively is useless. At the end of the day, I have to write, and I fully understand that this is something that no one really wants to read, but I have to write… something… in this limbo of figuring out who I am, and who we are, and what the fuck is going on, so forgive me if I just write about my brain fighting itself for a little while.
*The title of this post is a contribution from our six year old mispronouncing the oasis-esque little spot we found in our mountains. When you get to the point where everyone stops, keep going. That applies to everything.
This is way outside my character, but I’ve seemed to be drifting more and more in that direction for over a year in search of my boundaries, and wants, and needs, and figuring out what it is that I’m doing, exactly. This specific character whom I am outside of is intellectual, as I can not remember where I read about what I hoped to quote, and I haven’t the energy to go through my collection of photography, or philosophy of, books that lie stacked on our shelves, which my wife just loves, let me tell you… she often brings up how much she loves how many books I have *deadpan face*.
The passage that I can not quote, which I also fail to remember word-for-word enough to eloquently describe because it seemed so far from anything I would even be remotely comfortable with, was in regard to never truly understanding what it is you’re looking for or how to get it (as a photographer) until you know exactly what the subject is experiencing and how the subject feels, id est, if you want to capture souls, in my case souls free from social armor and expecting them to let their fears and insecurities go, you have to experience being said soul captured. That was a really long sentence, and, in writing it down, seems like a no brainer, but I learn by taking baby steps after falling flat on my face and getting back up… nana korobi ya oki… though I’m pretty confident the number eight, while not being the point of the phrase, is severely generous.
One of my baby steps (giant leap for me, really) was standing naked on a beach about a decade ago, which taught me about the attitude required to be beautiful, but there was always a part of me that knew I wasn’t beautiful enough for anyone to want to look at, as defined by the physical standard that society set for ‘men’, specifically, either the gratuitously muscular warrior type, or the frail and helpless little boy man… you know who I’m talking about… the line between Leo and Brad is just as strong as the Elvis/Beatles battle, you’ve got to just pick one. There has been a recent push for the attractiveness of the ‘dad-bod’, but that’s as patronizing as my mom telling eight year old me, “You’re not fat, you’re husky,” and then putting me on a diet.
There is plenty of leeway regarding intellect, humor, and talent that might make a dad-bod bearable, but you don’t see those bodies on posters or in calendars unless they’re advertising some show or movie as a basis for entertainment, not the primal desires that fuel our fantasies and wants… I mean, how many souls out there are fantasizing about Will Ferrel playing cowbell shirtless unless it’s because they need a laugh? It seems silly writing it down, because it is also something a ‘man’ isn’t supposed to feel, but I grew up hating my body, so I absolutely understand why 99% of the people I talk to about shooting are all for it… for about two days, which is apparently the time necessary for the average mind to calculate the fear of reality. I also understand why so many people say they would love to shoot… after they get down to a certain weight or work out.
Truth is, a society that makes money off our insecurities will never allow its people to understand that they were born beautiful, I mean, you won’t sell make-up if your advertising slogan is ‘you don’t need make-up, you amazingly beautiful soul’, or ‘leave your face alone or you’ll also have to buy our convenient moisturizer to replenish your beautiful skin that our make-up is destroying’.
At the end of the day, I have always known that I was less than ideal, physically, but I genuinely see the beauty in everyone, so that has caused a kind of dissonance in my work and has regularly been the subject of argument: how can I expect to get anyone to understand how beautiful they were born if I don’t see the beauty in who I am?… an obvious conundrum. I’m shooting for blatantly obvious things that elude me at this point in my journey, in case you haven’t noticed, like making my family more important than my work… I mean….. seriously folks, I’m an idiot.
There are already a lot of words here to say something quite simple: I’m looking at myself, literally, and instead of looking at all the things I don’t like, I am seeing the beauty there, and I don’t care if anyone else sees it. Maybe my decade’s worth of preaching finally rubbed off, or maybe I’ve just gotten to that point where I truly can see the beauty in everything, or maybe I finally reached the give-no-shits threshold? I don’t really care. I will definitely admit that this probably wouldn’t have been possible without the comfort of my goddess wife taking the photos, but I still was awkwardly shy and nervous as hell, obsessively listening for people coming and leaving my clothes close and jump-in-able. I finally conquered a fear that has been clogging up my brain since I died at birth, and I absolutely do understand so much more about what goes into to this NOT EASY task, just as I’m sure my wife realized that there is so much more to taking a photograph than pressing the shutter button (I humbly lied). I am kind of itching to go do it again… after I lose a little weight and work out… or I could just love and accept myself.
