Congratulations to Jeff and Jenna on their recent engagement! Their recent photo shoot was fantastic fun (as you can see from the shot above). I'm getting more and more excited about doing engagement photos with newly engaged couples. This photo shoot took place both in Drake and Shevlin Parks during magic hour just before sunset. Check out the full gallery by clicking the photo link to the right.

I took a surfing trip to the coast this last week to see my folks with my great friend Charlie and the beautiful Amy. Trying to get some of the best things in all at once in life, we stopped to smell the conifers several times with views of elk, scenes of epic waterfalls, sand dunes, activities like seagull feeding, donut shack conversating, meeting book store owners that "Never Miss" and eventually getting some surfing in with a little mardi gras beers and big game hunter arcade games with colorful locals to match. We came upon this amazing sight/site where there had obviously been an event in the life of our natural surroundings. The photo above is our rememberence of this place. It is of myself, standing on the edge of a slash pile, where the unusable timber was slashed and burned incompletely in the damp coastal air. The coast range of Oregon has continually been laid to waste by logging operations that clear cut hillsides of trees and vegetation that keep topsoil from washing away into the watershed, thus silting the stream with particulate matter that kills fish, macro-invertebrates, and eventually us. This has become our legacy. Standing upon a slash pile, I wonder what mistakes we will be trying to make right twenty years from now.

Habituation

Sometimes good habits are hard to start (like writing a blog as often as you would like). Sometimes our lives seem a collection of habits. Somewhere in the tug of war between responsibilities and personal comfort we fashion for ourselves these ritualistic automated acts of life. This has become my merciless enemy in creating this blog, at every turn my life has a seemingly random but really cleverly disguised repetitious habit centered rhythm that stymies any spontaneity or creative explosions. Deep introspection and the will to create become lost at my usual bedtime of right around midnight (which I am indeed staying up past in order to release my creative urge tonight) and this is one of the least poetic and romantically artistic rituals of all- the bedtime. I can envision Hemmingway awake from dusk til dawn drinking red wine and writing and boxing and tasting the grit of reality deep into the night. London sailing out from San Francisco into a starry Pacific night, dreaming of the cold Yukon. Ansel Adams writing letters in the evenings of lofty environmentalist ideal between the chemical baths that developed his craft. I use these examples of people that I romanticize to have led incredible and meaningful lives. They did not live for self-glorification for the most part, but for a dead-set collection of eccentricities that could be seen as the fearless pursuit of life and every richness witheld, or on the other hand as the terrified flight from what most folks trapped in ritual would deem necessarry responsibility.
The question comes to me now, am I truly an artist such as these? If so am I brave enough, or perhaps frightened enough to truly live? Does courage lie in responsibility or is courage itself an illusional merit given to these ordinarily responsible and extraordinarily talented people posthumously?
I am blessed to have an amazing and adventurous woman in my life that took an amazing adventure with me to a place I had wanted to see since I was a child and learned of its existance from cartoons and western stories- The Painted Hills. Of course I took a sickening amount of pictures that you can view on my flickr account by clicking the slideshow above and to the right of this text. This adventure was necessarry and was completely outside of my usual "life". Why is it that these punctuations to life can truly become life itself if allowed to be? OR do most people go throught life with only punctuation, namely a series of dots or dashes or numbers (in a bank account perhaps) that continue in a steady stream of wake-up/coffee/work/food/sleep predictability. Discipline is important, but not when its motivation is complacency.
Breaking out of habit can mean the difference of a life lived or a life sacrificed to unchanged and uncaring religiosity of ritual. In other words, go. Go and do something. Think something brave. Start anywhere.

Materials

Sometimes I feel like I need to be qualified by substance. What I mean by this is that if I have free time and want to be in a public setting, that I need to pay an entrance fee at a coffee or tea shop. I need to have pre-requisite cup with a little cardboard ring around it in order to feel like I have a purpose for being downtown. This idea must come from the capitalist system that we've developed where a person cannot exist in a public space without a good reason or we deem it loitering. this good reason has also been boiled down and lost in the cycle when a good reason can consist of a cup of liquid with a paragraph of pseudo-latin-based words to describe the cup size and fat content of the milk. The public library would be a great place to hang out and not feel the need to drink coffee (especially because they don't allow food or beverages inside) but you can't loiter and talk to someone in there because it's a library and needs to be silent for study. Perhaps if we built a public loiterary, somewhere where people can gather to do work, meet with friends, be creative, where they are not qualified or given an unspoken entry fee of something material.

Measurements

How many of these books can I read? Should I read? The goals that I have measured my potential all my life by now have no future. I have always wanted to read every book that I own and spend much time arranging on my shelves. To be an expert on literature, to become wise beyond my present understandings, and surely to create a fictional image of myself exhibiting to others that I'm more well read than I actually am. Operating under a personal six month expiration date, I have no choice but to tell and speak honestly about that. Truly though, will all my books on poetry help me to express my love to Amy? Will reading books on wilderness and travel bequeath to me a treasured memory spent waking upon a desert at sunrise with Jeff, Jack and Charlie? Will more T.S. Eliot allow me to live the vast and now lost time apart with Chris?
Thought does not create reality. Thought can only lead us into or away from the real.
What is this incredibly pervasive force that convinces us against truly important action? Inspiration and joy are treasures that could not have been meant to be this scarcely distributed throughout a lifetime. Something has set itself against us not in obtaining these treasures (for they are always in us) but in the deceptive degradation of their value.
What things in this world are valuable? How do you measure their values?
This is just the beginning I'm sure, shoot me a comment...

Time

Time well spent and time left to spend are not the best of friends. Sometimes the quantitative weight of the future leans down and starts pushing the breath out of your quality time. And sometimes some of you need to get out of your head long enough to remember that you are in fact still breathing for the moment and by that measure, which is both qualitative and quantitative, you are alive. This moment was only about a mile away from me today, I took a run on the high school track near my house, it had to be about 38 degrees and I clocked what I would consider a fast mile time for someone who ran between five and six minute miles during multi-mile runs in high school. After not running or training for over four years I came coughing across the line with a sturdy 6:21 mile.

I was impressed, but the accomplishment was quickly diminished by the futility of any kind of future training. I then realized that this futility had not entered my mind until after the fire had left my legs and lungs. Those six and a half minutes of peace and remembrance of my own breathing body and beating heart gave me what I needed to get past the futility into feeling alive.
Later on tonight I went to an apple party. Not a party for people with iphones or milky colored laptops, but a party where pie, sauce, and bobbing all had apples in the starring role. The party was unbelievably fun. We ate pie, we played games that made snot involuntarily rocket from our nostrils, and had epic apple bobbing battles.
Today has all been about one thing for me. The idea that life is not what is around you but what you make of it. It has to be somewhere in the energy that sprung out of a party centered around a usually mundane and overlooked fruit item and became alive in each of us. We each said yes to the notion that our fun is not dictated on anything other than our enjoyment of the moments that took place between us. The challenge lies in how we extrapolate this message that seems so clear in the smaller and more qualitative moments to the canvas of life's quantity.
This is most certainly a mystery worthy of pursuit.

Six Months to Live

It seems to me that finding out that you have six months to live is a lot like winning the lottery. In either case people gain some form of enabling freedom, some parting of the veil between the things we do and the things that are real and truly important.
I am giving myself six months to live. I don't do this to be dark or morbid and I surely don't intend on passing away anytime soon. I do this to document the real. What theologian C.S. Lewis would call sehensucht, our longing for the complete, the truth that we don't often see or allow ourselves to see. The indescribable knowledge that there is something more than what we see, yet cannot satisfy with what is over the horizon or around the tree. Life is meaningless without this "More" that we seek and seems to only be found when we have "less." Less distraction from the things that don't matter, and more of whatever it is that allows us to have the urgency to Live.
It could be anything. The impetus to undertake this project could be anything, in my case it is desire, in some cases it could be a diagnosis of cancer, an in-operable brain tumor, blood borne illness. My desire for the insight and creativity in this project will most certainly come with discoveries of unknown pain and unknown joys much diminished in the face of those who suffer and choose to live fully under true circumstances, however I invite you to share in the next few months. I will be living and documenting them as though they were my last and after this post will be referring to them as such. Please be clear however, that this is a search for life and truth through art, not a quest for death, tragedy, or wanton sadness.
This project has begun and must continue to be a collaborative one, it will be hard on me and my loved ones. I will continue to need your guidance on what to include in this project, to help me in the spirit of life and creation and to include the true and the very real.
I will be choosing a photograph that represents the journey's milestone for each day, or week- whichever is more important to the telling. These photos will be uploaded to my Flickr site here: http://www.flickr.com/photos/two27photo/
they will be labeled in a set entitled Six Months to Live.
Come Along.
Join in my pains and in my joys.
Blessings all.