I got to interview Chris in February for a short film our mutual friend Dustin was making, and it really got me thinking about what it means to be gutsy in your own work, and about how much I need and want to harness the power of that in my own creative journey.  (I'm working on it.)

In the months since then Chris and Dustin continued to work on the piece and it's ready to view!  Looking at it now I have to say that I just love hearing Chris talk about the interplay of his passions and how they feed and inform each other, making each element stronger.  I was on the edge of my seat during the original interview hearing him talk about his process and it's fascinating to watch again.  

And finally, this piece is just stunningly beautiful - both Chris' paintings and Dustin's shooting.  Blow it up to full screen, and enjoy.

Babies can't put the bread in the toaster, because they will get burned.  Only big boys can do that.

Babies can't sit on the big potty, because they will fall in. I can do that because I'm a big boy.

Suddenly I notice that all of Ezra's shirts are too small.  Mind you, not because I observe it myself, but because he squeals when it is time to get dressed, demanding a floppy shirt.  One that wiggles.  I don't want that shirt.  That shirt is too tight.

I don't mind Ezra's hell-bent demonstrations of growing up.  I actually relish that he's not a baby any more.  But at night, after our torturously slow tooth brushing routine and our books and our what-was-your-favorite-thing-about-today, lately he asks, Will you lay with me in three minutes? 

And I do, because it's the quietest three minutes of the day.

Will gave me a necklace when Ezra was born, a thin gold chain with three small beads, one for each of us.  It has dangled there nearly every day since.  As soon as the infant Ezra gained any control of his extremities he found that necklace.  When he was nursing we sat in the blue rocking chair in his room a million times a day, and every time he latched his tiny little hand fluttered to my throat and clutched the necklace like a prayer mala.

(The other day he pointed to my breast and asked, Is that your belly? 

No, I said.  That's my breast.

What is it for?

When you were a baby it made milk and that's how you ate.

Oh.  He thought, pointed at one and then the other.  This one made milk and that one made water?)

So here we are in the big boy phase.  The other night lying next to him in three minutes, watching him sink into slowness, I felt the absentminded starfish of his big boy hand find its way to my necklace.  It was a happy jolt, jogging me into remembering those long, slow infant days. 

The gift, as we rush into Big, is this: our former selves and all our time together, all of it, is encoded into our muscle memories in a place beyond knowing.

SOOC test shots from my first spin with the D800

*Alert! Alert! Full camera geekiness ahead! You have been warned!*

I have been lusting for Nikon's new D800 since they announced it several months ago.  Up until now Nikon has not had a full frame camera or one with broadcast-quality video. Canon, with their 5D Mark II, has been the standard bearer for the category and I was seriously considering switching, even with the significant investment it would take to buy not only the body, but to replace my collection of Nikon lenses.

I held fast though, and was surprised and delighted when my local camera store called yesterday morning to say the camera had arrived, faster than I expected.  I was completely impatient for the work day to end so I could go claim my new baby.

Ezra, naturally, was much more interested in digging in the 15 cubic yards of mulch we had delivered Tuesday than letting me focus on the camera long enough to figure out how switch it out of automatic mode.  So the camera sat patiently on the dining room table while I impatiently dug mulch with my short (but demanding) overlord.

As soon as Will got home from work I begged him to take over Ezra and dinner duty so I could show the camera the block where we live.  It was an overcast evening and getting late, but the photos in the above collection are all straight out of the camera, edited only to crop them into the collage, but not at all to manipulate their exposure or color.

Off the bat I will say that I am completely impressed with the camera's low-light capabilities, the richness of the color it produces and the detail it (and the 50mm f1.4 lens I shot with) captures.  Rumor has it the video is pretty damn nice too, and I hope to begin to experiment with that this weekend.  Being a person who hates to read manuals of any sort, I am a bit intimidated by the complexity of the controls on this instrument but I'm determined to learn to harness its capabilities and so excited to discover where my vision will lead as I play.

Here we go!

I started the year with an intention to learn to shoot video.  I thought it would be easy for me, since I've spent the better part of my career around professional videographers, watching their raw tape, and sitting in edit rooms.  I actually, in my downtime over the holiday break, attempted to shoot, only to realize that it's harder than it looks.

Me, to a friend who is a Director of Photography: Wow.  I've watched you shoot video for all these years and you make it look so easy.  But shit!  It's actually hard!

Him: Ummmm, yeah.  Asshole.

(He didn't say that last part, but I bet he was thinking it.)

So I stopped, after shooting approximately 4.5 minutes of mediocre video, because I thought I couldn't do it.  This is true, even though I understand as I type it that it sounds - and is - absurd.  But through a string of recent encounters and ideas and side projects the notion to shoot for myself has again arisen, this time with the understanding that oh yeah, I could actually practice that.  It sounds like an idea that would come easily to a person who devoted herself to taking a picture every single day in an effort to, you know, learn how to take pictures.  Instead it hit me like a complete novelty, a revolution in creative thinking. 

Here's what I'm thinking: I'll shoot video and put it together in a series of vignettes or sketches and post it here with some regularity.  Right now I'm thinking of them as video love letters, but I may just be stuck in that mode because the first one was a love letter to my new bike and a lost friend.  Sometimes they may be stories, sometimes just a collection of images set to some music that I like.  But always they will be practice, yet another opportunity for me to stretch my own personal creative muscles and work through the fear of sharing imperfect things. 

Thanks for being my test audience.

(And p.s. Thanks, Meghan Davidson, for your willingness to make a cameo.  Beware, other friends who cross my path.  You may be next.)

artifacts of a former life

I did indeed set aside three of the four boxes to be donated.  But the fourth, oh my.  The fourth was a forgotten time capsule curated by a former self.

Inside I found maps of cities and towns all over south Asia, annotated with my chicken scratch, a guesthouse here, a suggestion of a river trip there, a recommendation of the best fruit shakes in Laos.  On those maps I could see my backpack-clad self boarding a bus, tracing that line of highway up the valley.  I could remember that hot spring or the garden where I played backgammon or the awful flea-infested squat where I stayed trying to cross that border.

I found a trekking permit for the Annapurna circuit in Nepal, an official government document made of yellow construction paper and stamped by every bureaucrat in Pokhara before I could set out on the trail.  I read in the New York Times last year that the trail has now been turned into a highway.  

I thought about throwing these things out - what do I need with them now?  But then I imagined Ezra looking through these when he has grown and having a sense of me as someone with a rich and adventurous life, even beyond my identity as his mother.

I found old letters inside the box, letters my brother wrote me when I was in college (Mom, did you make the 13-year-old Avram write to me?  Surely he didn't do that of his own volition?), love letters from an old boyfriend, from friends, from my parents.  I found an undated birthday note, presumably from one of those early-20s birthdays freighted with nervousness about how to be a grownup, that contains possibly the best three sentences of parental advice ever committed to paper.

Happy birthday darling,

Keep in mind when older people give you shit about career & earnings & security, etc., that not one older person who has strived & worked & accumulated would not give up everything to be young and poor.  Do what makes you happy.  That is the only measure of success.

Love, Dad

I laughed and cried sifting through these pieces of evidence, proof that I really did exist in those other lives, and so did the people I love.  Here are these tangible artifacts, held in my own hands 15 and 20 years ago, that reminded me of the power of paper, of making things, of writing things down.

Ezra will probably never comb through my Gmail account, past all the decades-old Groupon offers and Linked In notifications, in hopes of finding the meaningful digital breadcrumbs left behind.  But he may look through these pieces of paper, covered in handwriting, and laugh and cry and know that I was really, fully here.

---

So to the growing list of things I want to get good at, I add this: write love letters.  On paper, in my often illegible handwriting.  Do it often and without the expectation they will be reciprocated.  Enter into the permanent record my high regard for the people who share my life.  Share sage ideas.  Use the postal service.  Choose pretty stamps.  Make proof of life, and proof of love.

Dear Dylan,

I can't believe next week marks three years since you've been gone. When you called me a few years earlier to confess that you'd fallen off the wagon I didn't realize it was the beginning of the end.  I had always known you as a sober person and I assumed this was an unfortunate bump in the road, but that you'd be back on track, say, the next day.  I didn't know that the wheels were starting to come off.  I didn't understand that all those years when you seemed okay, your demons were still there, under the surface, gaining strength.  I didn't understand anything.

When I think about how absent I was from your life at the end, so wound up in pregnancy and having a new baby, I feel so sad.  I know I couldn't have changed anything for you, but I wonder if I could have just gotten a little bit more of you.  Jackie told me things got pretty bad, that you were in the grip of self destruction and despair, so maybe it's a gift that I don't remember you that way.

I usually think of you when I'm in the car listening to music, but that might be because it's the only place I tend to be alone with my thoughts.  You also always come to mind when I'm chasing a tele-skier down a slope that's a little beyond me (this has become a theme in my life, but you were the first and the most demanding), or when I get on the old mountain bike you sold me when you became a partner in the bike shop. When I go hear shows at Red Rocks you are with me and I can't listen to David Byrne any more without thinking about the time that you got me backstage at the Fillmore to meet him. 

I feel so lucky to have shared the years of friendship with you and Jackie that I did.  I was such a kid when I started working with Jackie that it's a wonder she didn't roll her eyes and mock me mercilessly for my endless follies.  But she didn't.  She laughed with me, and she invited me into your lives and made me the approved girlfriend, an appropriate companion for the things you loved that she didn't, like skiing and listening to jam bands play live shows.  I hope I was good company for the things we all loved to do together too, like four straight seasons of Sunday night potlucks at your house watching every episode of Six Feet Under that ever aired.

I found myself wondering recently, during one of my Dylan reveries in the car, if you're here at all anymore.  The grief we all shared immediately after you died made you feel so present to me.  But coming up on three years without you, you were starting to feel distant and faint.  When Jackie e-mailed me to ask if I wanted the cruiser you gave her it was like a jolt.  When I saw the bike for the first time I laughed out loud for the joy of it.

Dylan, this bike is the most perfect gift I could imagine.  It just feels so you, from the outrageous color to the skull-and-crossbones valve stem caps.  Riding it makes me feel close to you and to Jackie and to all the times we shared together.  It also makes me hopeful for the colorful and inspired future I am calling forth every day.  This bike is the vehicle I'm taking to that place, so thanks for that.

I made this little film for Jackie, but also for you, to show you just how much I love your bike.  Since you loved good design and the coolest people, I'm imagining you and Jerry Garcia and Steve Jobs huddled up in a corner around an iPad watching this.  (You would have LOVED the high-def iPad, Dyllie.  Wish you could have stuck around to see it.)

Miss you so.

Love,

Corinna

But I am not fully nourished when I don't ingest well-constructed words, or when I spend too much time in my own and not enough time swimming around in others'.  My friend Marjorie recommended Cheryl Strayed's Wild a few weeks ago and I immediately went out and bought myself a copy.  Strayed tells the story of her solo hike on the Pacific Crest Trail in a time when she was broken and lost and needed to find herself.  A hiker she meets on the trail gives her a long black feather which she tucks into her pack.  She later encounters a woman who identifies it as a corvid feather, a "symbol of the void."  It sounds scary, but she describes it as "the place where things are born, where they begin."

The same day I encountered Mark Nepo's description of the void, the empty space of stillness, darkness, where perception is heightened and things are born: "Both the Buddhist and Zen traditions speak of an unbreakable emptiness at the heart of all seeing from which all things emerge.  The Hindu Upanishads tell us that in the center of the seed of the great nyagrodha tree there is nothing, and out of that nothing the great tree grows."

I am reminded of my long bad mood last winter and the feeling of claustrophobia so strong I couldn't breathe.  I am reminded of my efforts to hold just a little bit of space for myself, the place where a small sprout of hope took root.  I find myself drawn to the idea, not scared at all, of accessing that dark, quiet, protected place, observing it, and watching to see what grows.

Ian Robert McKown is a tattooist and fine artist in Denver.

I don't mind that I can never really know what's under someone else's skin.  I don't mind that at the end of the day I am just as impenetrable to everyone around me.  But I am growing ever more committed to a vision of a life where that which surfaces, which emerges from me into visibility, is just completely... true.