until again

there are many things that come to mind, many things that seem to be, and the seeming is the arrival, and the arrival is the impetus behind other thoughts. there are days like this one, and in it, the seemings, disarranged, facilitate the extravagance of all that waits to be known.

i try (and the attempts are trials), to maintain composure, but sometimes, the way in which life coalesces merely compounds the idiosyncratic tendencies of everyone around me (or at least my perception of them) and every plan, every expectation, every hope, turn into something other than what we supposed it would be—what we had dared to dream.

fragments of other people’s songs, their lyrics, their own communion with the world: these things i use, to trace my life throughout the confluences of existence, and even to define my interrelation with the world. there was a time when those were my songs, my lyrics. for a while after the spirit died within me, i was bitter, but the music never really left me. it lingers yet.

waiting.

waiting, like so many other days in my life.

but this waiting, this moment, this churning, has a glimmer: a spark.

a recalescence.

there is something about this time, this moment, that shines. the waiting, this once, is a good thing, for i wait here, willingly, at the end of the all which never was, and the dawn of the all which might now become.

(earlier this week, I took an old draft and turned it into this. something significant had happened the previous night, which i’m not going to explain it here, but it was a good thing: one which changed the entire tenor of the original draft from July 8, which was a much darker time. i am driven by rainstorms of late, and they drive me towards a glistening light.)

i sit beneath the rain again. it pages down, an unwritten book that so many have read since time forgotten.

on nights like this, it hollows crevices in my mind, and slowly fills them with melancholy, nostalgia, and stupidly even hope.

i am of that nature, possessed of the ability to dream, but not only to dream, to segment the dreams from the reformulated memories, the fears of what remains unknown, and the brief foreshadowing of insights i will later fail to recognize.

i don’t see everything, but what i do see, i see quite well.

which is not to say i always glean the right impression. especially when the rain comes, and then with it, the thunder and the lightning redefine every thought before i ever have a chance to set them down.

i breathe an air that is flavored with, colored by, comprised of this rain, and i remember all the things i wanted long ago, and none of them stand in my future. and no matter how deeply this rain saturates this moment and me, i come no closer to bringing them back to life.

and everyone else, having read these pages since time began, probably knows them for exactly what they are.

things like dreams and dreams like days and days like things i’ve never known. there are no in-betweens when everything keeps to the edges. and there are no divisions when everything subverts everything else.

but there are no dreams, not truly. there are memories and a confluence of biochemical processes. there are phrases turned in wistfulness and the desire for pain to subside. and yet, a life without pain is hardly one worth living. and so the dreams, the memories, the processes all bring a pain that is both a comfort and a lie.

this blast from the past was originally contrived very early one morning, ten days before #1 Daughter was born. it was, unfortunately, done at the resolution presented, because i was just goofing around, and as luck had it, i was never able to come back and replicate it at higher resolution. okay, “never was”. pfft. never did.

i’ve called this various things over the years, but i’ve never really applied a full name to it. it was created in MetaCreations Painter 7 (now Corel Painter X) using various Kai’s Power Tools plugins. it’s been a long time since i sat down to do nothing but art.

when i stumbled upon this tonight, i was struck by the lack of contrast, so i spent a few minutes tweaking it heavily, and when i was done, i had something pleasantly different than the original. so, here it is.

bah.

a truly anomalous event occurred here over the past couple of days. the snow was not unique, but the snow-without-wind most certainly was. usually, the wind is blowing strong enough when we get snow that i rarely have to shovel off the back porch and only parts of the driveway. but this time, we had a nice, gentle blanket of snow on everything. one might even say it was quite picturesque.

but did i manage to haul my stupid ass outside with a camera and take pictures of it before the wind started picking up early this morning?

hell, no.

did i even manage to have a camera in the car this morning, when the clear sky and the early-morning frozen fog would have been so picturesque, even with the slight wind clearing the snow off the evergreens, fences, other other surfaces.

no, i’m apparently WAY too intelligent for that. gah.

so, in potential partial recompense for my stupidity, here are a couple of things:

Thing 1: guess who has the cover of this month’s issue of Toy Trucker Magazine? The cover story is on the collection of Paul Westhoff, who is a friend and the owner of Hard Tops of Sioux Falls. I do their business cards, too. Look ‘em up and call ‘em and ask ‘em why they don’t have a website of their own! (i kid, i kid…)

Thing 2: ~from our recent trip up to Big Stone Lake for Thanksgiving. i have several plans for this photo, so this is kind of a sneak preview of an original that will probably never be released itself. in the background, you can see the point of land which is the subject of Big Stone Autumn. several of the trees back there were severely damaged by an ice storm last winter, so my plan to do a seasonal round of that point from the same vantage point were made moot. which was kind of okay, because the marks i made for the tripod didn’t last….and my father-in-law’s dock is a seasonal thing anyway. it’s not like it goes into the lake at literally/exactly the same place each year. so, i’ll be picking another place, or places, along the shore for that endeavor.

which reminds me. i need a sugar-daddy to buy me a GPS that’ll work with the cameras. i’m WAY too cheap to buy one myself, you know….

i took this photo late saturday evening on November 24th of this year, after three days of hunting with my brothers-in-law. the orange is so intense because of a) a recently-harvested corn field was being burned (it’s a method of putting nutrients straight back into the soil), and b) a cross-process filter which also deepened the blue and removed the haze from the smoke. my angle on this wasn’t exactly perfect, but i don’t think i would have brought up a lot more of the trees in the foreground if i had dropped to one knee. as well, the sun disappears rather quickly this time of the year, and i didn’t have time to go running across the field to get more of the trees in the foreground. i’m hoping that a future version can be derived that will highlight the trees and make a nice progressive triptych with other versions. i released it anyway, because….well, i like it.

you’re welcome to read the release announcement. terribly exciting stuff, i know. it was also added to my portfolios.com portfolio.

#1 Son turns 13 on December 20th. We’re sitting together at the breakfast table the other day, and I’m reading this letter to the Spouse Unit written by this guy who happened to be around at a certain car dealership the day she decided to purchase her car, and who has apparently believed himself to be God’s Gift to Carbuyers for roughly the last two years. Anyway, it’s a one-page handwritten letter (very thoughtful and personal, of course), that in four sentences contains more spelling and grammatical errors than typically exist in one semester of assignments in a second-grade classroom. So, I read it over, hand it to #1 Son, and ask, “Okay, kiddo. What’s wrong with this letter?”

He reads through it, chuckling several times, thinks for a moment, then answers, “He didn’t have someone else type it for him so he wouldn’t look so stupid.”

Deadpan.

Yep, the boy annoys me sometimes, as all kids occasionally do, but Gawd I love ‘im.

this looks like a screwed-up photograph, but it isn’t. although i will admit it was difficult to keep the wind off the camera during the thirty seconds it took to take this photo at night. i don’t get to do as much late-night photography as i’d like (and i’ll readily admit that Nikon DSLR’s aren’t really the best tools for dark shots), but the color here is completely unretouched, taken at ISO 800, f/5.6, 30″ in the light of a nearly full moon. the camera is pointing roughly west, about 2.5 hours after sunset. even that long after sunset, there is still a noticeable gradient to the light falloff. i just kinda thought that was neat. sadly, the rest of that night shoot was pretty poopy, because i had to use longer lenses and the wind was such that it was impossible to keep them from shaking over such a long period. this one and a couple of others are all that are going to make it.

well, i guess that’s about it today. best be shoving off to work, work, work!

(and since i’m tied here running photoshop batches for another hour or so….)

forgiven

in the palm of my hand
lies the crystal shield
of compassion
it glimmers and glows
with a light of its own
caught recklessly
between the lights
of two worlds
it satiates the primal urge
to run and fly away

what nought but this
that seeks suppression
what further drawn
alleviates the burn

come closer now
and the thought shall linger
chill mansions rose
where no one dwelled
before

~ December 18, 1992

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

recalescence

those days . . . .
vitality and strength
and the will to continue on
how much else then rectifies
the waste of an eternity
so many days now long forgotten
unattended in the graveyards
of my mind
some shadowless subdivision
of the thoughtless reclamation
of the emotion of a starry night
. . . so long now passed
that like eternity reconciles
the pasted glimmer
of a thousand stars
that fade like water pours
from between my fingers

i would live again
if only in this allowance
could the tokens be recalled
i am paled by the significance of others
their flows surround me
their auras imprison me
and without escape
i must sequester myself
behind the walls of solace

silence is a form of compassion
have i lost myself
or is this glowing spark of regeneration
only now coming before my eyes
i would be dead without these things
but alive
sometimes they stifle me

and those days . . . .
once remembered
. . . remind that i have grown
into what i do not know
but in this
i find i flow again
with the will to live

~December 3, 1992

my next-to-the-last wedding of the year is today. i’ve got a BAD sore throat. thus far in my career, i’ve managed not to have to work a wedding sick, so this will be first for me.

but i thought of this because of what my daughter said about staying away from guys right now and not getting married EVER. i SO felt the same way about women from time to time. several times, even. but in fact, i met the Spouse Unit just three weeks after i had TOTALLY given up on women. our meeting was completely unexpected, and our getting together was more than a surprise. so every time i shoot a wedding, i’m reminded of all the things that were pouring through my head ‘back then’ (positive and negative), and i’m still somewhat amazed that people actually want to get married, despite being happily married myself.

i was engaged three times in my life. sometimes when i look back, the acts of engagement were almost more significant than the acts of marriage that i’ve partaken in. they were emotional promissory notes that seemed to me to have more significant as a promise held in trust as opposed to the exercising of that trust. and if it weren’t for the exercising of Will, which is what a marriage ceremony is about, one of those earlier promises would still have been in effect.

which is not to belittle marriage in any way. there is something grand and inspirational about any marriage, as two people commit before witnesses to join their lives together, even when that joining is only a formality. i normally allow myself to get somewhat caught up in those emotions while i’m capturing wedding scenes, but with the way i feel today, i believe i’ll be more of an impartial observer. perhaps i’ll see some things today that alter my perception of this process.

regardless, every wedding i serve reminds me of my own wedding to the Spouse Unit and as such, during every wedding i serve, i silently renew my vows to her. it’s the least i can do, i suppose, since the weddings are part of what keeps me from spending more time with her and our children.

of bluer skies and rain

and then like rain these fetters fall and crash upon the floor

windows on a world and pictures moving sway and tumble
come to me and sweet surrounded water-torn love me
sing to me your songs of love and unity and peace and joy
and i shall sing to you and cling forever like the dawn’s sun rising warm

when winter comes and covers me in cold and blanket screaming
warm me with your heart and soul and spirit and your strength
and like these cracking windows melt and break the chains that bind me

~ Abilene, Texas; September 1988
~ © 1988, 2003