Twister

The stripped Dumbos and their chariot are GONE -- ooh, I wonder if they're off getting a makeover?!! THAT will be cool to photograph, if so!! I've taken to carrying my Daddy-O Cam in the car with me every day -- and look! Today I was rewarded with a different ride, loaded but parked. Gates still locked, though!! Eesh, blimey, and potential photo op SHITE! ?? Why do they remind me so much of those thingies that storm chasers load into the 'Dorothy' machines they drop in the path of twisters? The little data collectors, like in the movie? I like the rides better in color. I'm a twister kinda wench -- I love rides that go in every possible direction at once! I love how the top of the chain link mimics the tips of the ride carts, and then the razor wire loops the way the ride motion would. And I HATE that stoopid fence being in the way.

AWOL Carnival

At 8:30 this a.m., my oldest male child paid me a visit in my studio and asked me what I wanted for Mother's Day. Caught me totally unaware -- ubba ubba ubba ... "Oh! I know! I want you to go with me down to this place where I want to shoot some pictures, but I'm scared to go alone." Two blocks up the street from where I work is a big gravelly dusty lot surrounded by razor-wire topped fence. During the week it's FILLED with colorful carnival booths, a few merry-go-roundy kind of rides, the trailers where the Carnies live -- and on the street are parked huge tractor trailers with the collapsed parts of ferris wheels that look like folded up octopi legs. I've been dying to shoot this stuff for weeks now ... but it's in a lousy neighborhood and I didn't think going alone was a very bright idea. Well, uh, DUH! David and I arrived to find everything cleared out, nothing but this lone elephant ride which, on Friday, was opened up and being tested. And on Friday, the elephants were brightly painted yellow and blue Dumbo's. I guess the Carnival travels on weekends -- probably some dusty parking lot somewhere for Mother's Day weekend! RATS!!!! So. I got these three measly shots, thru the fence, of stripped Dumbos awaiting a ride to ... what, the carnival ride painters shop? Talk about disappointing! Have Daddy-O Cam and Buff Male Escort and nothing to take pictures of. You can see how interestingly WEIRD it could potentially have been -- to see a carnival in a behind-the-scenes way? I mean, have YOU ever seen carnival rides taken DOWN? or folded into semis? Or stripped of paint? Me, either. It'll happen. I may just have to take my Daddy-O Cam to work, and mosey on up the street during my lunch hour.

Meanwhile, my oldest male child and I adjourned to a restaurant near home, where he treated me to my favorite breakfast food, eggs benedict, and we had a lovely and LENGTHY conversation and some giggles.

It's been a really good morning!!

Self Portrait Wednesday - Slanted Light

San Xavier Mission - Journal Entry 3 - Expanse

Spirituality is expanse,
& forgetting the head inside myself ... tossing thoughts like doves to the air,
& just seeing,
just being. Groans my blood, to let go! to lance expectations! Vision unweighted by thought -- can I do it? See there? Sun kissed & shimmering -- feel that. See there? broad & open -- be that! There is always renewal. There is ever restoration. Answers are mere travelers, welcome sometimes but not always perfectly timed, or complete. Doubts are unopened buds -- just WAIT, for once, leave them alone, look beyond the current disappointment to the vista of history. 300 years to come to this -- you're barely 1/6th of the way to that -- it's hubris, your arrogance, all this questioning. Offer what you have in this moment of time -- lend your own journey to the horizon of this timeless place. Merge. Connect. Join. Belong. Then relax and LAUGH!

San Xavier Mission-Journal Entry 2-Details

Spirituality, for me, in the details -- air, shadows, textures, vignettes, light, smells, where is nature in it all? My spirituality like architecture: roaming, familiarizing myself with the sense of place, like an interior blueline, a way of aligning and preparing myself for the formalities I eventually encounter. The wistfulness I feel, seeing in others the purity & acceptance that elude me -- ever the analyst, ever the to-the-side documentarian. I am immersed in small components, led by fragments of emotional recognition & response, but not a whole. Never a whole. Just an awareness of its possibility, its probability, & my own propensity for withdrawing -- to the quietly lit corner, the bench farthest away, the dodge of lifting my camera --
my own resistance to being taken over,
or in.
I want to maintain that reserve of SELF,
set back,
to think & digest.

San Xavier Mission - Journal Entry 1

An hallucination, it must be -- such a sight, in such a place? A desert mirage, a desert miracle. No wonder it was called a Mission -- imagine, 300 years ago, a lone rider, or a group of dirty dusty men moving cattle, or a family in a wagon crossing an expanse of nothing but brown sand and pale sage cacti for days, rationing water all along the journey -- coming upon this building? Receiving all the water craved, beds, perhaps medical attention, and certainly balm for their hearts. Conversation, again, with another human voicing a tender message. Fanciful view, I suppose, but look at the image! It doesn't seem to embody the violence, the raw bluntness of life in the West back when it was built. It tells of its own 3-foot thick walls offering cool respite from a relentless sun, of corridors of silence to still a nervous soul or restless foot, at least for a night. It welcomes, it smiles, it says PEACE. Paz. The pavement fell away the closer I got, and so did the sense of present time. There, the glistening white Mission amid parched desert acreage and mountain ranges surrounding it, the ranges lending sweeps of odd blue-violet shadows overhead, up into the air (how?) and across the sand and cacti. This the gated archway beckoning me inside. I hesitated, of course, and took up my camera, shooting pictures while gauging my internal readiness for the sanctity of the inner Mission courtyards and church itself. My spirituality is so immediate in the approach -- the wide low mountains, the sea of dusty sand gusting in puffs around eclectic cacti studs here and there, the magnificent architecture of the Mission and my camera-at-hand to capture it in my preferred manner. But the acts of the inner workings? The singing, the words, the prayers, the deeply reverent manner of the elderly ones there? The tiniest, most fragile elderly people I've ever seen, barely as tall as my chest, frail, bent, using canes or the arms of younger loved ones, but going going going to that chapel, stretching gnarled backs, then arms, to reach the Holy Water container up on the wall ... eyes closed as they crossed themselves. Eyes watery with emotion as they moved their eyes carefully and more carefully around the walls and inside carved domes. Hands gentle as birth when they touched the relics on the side altars and lit their candles. Does that kind of spirituality only come with that age? I can recognize it, but I don't experience it personally. My spirituality ... did I know when I took some of these pictures that I'd see myself, this part of myself, in them? No. I'm the cactus, prickly, standing back, looking but gathered to myself. The sounds thrown by the bells, the shadows cast by the bell tower, I lean into those, grow under them and because of them, but I guard my proximity and surrender, also. I shoot photos of carved doorways like this, like those at Notre Dame, at Saint Catherine of Siena, but only in appreciation of the artist's work. I don't understand or want to understand all that symbology clustered in one spot so densely. I find spirituality in open spaces, quiet simple spaces, calm approachable buildings and art on human scales. I finally sat down, looked outward, over, upward. I did it! I drove here myself! Directionally challenged as I am, got lost BAD at the beginning though I did -- imagine my pride, sitting here, HERE, at my point of destination, and gazing through my lens at such a view. A scene I would shoot, have shot, anywhere in the world I encounter it -- bell towers. Italy, Paris, Tucson, and certainly England when I go there. How I wanted to hear them sound, resonate through that wide unencumbered sea of sand, over the heads and voices of those singing from within the main chapel. Here is representation of my spiritual garden -- plants odd & tenuous, but reaching. Strangely shaped and casting unfamiliar silhouettes. Prickly. Defensively armed, tender within, tenderly rooted and gathered. Difficult to identify, or label. Present in silent observation. Serene woman - is this Mary? And who or what is the angel? cherub? man? supporting her from beneath? I want to go back and shoot this in color.

San Xavier Del Bac Mission

This is where I spent my day today -- drove down, myself, this morning - it's 6 p.m., just got home. Am famished, sunburned, and in need of a shower (dust dust dust) ... but I had to look at my photos first! Here are a few shots -- more to come in the next day or so, once I've sorted and culled and had time to get into my journal with some self-expression of what I saw and felt.

Inspiration Synchronicity

One of my 3 favorite truck photos from my Daddy-O's and my trip to Jerome a few months back -- remember Old White, here? My Uncle Ray, the one I always refer to as The Real Family Artist? He told me way back when I first posted the pics that he was going to paint this one. I didn't have time to open my mail from yesterday until just now, here at work -- look what was in it for me ... Scanned copy of the painting by my Uncle Ray [aka Ramon] ... whew, woo, wow!! Yea, The Real Artist!!