felt you in my legs.

I’ve been thinking a lot about why I take pictures lately, and why I draw and collage and do all these things I do. The best I can figure is it all comes back to some weird misplaced sense of nostalgia amongst all the noise, and I am desperately looking for someone to share it with. It’s like my rant about God. We all have these holes we are trying to fill where these big glorious ideas of God would have been two or three hundred years ago. Now we’re lost amongst the mess with our drugs and our liquor and our notions of giving our lives a higher meaning. Sometimes it’s a little heavy, being me. But then, maybe you knew that.

Lately, I am overwhelmed in the best way possible. I see all these pretty little moments and I want to save them. I want to tuck them under my mattress. I want to display them, I want to see them again so I can look back and see where I was at the time. I will stare at these photos until my meaning becomes clear, until I can see what I was looking for at the base of all this excess. To understand what will fill my space where God might have gone, and to see what I have chosen to do with all that doesn’t fit. To see where my puzzle will take me.

It sounds sad, maybe, but it’s not. It sounds isolating, and quite frankly it is. But none of it is bad. None of it is scary.

oops.

sometimes i think i trick myself into thinking i know what i want, where i am going and what i am doing. then i remember, this is really just a neat trick i play on myself to keep myself from quitting before i even start.

‘There are six billion people on this planet, and I thought at least one of us should understand how snow crystals form.’

“At a time when the physics journals are full of theories about about how to create entire universes in the laboratory, it is easy to imagine that science has grasped the whole of reality. In truth, our ignorance is vast-and I believe it will always be so.

“Just before the flowering of the scientific revolution, the great early champion of mathematical science Cardinal Nicholas of Cusa advocated the advancement of what he termed ‘learned ignorance.’ Not omniscience but an ever more subtle and insightful un-knowing was the goal that Cusa envisioned for the modern scientific mind. In the humble snowflakes Ken Libbrecht studies we have the metaphor for this inspiring view: Though they melt on your tongue, each tiny crystal of ice encapsulates a universe whose basic rules we have barely begun to discern.”

-Margaret Wertheim, What We Believe But Cannot Prove: Todays Leading Thinkers on Science in the Age of Certainty

we had been here before

we had been here before,
this sing song aluminum can light,
pressed between my knees.
a flash under my finger.
a body too close behind me
with hands too tight on my wrists.

they just get younger, don’t they, baby?

Sometimes I think I’ve got nothing left.