Category: Personal Musing

Write Yourself Whole

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I just watched the recorded first episode of the BBC mystery series, “Grantchester”, based on fiction by James Runcie.
As so many good detective stories do, it wrapped with an “authors voice” statement delivered by the main character, Sidney Chambers :

“We cannot erase our pasts, however hard we try.

Instead we must carry them with us into the future.
We must carry them with us and look forward with hope.

We must look forward, because to look back is to waste precious time.

Someone recently said to me, ‘We should live as we have never lived.’
And we must all of us take heed and live as we have never lived.

For we are all mortal.

We are all fragile.

And we all live under the shadow of death.”

As it was spoken, I felt pulled to listen carefully, as I have my upcoming course, “Write Yourself Whole” in mind all the time, now. (my Facebook Event link)

How Perfect!

We must, indeed, unless stricken with amnesia, carry our pasts with us, though we do try hard to forget aspects that brought pain with them. Writing for healing is Not so much about “erasing the past”, as about becoming free to carry the memory, imprint, and lessons into “the now”… empowered, really, to use our pasts in creative ways and continue to mine the gold in them.

Or not..

I write this for communicating with you; I wonder what I might have written had I used the writing methods we’ll be applying in the course.

As always.. Tualk amongst yourselves.

So an image can sneak up on you. . .

…remember to play.

This is an image I made during a one week workshop at the Maine Photographic Workshop (now known as the Maine Media Workshop), in Rockport, ME, (years ago, now).

Maine-Summer-Day

I call that week a  turning point because of the facilitator, Sean Kernan, whose quiet guidance was more geared to seeing than to craft or method. Sean encouraged playing outside most of the “boxes” that some photographers want to get comfortable in..
elusive unself-conscious fruit of bold experiment was more valued than predictable formulae or safe technique. And, as I have posted before, he fostered a way of looking at each other’s work without ponderous and egotistical judgment  in feedback sessions.. not a bad way to see the world, either, eh?

Finally, he has a new book we’ve been waiting YEARS for, based on his lifelong curiosity and passion for finding and nurturing that state of fresh wonder and amazement we often refer to as “the zone”, or “the creative state”.
The new book is called “Looking Into the Light”, and is out on iTunes, so far, for download.

Follow the link to his companion site for info and dialog on the book; I think almost anyone in the creative arts will benefit from delving his/her own process with this book at hand. It certainly won’t replace being in one of Sean’s workshops, but try it.
I think you’re gonna like the way you look.. into the light.Kernan-IntoLight

 

 

 

 

 

Looking into the Light | 

Looking Into The Light: Creativity and Photography is a series of exercises and assignments that take photographers to a direct experience of their own creativity, then let them practice it in their work. It comes from a workshop that Sean Kernan has developed over more than 30 years of …

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it dawned on one of us

I can’t remember what the “holiday” was, but some friends and I decided to catch a Wrightsville Beach, NC chilly sunrise.

Perfect Rise

I believe I may have been the only photographer in the bunch, and I was Ready to “capture” (such a silly word for photography) the rising sun at the horizon. We all alternately huddled and stomped about in the sand to keep warm while waiting. As the brightness rose, most of our moving stopped as we stood in mute anticipation of the moment when that great orange bowling ball would finish slow-mo bursting through that break in the bank of clouds clinging to the ocean.

Silence. Even the seagulls had dissipated elsewhere.
Then one voice broke the spell.
“Guys.. the sun is rising over Here”
Meaning.. Not where We were expecting it in that cloud break, but several degrees around the horizon, to the northeast.
No apps to pinpoint sunrisings, back then,

but there’s probably not an app to avoid wishful presumption anyway.