Meditari

One little thing that most don't know about me is that every morning I read a meditation out of Deng Ming-Dao's 365 Tao.  I started this habit when I got out of jail in 2003 with the first version of the text, which was one that I stole from a book store when I was a nihilistic teenager and was added to the collection of books that I was pretty proud of but never really read until I was banished to the desert in 2013.  That first version of the book was given to someone who I thought needed it, and that habit continued through the years, as I would gradually replace it and continue reading.  I had thought recently that some of the passages that I've been reading everyday for 14 years would make decent blog posts.  This morning's, day 107, was withdrawal, as in back to the source: "...This is why followers of Tao always use the word returning.  They recognize the necessity of activity in life, but they always recognize the need to return to Tao.  In Tao is the source of all things,  and in the source one finds the renewal that one needs to go on with life.  This back-and-forth movement between the source and the activity of life is the movement of all things."  

That is what has been missing from my life for years.  Though I did find plenty of withdrawal at the Zen center every Sunday, true meditation for me is shooting.  I always referred to myself as a Zen photographer, and I don't think I ever really successfully explained what that means.  Most professional models see a statement like that and assume that I'm just a guy with a camera who doesn't have a plan, but I do have a plan, which is to allow the universe to unfold before me and capture it.  You never know what's going to happen, and knowing exactly what you want usually leads to disappointment because we will never get exactly what we want, and while we are trying desperately to get that, we are typically missing what's actually happening, which is usually more beautiful than what we want, because it's real.

John Daido Loori's The Zen of Creativity helped me figure out what I was already doing, but a recent read, Torsten Andreas Hoffman's Photography as Meditation really solidified my approach as an ideal, instead of my being bad at what I do, or a bad creative, because I don't like setting things up and wanting a specific style, when all of that is a living organism to be handled in the moment.  The opening passage of the latter: "Meditation and photography have more in common than you might initially think: both deal with the present moment, both demand the highest degree of awareness, and both are most attainable when the mind is empty and free from distracting, outside influences."  Now ponder that statement and understand that the only shooting I have done in the last two years has basically been with the girl I'm in a relationship with, and the children who are perpetually attached to her.

Most of the time we go out to shoot I quickly fall into a pretty grumpy mood.  I figured out why.  That is what we should do as accountable humans: recognize that there's a problem and figure out why, then you can try to fix it.  Madison had to harass me to finish sorting the photos I took of her and my girls back in January, so here's some more of those.  For those of you who are also confused by my mentioning Taoism: Taoism is one of the ancient belief systems that was a cornerstone in what would later evolve into Zen.  That's a gross simplification, but that is all I have time for right now.  Back to work.