16 -- Hasta la vista

This is not a terrific photo and I dislike posting these placemarker shots, here only because I made no better images this particular day. I had thought that flying might provide some opportunities, airports to me often seem filled with striking images, but we were late and I was just wiped out. Happy to collapse in my cramped little seat and veg for the four hours it took to land in Cancun. Then the rental jeep down the coast, arriving just past sunset. Better pictures to come today -- I can already feel myself slowly unfurling from my usual clenched-ness, in the sun and warm, soft breeze and endless susurration of the sea.

We will be in a really remote part of the Yucatan, right down near the border with Belize. (Saltwater flyfishing, hoping for the grand slam of catching a tarpon, a permit and a bonefish, which Bill says make trout look positively uncautious. Or at least he is on mission; I'm pretty much just along for the adventure. A good thing, given my woeful fly casting abilities). So it's unlikely I will be able to post for awhile, but I'm going to be working on remaining mindful. While it's easy, while there is some psychic and temporal room, working on keeping photography a part of my everyday experience of the world, no matter what the day brings. And not some special treat I get to enjoy when all the planets align just right.

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14 - Upside Down on Purpose

I love this shot of Cole in the pool. Upside down on purpose - I oriented the camera that way. It reminds me of an album cover from the loosey-goosey early days of hip-hop in the 80s...

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12 - Em me Fri Eye

Been traveling constantly for a week -- my usual midweek migration between houses, then a weekend trip with my extended family, then a couple nights home, now in Mexico. Things have been a bit up in the air as a result and this, I am realizing, is where this project slips. I am seeing the value of the discipline of not only shooting every day but posting every day.  When I'm not dashing about madly in my regular life -- if I had a Latin motto, it would be "Oportet nos custodiunt pistris incedendo" (or, We must keep the shark moving forward) -- I have moments, even days, of creative energy and focus. But those come and go, as unexpected and fugitive as the February sun. 

But being in that place always feels incredibly good, and I think I now get, understand, grasp with double-clutched fists the fact that doing this project is going to make those times more present and accessible. The habit of being visually present all the time, not just when life shows me a little mercy, is one that is made. Not given.

11 - Little Lancaster

Just after sunrise this morning, along Bel Air Road near my house - a shop called Little Lancaster selling picnic tables, Adirondak chairs, and other purportedly Amish-made products. The plain folk are apparently very fond of silhouette cut-outs of children and pets.

One of the fun things about this photo, for me, is that we are actually heading to Lancaster this weekend for a family getaway. I don't expect I'll personally pester the notoriously photo-shy plain folk. But maybe they'll be willing to let me photograph their wooden silhouettes?

10 - Still Life with Galleys

Yesterday's photo once again not the most exciting image every recorded, but it's big around these here parts -- yesterday was the day that my man received the galleys for his second book, which will hit booksellers in May.  Galleys, it now seems, look a lot like the actual, eventual book -- other than the words 'uncorrected proof' on the cover.

I noticed these on his nightstand. It's now time to read through for final corrections and changes, but I think the bottle of Scotch and the Pepto Bismol tablets really are what speaks most eloquently about this writer's life still life.

9 - Slip Slidin' Away

A most uncompelling image, but the important thing about yesterdays photo is that it exists at all. I had a day of nonstop demands from work that kept me glued to my computer until the very second I needed to dash to a meeting. As I drove along the Gunpowder I noticed this small, winding tributary stream that was frozen solid white, contrasting with the dead forest floor in a way that grabbed my eye and my brain.  I stopped, took two very quick pictures, realized that in addition to being drastically late I was also not wearing the kind of footgear that would get me across a half-thawed and very muddy river bed to make the shot I wanted. So I got back in the car and drove away. But I stopped.

And that is the important thing. Even if I can't make the picture that's in my head, the fact of stopping, of trying, of taking one small fraction of the day to be something other than a constant mad dashing through life. Some days, stopping is almost impossible. Life carries such forward momentum.

8 - Dragon a little behind

Last night at bed time, sent to put his pajamas on, Coley comes out wearing the dragon suit that was his costume three Hallowe'ens ago. "It still fits!" he proudly exclaims. Indeed it does. Sort of. In a bulging-at-the-seams kinda way.

Then of course he wants to wear it to sleep in. He knows this is not a sanctioned sleeping outfit, so the big pleading eyes are put into play. Dang. I'm such a sucker for the big pleading eyes.

We compromised: he slept in the dragon suit pants (complete with beclawed dragon feet), but not dragon suit top. 

The title for this blog post is acknowledgement that I am a day behind on posting. I really do want to post the same day I shoot, and I am going to have to find a way to make that happen when the boys are around. Their fondness for Minecraft means I have to compete for time on my own computer. But I want so badly to not fall down on this 365 for a *third* time that I think I'll even be able to resist the big pleading eyes rendered in Jack and Cole stereo...

7 - On Not So Thin Ice

It's been bitterly cold for the past week. Most days the high is hovering around a balmy 19 degrees. So it's not surprising that the river has partly frozen, in the places where the water runs slow. We went down to explore the frozen landscape -- skating on the ice above the place we normally go swimming, heaving the biggest rocks we could find out to the edges of the ice where it was thin.

I thought the opportunity for good photographs would arise, and it probably did. I totally missed it however, since my protective mama bear instincts were on high alert and I was focused on making sure nobody fell through the ice or met any other catastrophic fate. These tar splashes on the road caught my eye as we parked along the river road, and uninspiring as it maybe be this is the picture for yesterday, round 3, day 7. But I still consider the day a success in that only Cole fell through the ice, and only a little bit -- up to his shins.

6 - A Simple Song

It's disconcerting for me, sometimes, how posting these photos can make me feel so incredibly exposed. Intimate dispatches from my life in an upturned boat, marooned on a cliff...

5 - Spoon!

Emma, bringing me a spoon to stir the oatmeal we were cooking for breakfast. She's so marvelously creative and spontaneous, and -- even better! -- ever willing to let me photograph her.

4 - White Winter Hymnal

Awakening to find that it had snowed as we slept, unknowing. The fascination of looking at the white-covered world made new while we sit beside the window and gently smooth and brush the sleep tangles from Emma's long red hair.

3 - The Immaculate Heart

I had just dropped the boys at school, a frigid January morning, 19 degrees F and a stiff wind. Exactly the kind of morning you want to speed back home and then stay there. Except that I spotted this plastic bag stuck in some briars along the road, backlit by the early morning winter sun still low in the sky. It struck me how much it looked like El Corazon, the heart card in the Mexican game of Loteria -- played like bingo, only using pictures, and the iconography is simple and traditional and incredibly, compellingly beautiful. Or maybe the Immaculate Heart of Mary. I saw this and thought this even as I drove on past.

But. Then I turned around. And got out of the car, and took pictures til my fingers froze, got back in the car, looked at the pictures, saw how they could be better -- I realized I probably needed to lie on the ground to get the angle I wanted -- cursed, hopped back out of the car and walked back down to the spot where the bag was flapping in the wind. A few minutes later a Baltimore County Police squad car slowed to a stop, to inquire if the woman rolling around the frozen mud and shredded silage at the edge of a corn field maybe needed any assistance. Thanks, officer, but I'm fine, I told him. He looked skeptical but drove on.

And here is the image. It exists. I almost tremble now to recall the moment that I decided to stop, and really look. To make a photograph. Because, recently, I have simply kept on driving.  Even as I feel remote photography has once again become from this life I live every day, the only one I get. Later, I'll do it later, I'm always thinking. But later never comes, and I've also been around long enough now to be all too keenly aware that it's also always later than we think. (Time -- or, at least, my experience and expectations of time -- ceased being infinite awhile ago. I think when I turned 42 and realized that this 40s thing, it wasn't going away, and even if I'm not yet on the downside slope of this mortal coil you can see it from here).

 It was such a tremulous, fragile instant -- so bitter cold outside, I had forgotten my coffee and desperately wanted more, the pressure of the ten million things that I needed to be getting done. I could have glanced, noticed, kept driving -- I've been doing a lot of that recently. But I stopped. And when I drove home after, half-frozen and giddy from the unexpected side trip my morning had taken, I realized how good it feels to have this expectation in the day. That I will set aside a few brief moments to stop. To look, really look. To do nothing else but. My hectic life isn't going anywhere, but doing this pushes back the walls the tiniest bit. Makes some breathing room. 

I am not religious, but the way this image resonated in my head afterward kept calling to mind the prayer for the Immaculate Heart of Mary.
 
Hail, Heart most holy,
Hail, Heart most meek,
Hail, Heart most humble,
Hail, Heart most pure,
Hail, Heart most devout,
Hail, Heart most wise,
Hail, Heart most patient,
Hail, Heart most obedient,
Hail, Heart most vigilant,
Hail, Heart most faithful,
Hail, Heart most blessed,
Hail, Heart most merciful,
Hail, most loving Heart of Mary,
mother of us all.

2 - Onward, and Upward

Goofing in the kitchen, Tuesday morning before school.  Cole in his size 6 shark underpants, doing his best imitation of a rocket blasting off.  "Mama, watch me. Mama look, I'm a rocket. Mama, WATCH!!!!  Fiiiiiire...POWER!"

That's when the urge woke up from its long slumber, tucked way back in a dark corner of my brain.  Yawned, turned over, then reared itself up and looked me square in the eye: start posting photos again, girl. And I realized I want to. A quiet third attempt at completeing a 365 photo project. Why now? Things are as unsteady and unreliable in my life these days as they've been during the first two go-rounds -- I'm in even more dire financial straits these days, not enough work coming my way and I rarely even get an acknowledgement that I've sent my resume, much less an interview, when I've applied for jobs. Other fun goings-on include being in the nerve-wracking end game of divorce negotiations, and watching mostly helplessly as my younger son struggles unhappily with school and life in general. All this stress and existential wear and tear is manifesting itself physically -- I'm still on the tail end of a monthlong bout with pneumonia.  So. Not a promising set of circumstances for success this time around. But perhaps the third time's the charm.

My beloved friend Amy, who commenced her own 365 over the summer, was very supportive when I finally confessed how it's hard for me to visit her 365 site and admire the brave, creative work she's doing (http://interspace365.blogspot.com/).  "It's very difficult to maintain creativity when personal stress is so thick. I have been there and I know I did very little during that time," she wrote. "The important thing is to care for yourself as much as you can and just give yourself a pass. Once you feel like being creative you'll know things are healing."

Here's to healing.

1 - Third Time's the Charm

It seems I've begun again.  Let us see where this trail leads us.