Crash

I got rear-ended on the way to pick Ezra up from school one afternoon last week. The other driver and I pulled into the nearest parking lot to inspect the damage. She didn't speak much English and my limited Spanish is rusty at best, and particularly useless under the circumstances.  I did understand, with complete clarity, what she was saying when she looked at me nervously and asked if I was going to call the police. The damage was minor and I had no desire to get the police involved so we agreed to let our insurance companies sort it out.

The accident happened near my house, a momentary collision of two worlds. We orbit the same neighborhood, but different universes. We are hermetically sealed inside our cars, our ethnicities, our classes, but a split second of dropped guard punctured the thin membrane that separates our experiences.

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I received word last week that the daughter of a former colleague died. She was 23, grown into young adulthood in the years since I spent time with her. The speakers at her memorial told stories of her spunk, courage and independence in the face of Muscular Dystrophy. Speaker after speaker told stories of knowing her since early childhood, or of decades-long friendships with her parents.

The service was at turns somber, funny, and reverent, inspiring in many ways. I was most moved by the evidence of the strong and supportive community in attendance, the sort of web that is always there but becomes most visible in times of either crisis or celebration.  It struck me as tanglible proof of a life well-lived.

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I spent the weekend in the mountains with the makings of my own web. Friends I've worked with for years. Friends Will went to undergrad with, through whom we met. Orbits that intersect, over and over, and loop back in on themselves as new people get introduced to the fold. Our children are now friends.

This was an annual celebration of community one of our own throws each winter.  Food, drink, snow, merriment, an overflowing house.  The gift of time to crash into each other all over again.

Perhaps it is not a web that connects us, so much as a vascular system.  Tiny capillaries that weave through the membranes between my inside and my outside, carrying in nutrients and oxygen.  Carrying out the waste that builds up when I spend too much time in my car, or in my head.  Bringing me, crashing, into the world.

Prop Love

Strange ideas come and go. Sequins and felt and needle and thread, so utterly foreign in my hands, occupied them for weeks, only to be forgotten when their intended unveiling rolled around.

This could mean:

This was a bad idea and I am being saved from humiliation.

Those hearts actually have another purpose.

I need to get better about making lists.

Abandoned props notwithstanding, my mind immediately started gathering other random objects. Strangely, I was carting around a yellow chair in the back of the station wagon. A wisp of an idea, wrapped in leather and suitably colorful. I ignored the nagging questions about does this make any sense? and What does it do? and Um, so what? and allowed myself to play, for the sheer silly joy of putting a yellow leather chair in the middle of a snowy bluff and dancing around with a remote shutter release.

I have no answers. Only a million questions and the intention to stop taking myself so damn seriously.

New Friend

I didn't sleep very well the night before Meghan flew in for the mini photo-camp we'd dreamed up.  Will asked, are you nervous because you don't really know her?  That wasn't why I was nervous but he had a point.  We met and hit it off at Camp Shutter Sisters last fall, and since she lives one state over it seemed easy to plan our own little photography retreat weekend.

We are very different.  Our photographic styles are different, we get charged by different subject matter, and we have different approaches to shooting.  She is drawn to vintage looks and loves the evocative feeling of old film.  I am avowedly digital and can't stop myself from overexposing everything I shoot.  But we are both groping toward a deeper understanding of our creative paths and our life paths, if such things are separable.

Between us there was that flicker of instant recognition that arises with new true friends, familiar even though you know none of their backstory.  I don't even know how you met your husband, or what your mom is like, I told her before she arrived.  These are things you know about people you feel connected to.  But then she was here, and as each new piece was revealed something small clicked into place.  You find yourself surprised and completely unsurprised all at once at how perfectly things fit together. 

This weekend comfort and discovery mingled.  I see Meghan as accomplished and brave and grounded, and all those things are true, but with each new fragment of her life she shared I appreciated further the depth of her resilience and authenticity and the power of her dreams.

She thought I seem fearless because so many of my stories featured a Corinna that was unafraid to move boldly through the world.  Of course lately I feel pinned down by fear, but hearing my own stories for the first time again is a reminder that within me there are reservoirs of chutzpah that might yet be accessible.

It was a nourishing weekend on every level, but I wasn't sad when I dropped Meghan at the airport yesterday.  I know that this budding friendship that is shiny and new now will, over time, earn the familiar well-worn patina captured by her beloved Polaroid.

Useful Habits

The first four days of my new - dare I say it out loud? - 365+1 projectI've been resisting taking on another 365 project so fiercely for the past few months that the resistance has become an act of stubborn performance art in itself.  But I have so many other ideas.  A 365 will just get in the way.  It's too time consuming.  I already did that.  And on and on. 

So instead of doing a 365 project I've done a lot of thinking about ideas and not very much doing.  I've almost entirely stopped carrying my big-girl camera (to steal Meghan Davidson's phrase) and my shooting has ground to a halt.  Also, as I have reported here ad nauseum, I found myself in a long and enduring Bad Mood.

The book Art & Fear came to me at Christmas and one of the really wonderful observations that stopped me in my tracks was about how artmaking thrives as a result of developing a set of useful habits that support that process.  The author suggests that if your work becomes strained or difficult you might do well to look at what you changed and consider changing it back. 

I've been sitting with that little nugget for about a month.  Trying to ignore it, really.

But it kept returning to me.  And at the beginning of February I started shooting again.  I've given myself permission to keep it simple, shoot entirely with my iPhone, and post daily to Instagram (if you're so inclined, you can follow me here).  The intention, of course, is to keep myself thinking photographically, to practice seeing daily, and to leave some space for some of those other big ideas to grow. 

This is me, diving in.  Wish me luck.

Gutsy: Interview with an Artist

This is Christopher Owen Nelson, a painter and the subject of a short film a friend and colleague is making.  My friend asked me if I would interview Chris for the film and what followed was a coffee-fueled two hour conversation about how he knew he had to be an artist, what inspires him, his process, and the similarities between art making and fly fishing. 

Chris has created a technique of carving and painting sheets of acrylic into vivid images of the natural world. There are a lot of trees in his work, and he told me that he thinks of painting them as portraits rather than landscapes.  You've probably noticed by now how much I love both portraits and trees so this whole idea basically made me tingle.

Even in a weekend of snowy Colorado fun this stood out as a highlight for me.

I don't want to scoop the film, so I won't spoil too much about the conversation here.  But I will share this: we talked about what it looks like when gutsy shows up in your heart, studio, work.  Since I often get paralyzed in the thinking part of, well, everything, this part of his response struck me:

At some point, you just can't go around thinking your whole life.  You've got to pour some resin into a mold.  You've got to rip something out.

You've just go to do.  Do.

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More doing.  Less thinking.  It was on my list of intentions for the year.  Here it is, showing up again.

What does gutsy look like for you?