Day: June 16, 2016

My photography has helped me to see the beauty of women beyond the stereotypes offered us by media and marketers. The camera finds beauty and mystery, even if the eye sometimes misses it.  I empathize with women and the pressure they are under to look a certain way. Kelly Nolan is one of my favorite photographic subjects in Cambridge, she is both beautiful and radiant, she knows who she is and is proud of who she is.

It is always remarkable to see her work – she works alone (there is a cook) and  is bartender, busperson, waitress in a crowded bar and restaurant, Foggy Notions, known locally as “The Bog.”

Kelly is gracious, patient, and steady when many people would be hard pressed to cope. No matter how crowded or frantic the restaurant and bar is, Kelly always stays the same, she appears quickly, takes orders brings the food, checks on things, brings the check.

It doesn’t matter if there are 20 people there or 100.

Photographing her is always a challenge, she is always busy, always moving, she is happy to be photographed but never stops working long enough for me to get set or take the photo I want. Good training for me, I suppose.

I brought my new portrait lens, a used Zeiss 85 mm manual focus lens that has challenged me to pay closer attention to light and settings. I wanted Kelly to be one of my first portraits. The Canon lens I wanted would have done a lot of thinking for me. But this lens has no automatic focus for dicey light, and has already brought me some remarkable photographs.

Still, I wasn’t sure I got a good shot tonight, it was getting dark, the bar was crowded, Kelly never stopped moving, she never actually poses. Fortunately, her smile is so natural she doesn’t need to get set. I am learning to scramble and make some lucky guesses about focus and light.

I was surprised when I got home and looked at the photos. I got two pictures I really liked, the one above, the Kelly you and I know, and the one below, which revealed another side of her, as photographs often do.

The photograph (below) was exotic, sensual, moody, it evoked Casablanca more than my lovely little town of Cambridge. It showed a new side of Kelly, a quiet and introspective. A moon face, like a full moon, powerful and evocative.

Kelly is always happy and even, my new lens picked up something inside of her that allows her to be that way. I’m excited to be taking more photos of her, as long as she will let me. The crowd at the bar, looking at me suspiciously at first, are into it now. I didn’t set foot in the Bog for the first 15 years I lived here, I thought they might not welcome me. Another lesson in judging.

They cheer me on now, seem grateful.  A lot of them see photos of Kelly on the blog. “Hey,” said one of the men drinking, “you’re the photographer guy taking all those photos of Kelly. Great,” he said, slapping me on the back. Thanks Kelly, for putting up with me.

 

C.S. Lewis says that friendship is born the moment one person says to another, and says, “what, you too?” I think a friend is someone who knows you very well and still manages to love you. Scott and I have embarked on what is, for me at least, a great adventure.

Any man who tries to teach me something is a brave man in for a great struggle, I have left a bloody wake of broken teachers behind me in my journey through life. I love to learn, but resent being taught. Scott is not much better. Every Thursday at 1 p.m., we meet at Pompanuck Farm for an hour (it’s usually 90 minutes).

For the first 30 minutes, Scott teaches me Tai Chi. For the second half-hour I teach him writing. The interesting thing is that each of us struggles to grasp from the other the very thing we teach ourselves. Scott teaches Tai Chi as a self directed and gentle process by which we free our inner spirits and give voice to our bodies.

I essentially teach writing the same way – not about what people are doing wrong, but what they are doing right. Writing is our voice, a sense of self and identity. What we teach, we struggle to learn.

Today, a first breakthrough I think. Scott is grasping the importance of simplicity and writing. You write the way you talk, and in your own voice. There is no right and wrong, just help in finding a process that works for you. Everyone has a story to tell. Like many gifted people who wish to write, Scott was taught early on that writing was about grammar and that his stories were not important.

Today, he got past that, writing a lovely piece about the day a teacher complimented the things he did with his hands, praise that altered his life. The piece is about the power of hands in our lives and his love working with his grandson’s hands as well as his. A lovely piece, really, Scott is really getting it, finding his voice and power.

As for me, I am learning a five-step Tai Chi movement that I like and can do. It isn’t about doing it right, Scott tells me, but about feeling differently about my body, connecting to the earth, moving in a fluid way that is healthy and calming. For the first time today, I could see it and feel it a bit.

So a good day, I took my new portrait lens and set out to capture Scott, rather than shoot his face up close, I thought about what would capture Scott and stepped back and got this shot of him practicing his Tai Chi by the Pompanuck Farm pond.

A good day, only a powerful friendship could have accomplished it. We will stick it out together.

I am both excited and proud to let you all know about the rise of a gifted young literary talent, a student in my writing class, a writer, photographer, poet and painter named Jackie Thorne, she lives in Harford, New York and she has just published her first book “Gone To Ground: Selected Poems And Essays.”

Jackie is one of the most gifted and intuitive writers I have encountered and her new book has just gone on sale on Amazon and at selected bookstores.

She will be reading from her book at the Bedlam Farm Open House and will also do some readings throughout the Northeast.

Apart from her many creative gifts, Jackie  speaks to the new remarkable opportunities open to the young writer today, even during a time of great change in publishing. She is using her popular new blog creativejourneywoman.com to publish her poems and essays and photographs and share her life and her work.

Writers frequently lament the difficulties of getting published in todays’ market, but the truth is, writing is flourishing as never before, and brave and determined writers like Jackie Thorne are finding exciting ways to get their work out. Gone To Ground is a wonderful launching pad for Jackie Thorne.

It is first rate, beginning to end, the rise of a new voice worth paying attention to.

In “Gone To Ground,” Jackie writes in  a beautiful, haunting and very accessible way about her love of the natural world and her powerful connection to the animal world and the earth.

“Weathered stones

rough in my palm,

scrape and peel,

carving their way,

down to my bones,

stiff thorns break

my thin pale skin

blood flows, ready

to meet the air,

kiss the ground,

silken soil slides

through my fingers,

under my nails,

down to the quick,

never to come out.”

These, the first two verses of “Gone To Ground,” the title work.

I  loved her essay on a local Tractor Parade, and how it spoke to magic and disappointment, and of farming and agriculture.

The parade was rained on, but not, she writes ,a tragedy: “…the whole evening turned out to be not what I expected. It didn’t start out that way, with my Christmas grumpy pants pulled up high, and it didn’t end that way for me, either. Between the rainbow of lights and roaring tractor engines, the rain and the wind, and the conversation with my friend on our walk home, the memory, I know, will stay with me.”

Me too.

Jackie is the real deal, her book contains some of her lovely photographs, is 71 pages long,  and costs $14.95. I recommend it highly, for anyone who loves animals, nature, farming and rural life. It is a treasure.

And this, from her poem “Wet Dog.”

“wet dog, happy

in the sun

fresh from swimming in the pond,

shakes herself,

and smiles at me”

I hope you will take a look at it and support it if you can. You can take a look at Gone To Ground here.

I have the greatest respect for Jackie and her work. She is the real deal, her writing is wise, poignant, and at times, elegaic.  I am grateful to have her as a student and to read her beautiful writing.

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Jackie Thorne will be reading from “Gone To Ground” at 4 p.m., Saturday, June 25, at Battenkill Books, Cambridge, N.Y.

It seems to me that the outer world has split into two distinct universes sometimes: the Trump World, and the Other World. To me, it isn’t really a matter of politics but a very personal and individualistic matter. What kind of world do I wish to live in, what kind of person do I wish to be?

I don’t write this out of argument, nobody needs me to promote more arguments, and I’m not interested in telling you what to think or in your telling me what to think. My blog is not a place for politics and argument, there is plenty of that around. But I do have the responsibility of sharing my life, and we do have to deal the cards we have been given and argument and conflict seem to be our cards right now.

It is ubiquitous, even as we try to mourn tragedies and sorrows, it pops up everywhere, every day, part of the fabric of our lives. We can’t really run from it or hide from it.

But these are not my cards, really, my life is not an argument. The very male idea of conflict and domination is suffocating sometimes, I like to think it is making its last stand. I like to think the women are rising to save us, and our precious world.

I follow the ideas about finding our own centers, our own firm ground,  that the Dalai Lama has advanced, he is a wise and good human being.

In the end what matters is

How well you love,

How well did you live,

How well did you learn to let go.

I do not spend my life in argument, more wonder. I work every single day on how well I love, how well I live, how well I am learning to let go.

I feel like a make a bit of progress every day, and some days I stumble and fall, even fall backwards, and then, the next day, I get up and get to work again. I am getting there, farther than than I have ever gotten, with a long ways to go. I have come to understand that how I love and life is a work in progress, I will never get there, the point is the journey.

I let go of my many mistakes and failures and disappointments,  I release them every day as the sun sets, and set out once more on the path. That is my hero journey,  how I live in the time of Trump, a time that ultimately binds us all together just as much as it divides us.

 

The good news is that Red and Fate lie down quickly together when told. Fate, of course, can not be still for more than a few seconds, so she eats grass while lying down. I imagine the inside of Fate’s head is like one of those old pinball machines, lights and bells whirring and beeping all of the time. Still, it took a year to get her to lie down on command, that’s a record for me. All good.