It begins in your mind, always

 I must say a word about fear. It is life’s only true opponent. Only fear can defeat life. It is a clever, treacherous adversary, how well I know. It has no decency, respects no law or convention, shows no mercy. It goes for your weakest spot, which it finds with unnerving ease. It begins in your mind, always … so you must fight hard to express it. You must fight hard to shine the light of words upon it. Because if you don’t, if your fear becomes a wordless darkness that you avoid, perhaps even manage to forget, you open yourself to further attacks of fear because you never truly fought the opponent who defeated you.

-Yann Martel

These photos were made possible by Katie, my human tripod/fashion model extraordinaire.  Hers is the face that can often be found gracing my frames, most of the time in fact.  Shooting with her is always a pleasure because she knows what to do in front of a camera, which is less than I can say for most of my models.  (But I love them anyway.)

More photos on my flickr.

I've killed my self and buried her in a photograph

Photographs hold pieces of the soul that the mind can no longer fathom.  They cannot be fabricated because they are printed in ink so that we can assure ourselves that we lived, once.  By itself, a memory is fragile.  When married to a glossy piece of 4x6, it becomes immortal.  Film cannot lie.

My two year-old self is wary of present-day me, peering at me from where she hides behind the tall lady in the blue skirt and gray nylons.  She is a time traveler, a relic of the past.  The air she breathed is not the air I breathe now.  We share skin cells and hair follicles but that is where the similarities end.  We are not the same person, not really.

Not the same.   So why do I feel guilt heavy on my shoulders, whispering in my ear that I am a murderer?  A murderer for doing away with the child in the picture, disposing of her like clothes that have grown too small.  The girl who wore a starched collar and a bow in her hair would never do such a thing.  This girl, however, commits such atrocities almost as an afterthought.  Her heart is frozen, ice water flows through her veins.

Innocence, she decides, belongs in the realm of ancient photographs.

It's not the cry you hear the most

 

Two weeks and I will be back in school.  My major will have been changed from Psychology to Multimedia, a prospect that both excites and liberates me.  I am not a science person; I never have been.  My passion is in the aesthetic.

Strands of my soul, mingling

 

I have become an incense junkie of late.  It calms me, takes me to places where the people wear dreadlocks and speak in hushed tones to one another and where the air is always perfumed with the fragrance of bliss.  

A favorite quote + new photoshoot

Adventurousness is one of the most essential qualities for those who want to live life in its totality. And to live one’s life in totality is to be religious, to live it whole is to be holy.

Life is a great adventure, but people are so afraid that they cling to the familiar, to the known, to the well-defined, to the logical. They never go beyond the boundary of the mind. If you live in the mind you are living in a grave. If you go beyond the mind you are really born, you have come out of the grave.

One can live each moment with such intensity, with such adventure, that each moment becomes a great gift of god because it brings so much joy, so much ecstasy. But one has to be ready to go on dropping the past. One should not allow the past to be accumulated. That becomes a prison wall around you.

Each moment die to the past and remain fresh, and your life will be a great adventure. And it is only for the adventurous people to know what truth is. The non-adventurous live in comfortable lies.

Unless you are a rebel you will not attain to fragrance. It is only through rebelling against all the rotten traditions that one becomes fragrant. Tradition stinks, and if you remain part of it you continually stink.

The past is dead, it is a corpse, and to live clinging to the past is disgusting. But that’s what millions of people are doing. We have to get rid of the past. You are, only when you are free of the past; for the first time you are, for the first time you are an authentic individual. And that authenticity brings fragrance. Your heart opens up into a beautiful flower, you become a lotus.

-Osho

See more photos from this shoot on my Flickr account!

Sometimes I feel like exploding

Bullet Passing Through a Water Balloon 3, a photo by photoboothguy on Flickr.

Like one of those videos of a water balloon popping in slow motion, rubber walls breaking and letting loose their watery insides. My skin is the rubber and all it takes is a needle to shatter my defenses, that or a swift blow to end it all. Part of me yearns for destruction, for the sharp sensation of outer shell obliterating, insides seeing light for the first time.

I want to be pure, empty and translucent. Even if it means letting go of everything holding me together.

It's a rock-out-with-abandon kind of day

I was trying to kill time so I put together this mix on 8tracks.com. Yes, that is me in the picture. No, I am not a pothead-slash-hippie. (Though sometimes I wish I was.)

Anatomy of a sufferer

She is silent, these days.  The demons no longer scream at her—instead they have wound their clammy fingers around her throat so she can no longer speak for herself.  They are content, those demons, because they believe they have won.

What does she think of all this?  To be honest, she herself doesn’t know.  When others ask, she tells them she will pry the claws from her throat and reclaim her breathing space.  Tomorrow, she says.  Or, Another time.  When I’m stronger.  But she is never stronger.

Hours turn into days and weeks and yet she has the feeling of being trapped in an hourglass, sand pouring into her nostrils and eyes and suddenly she is blind and airless, like a cold wet fish in a dank, dark cave under the earth.

What does it mean?

My mind is a greyhound

Every time I stare uncertainty in the mouth my heart begins to race and ache with a kind of desperation that has become familiar to me.  For someone who thrives on control, not knowing what the future holds is in turns maddening and terrifying.  Last night was yet another night of Not Sleeping, tossing and turning, surrounded by a wall of pillows as though trying to protect myself from the demons of unrest that hound me so.

Sometimes I compare my mind to a greyhound chasing after one of those mechanical rabbits.  It tenses and then explodes toward a particular train of thought, ever fiber strained and working like the gears on a clock.  And yet the target is always out of reach, pulled along by some invisible force determined to rob me of my resolve.  I am left exhausted and unsatisfied.

What if I could control my own destiny?  Would life be easier?  Harder?  Perhaps I would finally be afforded peace from this mist of confusion that now envelopes my consciousness.  

I try to earn grace, but it never works.  The future is the future, and if I learn to accept that now then I will become stable and well-rounded and at peace and oh God who am I kidding, the future scares me to death and no matter how dissatisfied I am with the present, at least it’s here.