“It is in the struggle between good and evil that life has its meaning.”
Visuals:
Collaborative works with The Artist, who did the photographed pieces, all ocean-worn, collected in recent weeks.
Magnificent time working with You, always.
Quote:
“….and in the hope that goodness can succeed.”
Scott Peck, People of the Lie (p.266-7).
Or Perhaps:
Life is like a waterslide, you jump in with a bang, tossed around with gusto and then spat out, into the splashes catching the summer sun, bursting into laughter like blue sky saying,
“it was really fun, let’s do that again!!”
Lastly:
This post is dedicated to my two special friends, one entered, the other exited in July,
to their unforgettable bang/gusto/laughter now imprinted in my heart where I create, I try to, from.
May your pages be filled with what makes your heart swing.
This year, for the first time I bound my daily planner, crafted it in just the way I wanted.
With uneven edges and unfinished stitches, even let the stamped numbers dance, too!
All for the purpose of gifting myself daily, with a reminder that in Creativity there is, inherent, inviolable freedom.
The journal is photographed with dried spider lily blossoms from 2 autumns ago, with overlaid images of the ocean photographed during the first few days of this year.
On a walk back from an institutional concrete structure known as a big hospital, I noticed a path through withering weeds, barely beaten, consisting of short uneven steps and pebbly unpaved soil. I turned with my whole torso due to recent neck injury, feeling newly discouraged but still curious, to examine the difficulty level of passing through it.
Being the type to always try a new route, I’d made no exception and carefully taken steps. Immediately I noticed, on dried spikes of stickers a dragonfly, ornamented like a fine art installation waiting to be photographed.
Find!! I thought, with a surge of excitement that I wasn’t as forsaken by luck after all. Carefully I lowered my trunk solely with leg muscles and looked down only with my eye balls, and snapped off the stem in length enough for one of my glass bottles. Just as I started to plan on camera angles however, a surprise slight movement tickled my hand.
The insect, with three out of her four wings got spikes the size of her torso ripping through them, was moving her legs, as if to oppose to my photographic agenda taking place in my head.
No idea how long she had been that way, how had she kept her hope, is she a master of law of attraction, what are the odds of having someone like me, always on a look out for a ‘find’ like her, on foot moving slow, taking a notice of a barely noticeable path, and her predicament?
Out of sheer respect for this chance encounter I, at once, dropped my agenda and gotten to work tackling to break her free with minimum damage to her delicate wings.
As I removed the spikes one by one, she shook her wings off of them, the movement so full of life it was hard to believe she preserved her zeal for however long it took to manifest me.
Turned out one of her wings was more than half gone, another one badly ripped, and my heart sunk, recalling my own, one too many encounters with impossibilities of life. It was a warm day with not even a breeze, and the midday sun encompassed the two of us in a freeze-framed moment, as she rested on my knuckles, freed, facing me. Then with a sudden stamp of her tiny feet and the startling hum of her wings she flew away, leaving the power of her takeoff imprinted on back of my hand, into the field full of silver grasses and their sparkles, as if nothing’s lost, as if to state the most absolutely apparent:
“Broken wings? What broken wings!!”
Neck is nearly healed at the time of this writing (late Dec ’18). I hurt my neck editing photos – stationary for too long in bad “chin forward” posture, pinch nerve, very painful. Forced me on foot for over a month, which, as you can tell, turned out to be quite fruitful.
All photos are from 2018. Bottom two taken during the first sunrise of the year. They are at the bottom because, like waves the dawn always returns, anew, each day.
The wound of the unloved, is that of the human existence. – Peter Schellenbaum
After contemplating and experimenting on various available options (since May 2015), I made the first Zine, in digital format, earlier this month (November 2018).
It is available for purchase here.
Below you find additional info, in a form of postscript / artist statement. I will keep it short, sweet and straight forward.
Format
PDF – viewable on any and all devices.
Aspect ratio – 2:3 (as 35mm films – I felt it is the optimal balance for this issue’s gentle monochromatic look).
Put out independently – ie. outside the ISBN system – like a flower in the field, I’d say (smiles).
In the future I may make available in other formats / ratios, or even with ISBN. But for now, above is the middle ground I decided to place the book on.
That being said…my ears are open to your suggestions and requests, and I appreciate heads ups.
Grey and Grey
All photos were (re)edited in October – November, 2018.
Pure whites / solid blacks were mostly eliminated from the black and white images – they seemed too immutable to me. While editing, I was thinking of soft, understated sheen from graphite pencils, as the suitable range of tones for telling this particular tale.
Large Sized
Both in dimensions (1600 x 2400 pixels) and in file size (nearly 20mb for 20 pages). Images are web-optimized but left in high quality, in hopes they’d carry all the nuances I had woven in in those grains.
The subject matter – the psychological process of individuating – comes with much subtleties. I made a clumsy attempt at including, as much as possible, what cannot be adequately expressed otherwise.
This book is meant as a gesture, of my sharing hopes and encouragements, for the blossoming of us, the mankind, and the beauty of our individual uniquenesses, when fully owned, would truly unite us.
Are you Individuated?
Years ago I embarked upon an escape route from the state of deep discontent and ended up falling for the process itself.
In other words, I no longer care where I’m at on an individuation scale of 1-10. Try to figure that one out, I discovered thru trials and fails, I’d end up tripping on a type of self consciousness, which acts as an enemy to my creativity.
I only know, and talk about what I experienced. I intend to stick with the stance to the best of my ability.
Lastly.
I dedicate this book to a special friend who left the human plane last July, no doubt to be joined, on the other side, by her “partner in crime” – if courage motivated by love is a crime in this realm, by quoting from a book I found in her storage back in 1994, in Sun Land, California, where I spent a pivotal few, fortunate years immersed in desert sunsets and coyote howls, sensing there is, within myself a seed, I alone could water.
How can I believe there’s a butterfly inside me when all I see is a fuzzy worm? – Trina Paulus “Hope for the Flowers”
Photos, all from the Zine, from top:
Career Cormorant, a portrait with Gardenia (2018)
Career Cormorant (Anklet) (2018)
Flower. (2018)
P.P.S. I am not a master marketer – in fact I suck at sales pitch. If you happened upon this page and think you know a soul or two who may like this book, please help me out by letting them know it exists.
Your support as such is muchas appreciated.
Thanks!!
The first two pictures are from 15th of July at sundown. This post was published on 14th. I didn’t time travel. I edited the post on 16th. Pics on the first version didn’t click. Intuitive click, I didn’t get. Know the kind I’m talking about? The one that gets your spinal discs aligned and chi circulated like a minty breeze.
The 3rd from top is a work in progress named, by a friend of mine, “Earth Fairy Dress”. I haven’t asked her how so but I get the feeling. Cut from the pattern for my current project “Spider lily Red”, “shimmering” silver pigment paint is applied on silk that looks more like a linen-hemp-canvas rag. Ragged but luscious, don’t know whether to laugh or adore. This is the year 2 of durability testing, the paint different from the year 1’s that didn’t quite stick.
The dress will be covered with slightly excessive layers of silver, I will then have to wear it through to the end of warm months, a guinea woman I will be. If the paint continues to shimmer, by the end of the test phase I may turn into an actual fairy.
Also in the photo 3 is a snapshot of the True Contentment. Time spent by the sea with my mentor who was born 25 yrs ago around this time with the tough fate to guide this human disciple, through thick, thin and Japanese humidity.
In the photo #4 you see lots of print tests. Well there is a section in this website called “photography” that apparently never opens. I figured I’d share with you what’s been taking place behind the closed website, so you’ll know I didn’t branch out just to say “soon” forever.
Photo 5 is dedicated to Hydrangea blossoms, their season ends as the real summer arrives, and with it enters Gardenia (as seen in photo #3), the last one of the, what I call the scent season, starting with Ume (Japanese Apricot) in February.
It’s sentimental-sweet, the Gardenia scent. That’s what my nose thinks anyways. In fact, Gardenia blooming itself is sentimental-sweet, happy-sad, oh-it’s-already-the-last-one excited-dissapointment. All the photos on this post are edited accordingly, in colors that embody the sentiment to me, that also are the colors of the season’s sunsets.
The last photo is of a Tanabata bamboo grass with prayer ribbons, not exactly usually done but works regardless. Traditionally the bamboo grasses with people’s wishes tied to them, they float down the stream (not on their own) on July 7th, the Tanabata day, but nowadays it’s loosely prohibited due to “pollution” the floating bamboo-paper would cause. I burnt mine. Then let the waves engulf my heart’s desires. That’s right, you’ve got to unearth wishes from the depth of your personhood just so they’d be set free, into the Immensity nearby.
This may actually be the longest text I’ve posted here and all I talked about so far is my favorite kind of nothing. I usually do my best to keep my words minimum, short like Haiku. Evidently this is not a usual time, it is summertime.
One last thought, and it is about sunset. Nowadays I take sunset very seriously, serious, as in, of value, one of many things I learned from the mentor in photo #3. One day on our walk at, you guessed it, sunset, I asked her, how do you get so excited to walk the same street the same time with the same human. It’s never the same, human. The mentor spoke in Hunch, and glanced at me in mischief, “you’ll get it one day”.
When the one day came the mentor already resigned from the role (it was too humid) but I to this day commit hitting as many sunsets. I get it now, it is a show, a theater, a spectacle, and unless you are an Antarctica penguin, it is on everyday, throughout the year, never the same, and always pretty.
The Ocean’s been doing its fiery thing since yesterday, attracting a small group of devotees either with photography gears or surf boards. The capture is from today, January 2nd, just after sundown.
Somehow words are failing to express my wishes for the year ahead. The Ocean and my camera kindly bypassed the tongue-tied this evening and spelled them all out on the image above.
August 10, 2017. A day before Mountains Day, a national holiday only a few years old, I hopped on my little scarred Honda and headed out roughly towards west. Compelled by the briefness of summer, I wanted to absorb the scorching of the season as much as humanly possible.
Soon after somehow I took the turn I did not plan. General direction is right I said, my motto for a game I call “intentionally getting lost”. Just so long as I won’t miss out on the precious August sun for too long.
Well the path rode into the forest and quickly narrowed, to a single lane just wide enough for my compact. Winding as a large serpent would, on and on through the thick of woods that blocked even the brightest of the light. “Always a screw up, destined to miss.” An inner dialogue took the passenger’s seat like an inseparable old friend and worse yet at each hairpin, I grew deeper in agreement with her.
Then quite suddenly the serpent spat me out, into the bursting of the summer where I found a community probably the smallest I’ve ever seen. Tacked away in a valley between mountains are just a handful of housing structures, only some inhabited, lives held together with artful display of faded woods and rusted tins. Face to face with the unfolding quiet gem, with midday asphalt beneath my feet, I found myself alone in a place where leaves can be heard, streams carry life, the sun warms your shoulders and butterflies are free.
Morro Bay, 1995, further north of where the soon-to-be-fully-contained fire is at the moment. Bottom photo was taken by a friend of mine who also did the driving throughout our care-free road trip along the coast line. As you can see, she caught me in the perfect Kodak moment tilting the famous Morro rock.
Images were photographed with a single-use, most probably water resistant camera I used a lot in those days, and casually handed over for processing at local Target. Back then I didn’t think much of my creative inclinations, in fact I thought of them as the source of all my troubles and in most part I treated them accordingly.
Many years later in 2012, I decided to pamper my creativity with a high-end film scanner (rented), and discovered the negatives in progressed decay. Lines, scratches and uneven colors, they hinted at everything that happens only once.
Now, in December 2017, as California finds itself in flames again, I dug up the photos and gave them the suitable “vintage postcard” edit, then messed them up a bit, to near the creative disaster. Why, it’s a play, to be slightly off balance so your foot no choice lands forward. Well I was thinking of California I know, the foreign land always felt like a well worn pair, appreciating every minute I spent, submerged in the air of adventurousness and experimentation the land so eagerly, and effortlessly permits.
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