Tuesday, February 22, 2011

mind-numbing cold showers.




















I totally stole this photo of me towel draped over shoulders miles and miles deep in the backcountry having climbed down to the base of a frigid waterfall to take a shower bivied up above Hidden Lake with views to glaciers and the Cascade Pass peaks flip-flops and shorts sunglasses and ball caps dropping my little tiny container of shampoo in the rocks scrambling to find it to stick my head under mind-numbing cold water but loving it all of it nothing else like it to dry off quick under July North Cascades sun the bugs had gone off by then to go sit on my sleep pad and crack open a book nothing no sound just silence still and perfect and blissful.











I want to take a shower like this again soon ...





Thursday, February 10, 2011

to be or not to be.












There are those people some of whom I know intent on letting Fate run its course. Holding true and steadfast to an ideology that embraces a notion that whatever is going to happen to them will happen without their intervention or doing. And so maybe they languish waiting. Maybe not. Maybe what they are expecting to happen happens. Maybe not.

And of course there is an equal and opposite force those that live on the other end of the spectrum. Pushing their agenda to no end doing whatever it takes. Shameless maybe. Successful maybe. A bit of both maybe.

Nothing wrong with either. Cos like with all of our differences we humans we need all of us each one - the meek and the strong. And everything in between. Those who hold back need someone to push them here and there. Those that push need someone to reign them in every once in a while.

I remember it being hard to share my photography. I don't know why. It was personal at one point I think I recall but not sure. But then I slowly started bringing it out. Did some shows. Even sold some prints. Started posting to Flickr. Not sure why it became easier. Maybe cos I thought it was all crap anyway so who cares? I didn't any more. Convinced to the core and to the end all of what I have photographed and will ever photograph has already been done better and certainly the photos I have taken are no different and no better than any of the other hundreds of thousands of photographers doing the exact same thing.




But with music. With music it was always different. It is different.




Yes I am realizing I need to break out of this shell I have created and lived in most of my life. But maybe only maybe and only because I can permissibly make the slight but certain distinction between a photograph of a mountain photographed millions of times already and a strain of a melody conceived somewhere only in the recesses of my mind that I find a way unbeknownst even to me to figure out and render shabbily on a age-old worn Bechstein grand.

Out of a perceived sense of obligation I feel the need to share it as it does me no good playing this all to myself on this old piano here in the corner of my living room. What I've put out there has been difficult in part no always because it is but a fraction of what I hear in my head. Always enormous. Always overwhelming. Always grander than even sometimes I can envision so much so I feel at times to go mad over the immensity of it all.

But I can share it only to a point. I realize this now. I made one drastic mistake blasting out a lame and pedestrian suggestion to my small Facebook lot. Never again. Felt sick after. Maybe not sick. More just gross. I realized quite suddenly and quite powerfully just then something I have known all along in any regard: that I am not that opposite force. I hold back. I am not one to push myself on others. This is not to say I cannot when the time is right step out and seek out others in which to help as I understand and though perhaps begrudgingly accept as a whole other and just as vast and just as enormous of a challenge. I know that I can with the understanding as difficult as it is to admit that I cannot do this entirely on my own. That I can accept. I just write music and play a bit of piano.




That's it. That's all I ever want to do.




And so thankfully maybe there are those others maybe just a few or even one or two that can support those of us who just do one thing and one thing only and I will be fortunate enough to find them. I will continue to record and post music but not push not ever in the hopes to find those few people who may see this same vision I have but am not always if ever the best at putting out there. In this new paradigm of the age-old business of music I hold on to the belief hopefully not naïvely there are still some out there that want to find talent for what it is and want to help develop it. To be the ones to push for us. For ultimately in the end maybe there is one person one person somewhere who will hear one of those strains of a melody heard from some place in my head and be blown away as I have over others melodies and who would not have had I languished. Waiting.