Last week I started my 9-month art class The Artist ReBirth Cycle. I picked photography to be the art form I am focused on this year.1 I don’t have any special training other than the Photography 101 class I took in 1996. I am not entirely sure what I plan to do with it in the coming months but I keep knocking around the idea of a project with images, prose, and poetry. No, it’s not a magazine. No, it’s not a book. No, it’s not a blog. Yes, I might want it to hang on a wall, yes it might be a conceptual piece.
Why take this middle-age detour into being an artist?
Probably for a lot of the reasons I climb, take long walks in the forest, and move cities. I am naturally restless, irritable, and discontent. I also don’t have kids. However, I hope, that after some years of sobriety, I can channel this energy and time into ways that are both curious, interesting, and helpful. It also, I suppose, is a way to connect with my home now. That was my starting point for this blog, after all.
As the leaves turn again, it feels more real than ever that Santa Fe is my Home. Last week, I finally sold my condo in San Francisco; the mortgage is paid off, and the remaining equity (a hefty chunk less than what I put in) is now squirreled away in savings. Most importantly, the stress of that property ownership is gone. That said, when I got the notice that everything had been signed, sealed, and delivered, I cried in both sadness and gratitude.
The hardest goodbye has been ideas about my career trajectory and my little success markers. Until the papers were signed, deep down I saw the condo in San Francisco as a way of keeping an option open that I could go back to a younger version of myself and make another go at adult life when my Pandemic folly faded.
My birthday is in a few weeks, a banal one that is officially inching me closer to 50 than 45. And I have been thinking about bridges (and my hair, but that’s a different blog post). What is it that I want to build in the next few decades? And how can I get there?
My mom, who is 83, loves working. She loves the status, the income, the strategy, the networking; she’s interested in up-skilling and is a true careerist. But if her view in life is vertical—mine is horizontal.
When people ask me, “What would you do if money were no object?” (As if that’s a real question! Money is always an object and it pays the bills. Money must be made.) I respond, “I’d go back to being a journalist.” But what I don’t say out loud is “I’d love to be a features writer and documentary filmmaker traveling around the World and telling dusty stories of the dying details.” There’s no ka-ching at the end of that sentence. So I have to find a bridge between my worlds of the sacred and the profane. This blog has been one plank. And photography is now another.
Maybe there’s something deeper. I keep coming back to this idea of the female gaze. I feel I understand the “male” gaze both as a recipient in wonderful and terrible ways and as a giver of it via the attitude business life forces one to assume. But what does it mean to cast the female gaze? What is at the center of the gaze? I leave you with a thought.
Love is the essence of the feminine consciousness—in men and women. It is the recognition and acceptance of the total individual, and loving the individual for who he or she is. The feminine is the loving container of all conflict, all physical and psychological processes. They must not be rejected, but safely, lovingly contained. Suffering and conflict are the only way to grow As life moves from phase to phase, you have to suffer the death of one and the birth of the next.” — Marion Woodman
I bought an almost-new digital mirrorless camera (Canon EOS R). After taking photos on an iPhone for nearly a decade, it is so wonderful to leave the phone behind and instead just focus on the photography and seeing. Highly recommend a stand-alone camera.
Very interesting insight into thoughts of horizontal career people
I LIKED THE PIECE VERY MUCH
Beautiful pear.