Seasons, reaping, and sowing

The summer slump–that period between from somewhere in August to somewhere in September–has seemingly ended for me. August had a restless feeling. The sun suspended motionless in the afternoon sky. Clients all on vacation, so no work coming in. I did my best to keep the creativity in flow during the long, luxurious afternoons. Almost under our noses, the days begin to shorten. The sunsets come sooner. The mosquitos still manage to bite. Fall comes in.

Now I’m going back to client work. The first was at Angel Stadium in Anaheim for an event. A casual, yet extravagant, evening for wealthy donors to a non-profit held on the actual field of the stadium. I had to steal a quick selfie in the dugout, which was where I was to store my camera bag for the night.

I’ve been thinking of a clip I saw online of someone saying “you can’t always be in the reaping or harvest stage of life” and it really struck me. On some level, it’s something I already knew, but somehow never full had heard it articulated as such.

When I was younger, all I wanted was success. I had worked hard in college. Moved to the big city to pursue my dreams. Networked with the right people. I even made some really great friends. Yet, I was shocked that I wasn’t swimming in success. I knew I was talented and I knew I liked to work hard. So why weren’t opportunities falling from the sky? I waited for the phone to ring. I floated from day job to day job. For so many years I was focused solely on the reaping without really focusing on the sowing.

As a gardener, I knew this! I knew this as the years came and went, a few “somedays” came and went. Now, as I start booking my regular clients for fall events, I recognize that the only way I can do so confidently is because of seeds I sowed long ago. Seeds sown, by the way, in the face of personal adversity. I lost a relationship then, and friends of mine fell away. (I’m not saying you should sacrifice relationships to pursue a dream, but that is just how it played out for me.)

These are just reminders that there are indeed seasons to life. I may be having a harvest year of sorts, and it’s a good idea to think of planting new seeds as the year winds down. Lately, that has been reminding people around me that, while I am extremely grateful for my photography career, it is not the only thing I do. I’ve been playing and posting more music while looking for more opportunities to perform again.

Pictures of Nothingness

I have shared less and less of my personal photography work on social media lately. My client work has taken off this year, but I’ve found myself hesitant to share anything outside the scope of what I do for my clients.

I know I’m not the only one who feels that the large social media platforms have changed so much, enough to feel that they no longer have the users’ best interests in mind. I won’t lie and say that Instagram, Tumblr, Flickr didn’t help improve as a visual artist. Sharing my work there helped me build confidence, take risks, find a voice. I also bought into what happened there, too. The people going from artists to “brands” to “influencers.” The photos in exchange for “free” watches. The purchased followers (never did that) and the mad dash to hack your way to a large following.

Things got lost in that process. I’ve studied visual art my entire life, and learned to see the world around me as creative inspiration. That started to become the cliche—doing it for the ‘gram. As in constantly seeking the most visually stimulating thing to post.

I’m trying to remember what it is like to simply make photos as visual meditations again. Pictures of nothingness and that don’t serve an outright agenda. Work that documents. Work that is my own mix of influences that follow me everywhere: Salvador Dali, Vivian Maier, Leonardo Da Vinci, Henri Cartier-Bresson, and lots of musical theatre.

Social media isn’t all bad, but it’s also not that great either. Instagram in particular was built of the work of photographers, then became saturated by media and Meta’s attempt to appropriate ever other app out there. I’m sticking around with a few selfies, and some updates on various projects. I still believe in building a long-haul audience, in having a space like this to post quality content. It’s extra work, but I’m keeping this site exactly for that.

New year, new me?

It has been quite awhile since I’ve posted anything here. To tell you the truth, I’ve had this URL since about 2000 and haven’t added much to it. It used to be a catch-all site for my fledgling acting career back then. Then came the rise of the blog, then the rise of what we called the micro-blog, the then the rise of the social network, and that became the rise of the social media. Now seems to be the fall of social media as we know it, with some of the most reliable platforms seeming to fall under their own weight…or onto their own swords. I still love them, despite that everyone seems to regard them as “hell-scapes”. All this is to say that now seems to be more important of a time to keep one’s own website updated with quality content and connection.

Where have I been? Well, it’s nothing serious. After several years of building a freelance photography career, only to have it put completely on hold at the start of the pandemic, things have been back. I wasn’t doing all that well during the long stretches of lockdown months. For any creative person who found that time to be ultra-productive, great for you. Despite my introverted nature, I found my anxiety to be barely manageable and I had almost no ability to actually concentrate on a single project. In fact, I think I just got my brain back within the last year or so.

But, yes, things have been back since last fall. I’ve built relationships with a handful of new clients who have been fantastic and who have kept me busy. I expected maybe a few bookings last fall, but the phone kept ringing right up through the holidays and into this year. I’m a very lucky photographer because I know a lot of us went out of business in 2020.

It’s been a year of shifts. No, it’s not January, but I think of this time of year as a New Years in many ways. My birthday is in summer, and I tend to take stock of myself and my year around June/July. Many shifts began about a year ago when I was approaching a big birthday. Friends I had regarded as ride-or-die seemed not to be “ride” at all, and I had to sort of quietly let them go. A family member was in the midst of a health crisis and I spent several weeks in the hospital with them during a record heatwave in Southern California. (They are doing much better now.) What I thought would be a joyful celebration of me entering into a new decade surrounded by friends actually had me feeling very alone. Most plans I had made to welcome this next stage of my life all seemed to fall completely through amidst a bad COVID wave.

Things can, and do, change. I had to accept that as I watched relationships in my life shift. As I watched my priorities realign around certain people. As I understood that by embracing my own personal growth I had to course-correct certain precedents I had set around how I had always allowed myself to be treated before. I’m risking this post becoming a bit long and cliche, but that is sort of it in a nutshell.

Again, as social networks continue to annoy and/or disappoint their users, I am aiming to be more committed to this space. I’ve never been much of a writer, but I’d rather my words and quality creative efforts go here.

Helianthus, summer suns, fire colors

Early July, my birthday month. In Southern California this means the ever earlier beginning of what we call fire season, historically reserved for dry fall months. I’m not an ecologist, but someone who is outside a lot. Someone who pays attention to the land, photographs it, and notices the ongoing changes over the years. Needless to say, growing up here we didn’t have months on end of skies amber with smoke. But that’s a post for another day.

Closeup of a yellow sunflower.
A small, but large sunflower blooming.

Independence Day fireworks came and went. I’ve passed on them yet again to mind the sanity of my dogs for the evening, plus I can’t stand the poor air quality the next day. I choose instead to admire the small sunflower bursting open in my container garden. These Helianthus have been surprisingly more work than I’m used to, needing extra care and water in an already hot summer. But the blooms I do love.

A closeup of a red sunflower.

These little summer suns. Among the fire colors I have spilling out of pots and small patches in my garden. The only fire colors I’m hoping to see in yet another year of climate records shattering. I’ll be keeping an eye on the landscape as we carry on through it.

A Break In The Rain

It’s mid-March and I’m reading one piece after another about being a year into this pandemic, at least in the US. Much of these sound familiar. The brain fog, the struggling with meaninglessness. Me, I often feel like I want to be a go-with-the-flow guy–to take these prolonged months as they come and try to make the most of them–except the flow often doesn’t really want to go with me.

A break in the rain

Small moments of chaos break out. Our elderly dogs eliminate on the floor. Water leaks under the sink. I’ve become excellent at clearing decades of clutter Marie Kondo-style into donation boxes, only to have to drive all over town looking for a thrift store that’ll actually take them. (Note: thrift stores are overwhelmed with donations and are usually full by noon.) As a freelancer, any sort of work or creative project usually ends in a false start.

My complaints are little. I’m navigating much of this with enough privilege to usually keep these things to myself. So when small chaos seems to reign, there goes my flow. Any kind of flow.

A walk per day keeps the fog at bay. Just like our usual March here in SoCal, the rain has been off and on. A small break in the rain makes for a lovely iPhone shot. And maybe some hope that as more of us get vaccinated, this storm might actually break.

A Garden in the Rain

A closeup photo of seed pods in the rain

” ‘Twas just a garden in the rain

Close to a little leafy lane

A touch of color ‘neath skies of grey…”

A Garden In The Rain (Carroll Gibbons / James Dyrenforth)

A very rainy week or so here in Southern California. One of my favorite times to take my Leica outside. Carefully, of course, as droplets are still dripping off of things.

I haven’t posted anything since last year, but feeling a sense of re-focus on creative pursuits. Pandemic life and political crises have occupied my mind almost non-stop since who knows when.

I know we aren’t in a clear space yet, but it’s nice to feel a storm has come to wash away and refresh.

A very familiar sunset

A beautiful sunset over the Colorado River in Parker, Arizona.
Sunset over the Colorado River in Parker, Arizona.

I wish I could be dancing in the streets right now after a very tense week of election stress. I’ve always found elections to be stressful but this one, of course, nearly pushed me to the edge.

I’m at the Arizona house to de-stress. Yes, that Arizona. And here watching a very familiar sunset again over the River. These sunsets that I’ve been watching since I was a small kid.

Sun setting over a dark and troubled time. Sun rising over a new day where the work is only begin. To heal. To begin anew.

“I have the feeling you just want to be miserable.”

A recent reply to a mildly snarky tweet I sent, a comment on celebrities receiving free clothes all the time and why it always seems to work as a marketing scheme.

“I could explain to you why it works but I have the feeling you just want to be miserable,” a paraphrased tweet in response. I was slightly taken aback, not because I’m such a know-it-all, but because of a stranger’s rather mistaken assumption about me based on a few words.

While I tend to be somewhat quiet and introverted, I don’t think anyone would describe me as seeking to be miserable. Then again, you never know…

It’s an attitude I seem to find over and over again on social media, Twitter in particular. This attitude of schooling someone, or “let me explain it because apparently you don’t know…” I often seek knowledge online out of genuine curiosity, but I find people online either assume I can’t think for myself or that I’m somehow just plain dumb.

Did I waste time clapping back to this dim response? No, I moved on as they continued tweeting at me. I hope they enjoyed their moment of superiority.

All about the pause

The calls are coming from inside the house. The weight of anxiety around person problems. Lack of sleep. Worry over lack of direction in a pandemic world.

And the calls have been coming from outside the house, too. Raging wildfires destroying the west coast. Friends, family, and myself out of work. Teacher friends struggling just to do their job. Anything on the news.

Not to mention I can’t be outside doing what normally calms me–exercise, hiking, and gardening. It all makes me realize that you can’t whip yourself out of this space.

Reading this piece on why I’m feeling so awful right now hit all the right points for me. The ambiguous loss, the unproductive feelings, the lack of normal self-care activities.

Today has been all about the pause. Hitting pause to allow myself to re-adjust, and realizing it’s a privilege that I can even do just that. Pause, and lots of rest, and keeping stimulation low.

An image of the book 52 Weeks in the California Garden

Garden Journal: The Year Starts in September

Being from Southern California, I grew up with earthquakes. Yes, I’m one of those people who will stand there calmly as the earth under my feet literally shakes. The occasional fire might have made the news when I was a kid, but back then climate change was real but mentioned rarely and usually in passing. It wasn’t until the early 2000s that fire season became something so all-consuming. Several fires have threatened my home in the hills over the years, and I’ve been evacuated once in the middle of the night. I’m currently sandwiched between two large fires–the Bobcat Fire and the El Dorado Fire–each burning tens of thousands of acres.

Late September. The wildfires continue to wreak devastation up and down the West Coast, and the sky is filled with a toxic atmosphere of smoke. I’m tending to my garden. A piece of land that was a simple, plain lawn when we first moved here. Now it is a constant work in progress, thanks in many ways to an excellent professional gardener, Miguel.

As of yet, I have to limit my time outside, but do I have my own projects in the garden as well. I keep an eye on the big plants and I’ve spent much of the last few months weeding more than I ever have in my life. The garden has become my sanctuary and the thing that tears my eyes away from computer and phone screens.

I’ve started stacking a growing collection of gardening books along with a few seed catalogs. Finding a copy of Martha Stewart’s Gardening Month by Month at a thrift store was, like many things Martha, the start of a great love. Her yearlong paean to her masterpiece garden at her old Turkey Hill home, paired with incredible photography, is something to behold.

From there, I found myself diving into the wonderful A Way to Garden by Margaret Roach, former head gardening editor at Martha Stewart Living. Her anthropomorphic approach the gardening year as six seasons, starting in birth all the way to death and afterlife. Her “how-to and woo-woo” approach illuminates the elemental joys of gardening.

Still, for some reason most gardening books are centered around an East Coast, New England style of gardening, where there are more conventional seasons–pleasant springs, humid summers, crisp falls, and snowy winters. As opposed to here in California where much of that just simply does not apply. Luckily, I happened upon 52 Weeks in the California Garden by Robert Smaus, former gardening editor at the LA Times. His recommendation is to start the gardening year in September as he states in the Introduction:

“My gardening year begins in lat summer, when I fish out some weathered redwood flats and sow seeds of broccoli, calendula, delphiniums and other things I plan to plant in the fall. In the warm weather of August, seeds don’t sit, but sprout like a rocket lifting off, and six weeks later they’re large enough to go out into the garden…In our climate, fall is spring, at least as far as planting is concerned, and autumn, not spring, should be our busiest time in the garden.”

Having published this in 1997, I don’t think Smaus had to account for the apocalyptic wildfires we have happening now. Still his thoroughness in describing just how to truly maintain a thriving garden amidst the dryness, the Santa Ana winds, the heavy raining season, the ever more common droughts, and our notoriously hard clay soils have become fundamental to me. A guide for each week of the year here in SoCal.

So, here it is. The new gardening year begins, fall as spring, as the West Coast burns to an ashen crisp. I don’t know how to fix these terrible fires beyond acknowledging the impending doom of climate change–but I can make this a small sanctuary for the birds, the bugs, and the humans that pass through.

Speaking of fires, my childhood summer camp is currently being threatened by the El Dorado Fire, the one that started as a botched “gender reveal”. If you have a few extra bucks, please consider helping fund them through this emergency: https://www.uucamp.org/contribute/covid-19-emergency-fund-2/