for the frustrated mind

"When I say beauty, I mean just the reality and openness to everything."

~Jeff Koons

"... like walking through the forest in the evening, and then the sun finally sets completely, and your relying on the light that was there to navigate through it. It's the moment when your aware of the absence of light."

~Mark Bradford

"It starts with a postcard. I put two of them together and try to connect them. It's fun to imagine what might lie just beyond the edge, but them you work yourself into a no-exit situation where you have to make up something. You might say I make settings for these found objects."

~William Wegman

"We're so used to finding anything in abstraction. If your mind wants to find something, you can find it in almost anything. It's like people finding Jesus in a slice of toast."

~Julian Lethbridge

Can you guess what all these words are speaking to? Now, as the sun finally steals through the thin, crimson leaves during the last few moments of an afternoon like any other? But it saves, somehow, the sun. It saves and it draws a person out of a multi-walled house, out of a multi-dimensional mind rife with frustration and words coming from every which way.

They all apply to a theme present in the everyday, the mundane and the extraordinary. They

apply to something that might or might not necessitate the human consciousness.

The answer might be found in November's Vogue, as well as the accompanying tableaus.

But perhaps it is more fun not to look, not to go looking.

Rather to just feel it for yourself and make it be what it needs to be

for you

in this moment

before the sun draws you back out

or in

.

change your escape

"I find it fascinating that most people plan their vacations with better care than they plan their lives. Perhaps that is because escape is easier than change."-- Jim Rohn

Change can be thought of as escape, yet why do we feel the need to escape in the first place? What are we really escaping from if only a self-imposed and believed perception of things? Although reality can't be denied and escaped from by evasive dreaming--confronting a problem and living in the moment demands such clarity of perception, if such a thing exists--any present state is still a living state (unless besought by a fatal and debilitating illness of a certain kind) and thus escaping becomes something layered upon living. To escape from a current state of being, semi-permanent and sometimes referred to as real life, is to escape from a chosen situation which is not obligatory. Where an escape is needed, is happiness present?

On the other hand, when change is needed, perhaps it would be easier to execute if thought of as escape. I believe we have at hand many different coping mechanisms, including the ability to romanticise and alter perception and create spin in any given state or situation. We all live in our own sort of dreamworld, we all perceive the same "realities," assuming they are real and have a static form outside our perception, differently. And thank goodness. Sophie wrote a bit about perception and writers recently in a biting response to part of New York life. Writer or not, we all do the same thing. And so what if instead of looking upon change as a terrifying leap or an event sure to result in deterioration of the self, it was thought of as another great adventure, an escape if you will. What then?

And with that I'm off to Crescent Lake.

yes, please.

“Make the most of every molecule you’ve got, as long as you’ve got a second to go. That’s your charge.” 

- David Brower 

hier, it was a whole year of seasons in a day

photo I, via Lolita

photo II, we came home

Quotes to Spin a Life With

“Eating with the fullest pleasure – pleasure, that is, that does not depend on ignorance – is perhaps the profoundest enactment of our connection with the world.” Michael Pollan (my emphasis)

Yes, another example of how eating and food can be tied to and used as a metaphor for life itself. Eating gives and perpetuates life, as a simple and base definition, as an operation. But one may also use this act as a way to understand and approach life. The first word in this quote may as well be conversing, singing, laughing, learning, whatever... The fact of the matter is, ignorance deteriorates every experience, weakens every thought, impairs every movement and dilutes every argument. To build a connection with the world on the basis of ignorance will at once rot that connection, just as food, forgotten, is soon consumed by mold.


“And that simply means you’ve got to have people who insist that their food comes from good farms, and that means they’ve got to recognize what a good farm is.” Wendell Berry, from Gourmet, February 2008 (my emphasis)

Again, if you apply this food-specific idea on a life-size scale, it holds true: (perhaps this is the mark of a good statement – if it checks out in more than one realm of specificity, then it can be held as widely true) To hold yourself and others to any sort of value, to even employ any sort of value system, to recognize good as good, fair as fair, one must first recognize what that good, fair, defining value, is. The form must be there. The experience must be there. The understanding must be there.