... 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.
“Children are the anchors that hold a mother to life.” ~ Sophocles
… and a father to love.
I am one to see the current state of affairs as a positive and beautiful thing. It has really helped me put things into perspective, which I’ve felt the drive to do since this year began, but my unconscious mind kept distracting me, and that created a lot of unnecessary dissonance.
Now I feel like the universe is forcing me to take a step back and really look at everything, like I talked about doing months ago.
I was always so focused on accomplishing something that I never realized how incredibly selfish that was, and I had long since made an extensive list of excuses why it was justified, which sound beautiful and honorable, but were more likely to make myself feel better for abandoning a perfectly good family to pursue my selfish dreams twenty years ago.
One of my biggest excuses was that I was trying to make the world more of a beautiful place for my kids to live in, but I’m finally beginning to see that I would accomplish more if I invested that energy into teaching these brilliant little humans how to perceive the world beautifully. Not the way I perceive it, mind you, but to look at the sides of everything, underneath and above everything, and learn to perceive things in a way that makes everything beautiful for them.
This may sound like Parenting 101 to most of you, but I never took that class because I didn’t want to do the homework, plus the obvious scheduling conflict with Life 105. It has also become painfully obvious in these times that if there is one thing art, philosophy, and history have taught us, it is that you can’t really change anything but yourself, so what AM I doing?
What difference am I ever going to make if there is nothing new under the sun, and why am I just now figuring that out when I discovered it a decade ago reading Plato? Because I’m an idiot. The only thing more humbling than realizing you’re an idiot, is learning things that are pretty much no-brainers. I've been trying to assemble a puzzle without looking at the pieces I'm holding right there in my hand.
This year I have felt lost and confused, but I am not as lost as I am losing something beautiful that I’ve been looking past, and I need my eyes to refocus on the foreground. I need to stop trying to get people to understand what I'm talking about, and look at my people standing right in front of me. Every day is a beautiful lesson, and if we are doing it right we never stop learning. I don’t imagine I’ll ever abandon my work completely, but I need to take some time to line up who I am with who I want to be.
Our plan with all this crap going on was to get out and hit some trails on a regular basis, excused by “exercise” in the quarantine guidelines, but we quickly realized that a lot of people had that plan, and what was meant to be social distancing looked more like social clustering. I have never been one to buy into the bullshit we’re fed, but the “what if?” is definitely echoing in my head, especially since I’m getting to an age where I’m “at risk” and I’m not exactly the picture of health, but my Amish blood helps a lot.
I do get the flu just about every year, and I’m always the last one to get it, but it only lasts a couple days. So when this does sweep through here, right about when everyone else is in the clear, I’ll be coughing my insides out, and I don’t imagine a couple days of rest will fix that. “What if?” becomes “not fucking worth it” pretty quick. So we’re looking at this as the universe telling us we need to appreciate our own beautiful mountain a little bit more, and hey, don’t visit. I will never live in fear, knowing that everything happens the way it is supposed to happen, and everything happens for a reason, but getting the opportunity to really look at my beautiful little family has left me understanding that I’ve been living in stupid this whole time, and I've never felt further from figuring things out. So if I disappear........... read this again.
So I started this wanting to write some rambling post about my complicated relationship with other women and the idea of womanhood itself. I realized immediately after I wrote that piece that what I wanted to talk about was my complicated relationship with and resentment toward my own womanhood, as stepping into those shoes has not been a graceful process for me, but is it for anyone really?
I’ve always gravitated toward more “masculine” characteristics, whatever that actually means. I’ve always been a little bit loud, rough and boyish. Most of my friends growing up were boys, I had three little brothers. I liked to ride bikes, roll around in the dirt and break things. I’ve kept many of those “boyish” qualities coming into adulthood. However, along with those rough-around-the-edges characteristics, I have long felt the haunting weight of the ethereal femininity I secretly desired and idolized, but felt I couldn’t possess. Like somehow being a woman looked great on the rack, but fit a little awkward when I tried it on. If I have to wear anything other than jeans and a t shirt, I’m probably not going. I hate bras and shaving. When my period starts, I implode. I feel debilitated, gross and slightly embarrassed that if I laugh too hard bad things could happen. I’ve never been able to graciously revel in womanhood the way all these women around me do so effortlessly, at least from my perspective.
I felt inherently unattractive and from that developed an automatic gnawing comparison to other women. I’m too loud and profane. People don’t like women that are that way. My hips don’t curve the same, I don’t like dresses, my hair doesn’t fall over my shoulders that way. The list is endless. There came a point when I would cry before I went out to a bar or a party or dinner because I felt that every person looking at me knew how hard I was trying to be (unrealistically) feminine and angelic and they knew I wasn’t good enough. And I knew that too.
So after all this turmoil feeling I couldn’t fill the shoes of womanhood with all the beauty and grace it deserves, here I am posing naked in Joshua Tree with Maya and NevaehLleh. Absolutely terrifying. They are undoubtedly beautiful and have an exponentially greater knowledge of modeling than I do.
I assume immediately this is going to go so poorly. I have no idea what I’m doing, I’m small, I’m awkward, clearly not graceful. These women are the epitome of the celestial goddess, molding their curves effortlessly into this beautiful landscape. And here I am fumbling my naked body up and down rocks reminding everyone frequently that I’m terrified of heights, I don’t know what to do with my hands and my knee is, in fact, fine after I sliced it open on a boulder and bled everywhere. I’m thinking these women eat rose petals for breakfast and leave fairy dust everywhere they go, I mean come on are they even human? What am I doing here?
And I was so wrong. We talked about geocaching and hiking and coming home from shoots bruised, cut open, sore, cactus needles in feet, splinters in hips and thighs. These women are fucking fearless and loud and opinionated. They doubt themselves just as much as the next person and have the strength to do this anyway. They’re awkward and goofy just like me. They’re real.
And they’re beautiful. Which just might mean I’m beautiful too. Woman isn’t a list of strictly beautiful and feminine things. Woman doesn’t have to be soft, smell like strawberries and not have body hair. This shoot was woman in dirt and sweat and unshaven legs and a lot of cuts and bruises by the end of the day. Woman is strong and fearless and whatever she feels like being one day to the next and your ability to flow between the blurred lines of masculine and feminine doesn’t make you any less so.
I guess what I’m trying to say is thank you to Maya and NevaehLleh for reminding me that my roughness is beautiful. That I can be soft and ethereal (don’t forget to point your toes), but that’s not what makes me pretty. Thank you for allowing me to feel out where I fit in and providing a space in which I can exist safely and just be. There’s a duality to women I didn’t quite understand up until this shoot and I’m finding every day that I am exactly as I’m supposed to be.
