Earlier this month my sister Andie and her husband Jason visited the NW again (as they did last year). I spent a day with them in Seattle where Andie had been taking some further education classes for her job and I gave them a ride back to Portland from there. We had thought about doing something crazy like climbing Mount St. Helens but ended up toning it down a bit due to time. We did make it through Astoria on the way south from Seattle and then a camping trip up into the Cascades the next night and a back yard bar-b-que on the last night they were in town.

Last month I shot some engagements shots for some good friends here in Portland, I hope you enjoy these as much as I do. You can also find more on my flickr.

While in Hawaii in April, I of course met up with Blaine and Bethany for a day and that morning we spent with the turtles and fish just off shore near Kona. At that time of day, the turtles weren’t out to swim so we instead had fun taking pictures of each other with Blaine’s super-high-tech camera enclosure. He seriously gets some of those most amazing pictures with it, and here’s a few we shot that morning under water:

This one’s of Blaine:

I thought perhaps I should post this since I mentioned it in my previous post.

What happened was that my friends Ryan and Holly and their son Pax had planted a single Allium flower next to the sidewalk at their house and Pax would run out an get excited to see the flower every time they came out the front door. Some time last week, someone cut off the flower and stole it, leaving Holly with the task of explaining to her two year old what happened to the flower – now every time they went outside. Holly left a note describing this, hoping the theif would see the note on their next trip past the house, and at its very least understand the implications of their actions.

So a couple days ago, there appeared another Allium plant, in a pot, on the doorstep. Its impossible to tell whether it was put there by a guilty-feeling thief or an empathetic neighbor, but Pax quickly regained his love and excitement for the flower as they planted it in the yard, replacing the old one. See Holly’s blog about it here. I hope she doesn’t mind me telling the story.

Daniel, who is staying with me for a while in Ryan and Holly’s basement, and I were about as excited and happy to see Pax so happy perhaps as he and his parents were. It was a beautiful day in the Sunnyside neighborhood.

This is Pax hugging his gifted flower:

I’ve traveled quite a distance in the past month or two. I have traveled to different parts of the country recently, though these are not the travel I refer to. Really, where I stand now is not so noticeably different from whatever vague moment could be considered a beginning. I only mention this because I’ve been what feels to me like racing through time, thoughts, emotions.Less of a journey through space, however, more of a journey through circumstances, intuitions, and feelings.

Travel of any kind always feels like a video on fast-forward, a feeling only reinforced by the speed with which a setting passes while driving in a car or the speed with which one experience or thought, feeling as though it will carry reverberation with you for a life time, is soon replaced with the next feeling deserving the same consideration as the last. It seems it was the rainy winter of Portland only a few days ago, and somehow all these memories from the past several months were only packed into the passing notions of a spontaneous song, soon to be forgotten as soon as my mind moves on to what’s next. I don’t desire to live life this way, and hopefully steps I take to form a better life for myself and for those around me will do just that. Slowness is my honest desire.

What I’m most troubled by is that I have no idea how this works. I have no idea to achieve that, and as the cliché goes, I’m stumbling blindly. So blind, in fact, I’m not sure whether I’m moving at all or simply standing with a hand reaching out for another’s.

I spent time in Laurelhurst Park this evening near my house, a large park with a duck pond. The ducks and I are commonly acquainted, and they often suggest ideas to me I haven’t yet considered.

It occurred to me while at the park how good people are, particularly in my neighborhood. This is one reason this was on my mind, and here is a picture I took of Pax. This goodness is a goodness I’m not use to. Small town Nebraska, ultra-conservative Colorado Springs, yuppie-ville Hood River. This isn’t a rag on those places, because they are good places too. They may lack this certain kind goodness, but there are things Portland lacks as well, and there’s something about this place that feels like home without my having to coerce my mind into believing so. Its something about my life I likely cannot explain to those other places and may not have understood before I arrived where I now stand.

This goodness I’ve found in places here where I now live is a goodness I would only have speculated about or understood in idealism. Consequently I feel much less than adequate or worthy of living in such a place. That sounds extra cheap, I’m sure. Self-pitiful, whatever. What does one do when they know not how to acclamate old lives with new ones, the new ones they’ve searched for and somehow found? What does one do when they feel the momentum of past expectations and behaviors dragging them beyond what those constructs were suppose to bring them to? or when they cannot turn sharp enough to escape the ruts circling the campfire to get to the campfire itself?

I have no answer for that. I only have friends near and far who’ve heard my joys and sorrows, and the words of those who express what I otherwise cannot.

come tortoise, standing still
go hummingbird, my will
come tortoise, stumbling blind
go hummingbird, my eyes
come tortoise, empty hand
go hummingbird, my plan
come tortoise, undefined
go hummingbird, my mind
come tortoise, letting go
go hummingbird, I know
come tortoise, come and die
go hummingbird, my I
goodbye, I

Notice this: that love is not really one of man’s powers. Man cannot achieve love, generate love, wield love, as he does his powers of destruction and creation. When I love someone, it is not something that I have achieved, but something that is happening through me, something that is happening to me as well as to him. To use the old soap-opera cliché seriously, it is something bigger than both of us, infinitely bigger, because wherever love enters this world, God enters.

- Frederick Buechner, The Magnificent Defeat

This is only a fragment of the rebirth of Portland in the Spring. It was a marvel to live and witness this small corner of the world and its movement back into the greenness and the beautiful days it offers over the summer months. Spring has come and gone, but that growth and excitement carries enough intertia to bring this world around to attempt it all over again, less than a year from now.

Blaine and I stood on a cliff overlooking the green sand beach near Southpoint, Hawaii, on the big island. Each of us taking photos of this and that, avoiding the driving wind and the sand it brought to our camera gear. The sun was making its way down the western sky, but it seemed an instant change when the entire valley on both sides of the cliff glowed with the pinks, oranges, and blues of an incredible sunset. Anyone who knows such a moment knows that these photos do it not justice, yet I still post them if for no other reason, to remember.

I consider our pitch dark attempts to get lava pictures of Mt. Kilhauea rather pitiful in comparison to Blaine’s photos that he hasn’t even posted yet. Trust me, just wait, they’ll make you wet your pants, and I’ll try and remember to link to his post when he finally does. Here’s one of the few he posted and it doesn’t even compare.

So anyway, a couple days into my Hawaii trip last month when I finally made it over to the big island, the Frangers and I made the most of the single day I was there and stopped by to snap some long exposures in the freezing cold of the mountaintops. (Yes, freezing cold in Hawaii) This shot was about a 30 second exposure, ISO 3200, the best I could do without a remote trigger. Man was it dark outside, but it sure produced an erie glow that we could just see enough of to orient a zoom lens one from about a mile away.

Herman Melville begins the unreasonably short chapter 23 of Moby Dick by mentioning Bulkington, a man who had landed just a few months ago from a previous four-year whaling voyage, and was already back at sea with the launching of the current expedition. As though land scorches his feet, Bulkington avoids the safety and comfort of port like the plague.

Melville calls the land pitiful to the seaman. Safety, warmth, supper, “all thats kind to our mortalities,” all that brings a man back to port after such a journey. But he goes on,

In the gale, [land] is that ship’s direst jeopardy; she must fly all hospitality; one touch of land, though it but graze the keel, would make her shudder through and through. With all her might she crowds all sail off shore; in so doing, fights ‘gainst the very winds that fain would blow her homeward; seeks all the lashed sea’s landlessness again; for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril; her only friend her bitterest foe!

And he soon continues:

Glimpses do ye seem to see of that mortally intolerable truth; that all deep, earnest thinking is but the intrepid effort of the soul to keep the open independence of her sea; while the wildest winds of heaven and earth conspire to cast her on the treacherous, slavish shore?

But as in landlessness alone resides the highest truth, shoreless, indefinite as God – so, better is it to perish in that howling infinite, than be ingloriously dashed upon the lee, even if that were safety!

The howling, infinite sea is the same fury of truth, the God, all that one cannot comprehend and one of the right mind would avoid. Yet it be not the mind that push one out to sea..

Take heart, take heart, O Bulkington! Bear thee grimly, demigod! Up from the spray of thy ocean-perishing – straight up, leaps thy apotheosis!

Hasselblad 500 c/m

We had some fun over the weekend near Scappoose, Oregon, as my friends Texan friends (who live here now) invited me up for the relaxing afternoon near the Columbia River. My Texan friend count seems to be expanding more and more, as they seem to be heavily recruiting more of their old college friends to follow them to the northwest. I can’t say I blame either party, however, and of course welcome any new friends, especially because I usually like Texans once they leave Texas. Thats a joke, of course. These are a few shots of Evan, as the afternoon included some dress-up time and ventures into the woods. A special thanks is due to Kyle, a very swell fellow who hauled his lighting gear all the way from Texas for some photographic fun and also loaned me his Canon 1D when my camera’s battery depleted. One last thing, I also took some engagement shots of Jon and Paige, friends who will be getting married on October 16 (the day before my birthday) but those photos won’t be released until they have had a chance to see them. In the meantime, please enjoy these of this 5 foot 4 inch tough guy:

Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being.

I’ve decided to reread Herman Melville’s classic, Moby Dick, because it been quite a few years. Probably something like ten. In many ways rereading well-written pieces of literature, fiction as well as non-fiction, is like reading them for the first time. The ideological and cognative distances I’ve traveled, at least to me, feel like oceans of both space and time. The passage above comes from the end of chapter seven, and of course I don’t remember a bit of it. I’m enjoying, and probably better understanding than the first time around, the King James style vernacular employed by Melville and the deluge of topical analogy that so compliments a first person narrative. Being one who always finds at least a smirk for the simple spiritual analogies, particularly those offered by simpler minds or characters such as Ishmael, I just had to share it. Lees, by the way, is the sediment of wine in the bottom of a curing barrel.

I’m late in posting this but I wanted to make sure I let anyone in my readership know about the recent launch of a magazine called Conspire. The project is primarily driven by The Simple Way community and its many sister communities. Its first issue was released about a month ago and I was honored in that a photo I submitted was used on the cover.

You can pick up a copy of the magazine (which I recommend doing) at conspiremagazine.com or any of the communities involved with its publishing.

That’s what we all find when we reach this country, that we’ve all been wrong. That’s the great joke. There’s no need to go on pretending one was right. After that, we begin living.

- C.S. Lewis, The Great Divorce

Despite all the lip service he’s given, Lewis continues to offer one of the most revolutionary perspectives among us. Over a game of badminton and beer two nights ago, Ryan and I discussed Lewis a bit. Its notable that, as Ryan asserted, Lewis was among the apologeticists who took it upon themselves to reason God into existence, or rather, prove it. Yet, and especially for his time, Lewis remains revolutionary, in my opinion, because of the outrageous gap between his notions and the actual conceded reality. The masses may invoke his name, yet remain oblivious to his actual truths. Not unlike Jesus, I suppose, and in a sense, further proving the un-wisdom of the crowds maintained by Kierkegaard.

This single line from The Great Divorce summarizes effortlessly much of the confusion I’ve found in asking the honest questions. It embodies the tragedy that life is built upon and the comic relief that Buechner spoke of when he said “Blessed is he who gets the joke.” I spoke here on my blog last week of feeling ground to a halt, and my thoughts have yet to diverge. I’ve stopped pretending I am right, stopped believing doubtlessly that I am, and that is the only thing I can be sure of. No, I’m trying to stop pretending I am right. No passage is instantaneous, unless it attempts the same pretense as that of internet travel.

The fanal stanza is “After that, we begin living.” I can’t abandon all notions of truth, because I also know that no life as we wish this implied will actually be shaped the way we ourselves imagine it. This is the inevitable, and the same divergence of expectations that Lewis illustrates in the The Great Divorce, both on micro and macro levels. It would seem simple enough, but dropping my notions of being right, and dropping my imagination of goodness in life are the largest and most impossible of steps.

All I know is what I do not know, and walking in philosophical circles is not beyond me.

Between Night and Morn, Kahlil Gibran
page 95

These are my dear friends Bryan and Beth from Omaha. Tomorrow they’re getting married. I took this picture of them on the Broadway Bridge when they came to visit Portland last summer, and only a few months later, they were engaged. Bryan is one of the few friends I’m still in touch with from my college days, and its been great watching their friendship and relationship develop over the last 2 1/2 years. If you’re out there, please wish them a beautiful life together.

I’m particularly agasp at the occasional chapters in John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath when he seems to set off on tangents of describing anything from the dusty, dreary settings of a small town general store to the socio-economic conditions and philosophical underpinnings of the time. One such tangent is chapter 14, in which he repeatedly stresses the distinction between causes and results, a chapter in which he states:

If you could separate causes from results, if you could know that Paine, Marx, Jefferson, Lenin, were results, not causes, you might survive. But that you cannot know. For the quality of owning freezes you forever into “I,” and cuts you off forever from the “we.”

 His premises state that it is the bare and basic needs of humans, even at their most individual level that drive the movements of history, but that they are also hidden from plain sight. They are masked by the pathologies we did not choose, and may not have chosen against if we had a choice.

There is much of me that feels as though it has ground to a halt. Outwardly, this is much less dramatic than it sounds, and inwardly, its existence isn’t completely apparent. Its taken time, reflection, movements of emotion and exhaustions, both physically and spiritually in order to shape something beyond the brain impulses that would otherwise solely define its realness. Its also been aided by the words of others and the sharing of similar experiences or moments in the soul’s variation.

I’ve thought so much and read so many books over the last few months but have felt unable to say a word. I don’t have a lot of free time, but I do have some. I’ve posted little more than a handful of blog posts here over the past few months, and those have mostly been photographical posts. Its not that I’ve lacked time or truth to attempt to share, its that something has changed. I’ve written post after post these last few weeks only to leave them unpublished in dissatisfaction, either with the content altogether or the arrangement of the words themselves.  

A friend of mine recently was a part of a gathering of folks involved with Emergent Village, and afterward, the thoughts he translated into words to graciously share with his readers were ones that somehow helped me explain my own feelings even to myself. Its not that parallels need be precise, but that words chosen trigger just the right thoughts and that peace you get when you find yourself defined. Such definition carries not the forcefulness that one’s true identity given by God would bring, but it is similar, and, albeit fractional. It brings an exhale of understanding and peace, but not necessarily the complacency or the fabled “joy of the Lord”. 

At this gathering of Emergent folk, Brittian describes himself as arriving at a state of agenda-less-ness. I may read more into his reactions or even adopt some and then tell him “I’ll take it from here,” but as is obvious, we can often trigger feelings and revelations within each other with words that were meant for other purposes. By the end of his time there he had dumped his regular response to the question “What do you do?” and replaced it with, in so many words, “nothing.”

You see I’ve let go of many pursuits in my life, and even in the last few years. Pursuits that would seem to define the very nature of such narratives as “Christian”, “American”, “lover”, “fighter”, and “artist”. I can’t help but leave it that vague because even to me, looking back at my life as though I could read the pages, I couldn’t paint the picture even if only I were viewing it. Perhaps its the complexity that so burdons my soul while my mind enjoys the exercise.  Perhaps its the demands of reasonability that so burdons my mind while my soul finds it to be a shade from the sun on the warmest of summer days.

I’ve long now thought myself as meddling in the affairs of the gods, or at least the affairs of men who actually give a damn, and believe in that damnation for better or worse. Kahlil Gibran, with every word, applies color and comfort to the absurdities that would otherwise plague me. Just today, I pulled from his short collection of writings, Between Night and Morn, a line from a story that for a moment, I could swear was about me. 

“His soul abandoned the rapid parade of time rushing toward nothingness.”

And so I’ll raise my glass, not to passivity nor the narrowness of hedonism, but to the agenda-less importance of first, be-ing. The be-ing that frees one to rise through clouds to find clear skies above them and yet, still devoted to truth, remaining within them. The same being that disregards any notion of a halting or of progress, and leaves us with contentment in saying, simply, “I dream…I dream”.

(Please do visit Brittian’s blog and his particular post in which he concludes with “I dream…I dream”, and thank you, Brittian, for sharing.)

While in Hawaii a few weeks ago, I made a one day jump over to the big island. My great friends from Hood River, Blaine and Bethany were there for a few weeks after having shot a wedding. Naturally, I had to spend at least a day with them (on an island other than the people-packed Oahu) enjoying a day with the most adventurous people I know. Here are a few photos from the day, which had started off with Kona coffee, snorkeling off a lava beach, and later, journeying to the southern most point in the US and making a loop up to Kilaeua to see the lava glowing in the night. I’ll have more photos to share in a few days as I (slowly) get them edited, so please be a dear and check back soon.

One of the black lava rock beaches at south point:

As I think I mentioned in an earlier post containing the panoramics of Hawaii, the Southern part of the big island is covered in incredibly green rolling hills. You can’t see them in these photos, (actually I was standing on one while I shot this) but the hills were also covered with black lava rock fences. Such bold contrasting colors could never go unnoticed. 

One of many new friends I met on the island. I met many, but was jealous because Blaine and Beth had the chance to swim with them the evening before. We snorkeled in the morning, apparently the time they reserve for lazing on the beach.

My wide angle lens loves me dearly:

As mentioned, more to come, so please be patient with me. I also shot about 6 rolls of medium format on the islands so I will be posting some of those as well.