about
Rain comes to Valencia like typhus: wind, thunder, rain—predictable and ruthless. And once it passes, recovery is slow and the entire valley, exhausted. Valencia, however, never floods—nothing drowns, nothing is fully immersed. The earth is marked just a little, scratched just a bit immediately after the fall. And from the runoff, the bleeding, the landscape is re-tissued as though a top layer of skin has molted—nature's facelift. Our little Garden of Eden once again is as it was in the beginning before the fall, before Gethsemane, before the atonement when rain was nothing more than absorbed, when rain did nothing more than fall.
Delicate flora has washed away. Colors not diluted by the master artist now appear freshly painted, glossy in the aftermath. Ferns are now a deeper green, their jagged edges sharper than ever. Nature's confetti lays everywhere. Fallout consisting of anonymous blossoms, buds and leaves still hold their colors but have somehow lost their virtue in the storm. Pathways, fountains, and ponds display a similar complexion, distinction muted by the downpour. Nature celebrated a new year it seems, or maybe a wedding—a consummation by the look of things. The afterthoughts can be uncomfortably familiar, or unfamiliar. Is it worth the mess, one wonders?
Yellow Cat weathered the storm, perched on the piano bench. The sound of my playing, comparable to thunder, must transfix her, purring as usual, paws and chin resting upon my lap. Unfortunately, I practice only as often as it rains here. The piano, more than anything, serves merely as a reminder of music. Where the mission choir is an ensemble of cathedral acoustics, gothic accompaniment and the interplay of audience and angels; my piano, on the other hand, is the solo. It is only me. It is more sound than music, more cliché than opus, more heart than voice. But Yellow Cat lays still and listens; and maybe in the studio upstairs, my music is heard as well.
Although the rain dilutes the valley's colors, it enriches the atmosphere with earthy aromas as hearty as smoke. After the cloudburst, the fertile air draws all life into the open. Noses swelling, windward, townsfolk ponder the familiarity in the air that only comes after rain. The green cologne of the river, woods, and sea plus everything sweet that perished in the storm attack the senses like a crusade of meadows. Topsoil smells up the air with that rich, gritty decay of earth. The breeze brings a spring-cleaned energy comparable to that of April's last layer of snow sinking into the piney soil, cleaning the earth's pores before trickling into pools and streams across the valley.
My next book describes consciousness as the matter within a bubble and follows this consciousness as it rises from the bottom of the sea to it's release into the atmosphere. I think of the bubble as a womb, like the earth as a womb for all of us. The bubble holds us, nurtures and teaches us, carries us into maturity until we rise to the top and are born into the universe.
I am the cold grey of a turning sea
the stillness of a warm bay--
a balmy sedation
subtle as glass.
I am the room between thoughts
the distance between words
the infinite rests of an unfinished song
the echo of a mayfly's whisper.
I am the first breath of sleep
the next tick of an unwound clock
the last seductive secret;
I am the ubiquitous space between.
I have always longed to tell the stories of people I photograph. And I have always fostered a style and philosophy that endeavors to illuminate the soul of everything I see. I look for a person's humanity in their expressions complete with the good, bad, but never truly ugly. And in the end, I often discover a true and soulful beauty that reveals a story about everyday people that, hopefully, we can all relate to. I love people, and helping them find this beauty behind the camera is my number one goal. Nothing illustrates the collaboration of art and science better than the art and science of photography. It employs the art of observation and the science of communication. One must see the sublime in the mundane and the extraordinary in the midst of ordinary. And one must communicate through pictures a context of time that can be preserved and remembered forever.
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3. Once I have some inventory,
it'll be a real store!