Blogger is a Wonderful Thing

I have been absent for too long, I think. Too far from my blurbing and blathering and blubbering and blogging. It is healthy, I think, to continue the exercise, however anonymously, of placing thoughts down on phosphorescent screens with highly intelligent and beautifully trained ones and zeros. This doesn't exist. Not really. What I am writing, what you are reading, it isn't real. Not anymore than color is real. You are not seeing color, you are being tricked by absorption and reflection and the quanta of photons that reach your eye tell it a story, and your eye tells that story to your brain and your brain makes impossibly difficult analysis of the story and tells is to your mind, and your mind smiles, ensures that white is white, and black is black, and everything else falls into place and that is what you ultimately think is color.

But I digress. (The MFA has started, after all, there is fresh knowledge swimming about my brain pool.)

Blogger is no different than color. It is a misrepresentation of the truth that has lead me to think that my thoughts and dreams and exaltations are permanently embedded in the fabric of history. Perhaps they are, even in an unreal sense.

Here is how I know this.

One year ago I was finishing my second class at Brooks with my still-to-this-date favorite instructor at this institution. I was revelling in my accomplishment and the creation of five "Big and Beautiful" images for my final project (one of which now hangs in a prominent location in my sister's home, two more in those of my Mother and Father.) I was also exploring local Santa Barbara culture with a tiny golden salamander that I found under my desk.

Two years ago I had just arrived in China and was still tired, sweaty, and somewhat nervous about my accommodations which were in a less than savory part of Shen Zhen. I could write and publish blogs to my heart's content, but I could not read them. It was the beginning of one of my greater adventures.

Three years ago I had been married for one month and was realizing that I loved to blog. I blogged several times a day back then. I was prolific with my espousing of daily activities, knowledge, moments of truth, triumph, defeat, and sheer ridiculousness.

I know all of this because blogger tells me it is true. I feel a little nervous, as if Orwell's Big Brother is telling me stories about my life and I am pretty sure they are true, but not positive. But I think I remember the salamander. No. I definitely remember the salamander. I am sure there is photographic proof. I am a photographer, I am sure that the truth of my life, the truth of the little ones and zeros, can be verified and explained, realized and profoundly demonstrated.

But then I'd have to take the time to scan the image.

Sigh.

At any rate, blogger is a pretty amazing thing, whether it is full of lies and deceit that make pretty colors or not.

Can't Find My Anchor

Life is full of ebbs and flows, full of tides, changes, cycles, ups and downs. That's the way it works. When you are high, you know it because you have been low, and when you are low, you can look back to when you were high and see the flow of it in your future. I try to believe that. I try to see the ultimate path and see that both the good times and the bad work together to mold the solid rock of innocence into the fine, soft sand of experience. It is a metaphor that makes sense to me, because without the tides, there would be nothing to motivate the water to work on the rock, to change it into something that flows as easily in bads times as in good, a place that new rocks can find comfort and solace, that gives perspective to remembering the journey and seeing more experiences and life yet ahead.

But for me the metaphor breaks down without an anchor. In my vision of my life, it is the anchor that keeps you at the beach, keeps you where you can tell the high tide from the low, the ebbs from the flows. Without that, the sea rises and falls beneath you but you have no judgment of how far it is taking you in either direction because the vastness of it is too much to comprehend without that line that ties you to earth.

I suppose metaphorically I believe that line could be friends, family, a spouse, a group of colleagues, even a pet or something that requires a daily interaction, a step by step occurrence that must be completed for the sake of another creature. It is that line that keeps you from drifting out to sea. And I believe I have lost mine.

I have been up here, away from family, friends, my husband, my past collegues, and even my three cats (with the exception of a few unsuccesful bouts with Brooks and Osiris) for a year and a half and I believe I have lost my anchor. The new friends that I have made here are not anchors because they, too, are drifting hopelessly out to sea and even if we grab on to each other, without a sense of place, a sense of land beneath our feet, we are no help to each other more than we can be to ourselves.

My family has been very supportive, but distance and minimal contact due to conflicting schedules, time zones, and technology make for a haphazard and inaccurate anchoring system. It is a great reason that I am so desperate to anchor myself to my instructors and industry professionals that I meet here, because I have no sense of the tides in this place. No sense of how high they really go, and how low, and where my anchor point is in relation to the beach.

I don't have a solution to this issue. I am swimming and paddling as fast as I can, but I think I may be circling around myself rather than progressing towards security and knowledge. And eventually, a rock in the middle of the ocean will sink to the bottom and never be shifted and changed again because that turbulence that is life experience doesn't disturb the bottom of the ocean, where there are no tides, just the same tired existence day in and day out. That was the corporate life for me, and I am becoming more and more worried that I will end up on the bottom of the ocean again, a rock for all time, rather than endless and widespread sand that can explore the crevices, mountains, and valleys of the world with open and eager eyes not clouded by the depths of forgotten dreams.