“The land doesn’t speak to you because you don’t stay in one place long enough to hear it”
It seems a lot of what I’ve written about recently stems from conversations with various friends from all across this country.
I don’t know that I’m talking to people more than I normally would, but perhaps life has slowed down enough to really be able to meditate on the things being said to the extent they deserve.
This is a paraphrased quote by a friend who mentioned this line from the book: The Practice of The Wild and it’s from a conversation with a Crow elder.
It struck a chord with me for several reasons.
While I have the constant pull of The Road on my mind and that’s a huge part of me, I’m also a life long Virginian. A born and raised Richmonder, and someone who grew up routinely going to the Chesapeake Bay and its surrounding tiny towns because I’m the #daughterofasailor.
I have immense pride in being from one consistent place and having the roots that I do.
I lived in #RVA for 25 years before I chose to make the bay my home in between my road dog life, and while it’s always been a part of me and felt like home, taking up residence here has made that more tangible.
When I came home in November from living a year on The Road, I really meant to be back just for a few months to catch up with loved ones, work on some writing projects and then get back out there.
And then the world fell apart.
Yet, in the midst of that I’ve had more ability to enjoy this place. Discover unexplored corners, notice things I’ve always driven past too fast, really get to know my neighbors and those who work in my community and appreciate the consistency of place.
I have been debating what to do in the coming months.
Whether to leave or stay.
What leaving would look like now that photo jobs have been cancelled and I’m unsure if @folkling could be consistent enough while being mobile to make ends meet and still trying to save for a place of my own.
And I’m still debating.
But I’ve been relearning the importance of home. That even in these times, or maybe especially so, pausing long enough to listen to the land and appreciate where you presently are is a narrative worth hearing.
Personal
How To Survive Staying At Home: Get Dressed
Other than focusing on the good and trying to create something each day to some capacity, another thing getting me through this current upheaval of our world is getting dressed.
Every day.
What a concept, I know I know, but hear me out.
Even before the stay at home order that we currently have in place in Virginia, I have largely worked from home.
Through my varied ten years of owning my own business and working for myself, whether it’s photography or writing related, my knitwear designing or vintage curating, a lot of what I do in a day can be done from home.
As a result, I have had a built in routine of getting dressed every day.
Because I noticed when I didn’t, when I stayed in my pajamas, or my workout clothes, I did not get as much done in a day. I felt sluggish, distracted, unorganized and quite frankly, not so great about myself.
I truly notice a difference in my outlook and attitude when I choose clothes I love, don my hat and boots and maybe even put some mascara on. Even if I’m not leaving the house that day.
Think about it, if you feel good, you’re going to do good. You’re going to feel put together and therefor your output and actions have the ability to be more put together.
It should go without saying, but I’m going to say it anyway, that I am in no way faulting anyone for living in their yoga pants during this time. Everyone’s lifestyles are different, especially those of you home with kids. That is a whole other battle of priorities and things you have to take care of in a day… but if you’ve been feeling kind of off lately and need a reframe of mind… maybe just try it.
Put on your favorite pair of jeans (cause while I have been getting dressed every day I am actually mostly just wearing the same pair of pants…) brush your hair and just see if it makes a difference in how you feel.
It might be the attitude shift you need to see today as a good day.
Another practice inline with this ethos?
Make your bed.
I haven’t gone a day without making my bed since… I honestly don’t remember.
But maybe that’s a post for another day.
On The Feeling of Home
These times certainly pose opportunity for contemplation.
Contemplation, and solitude of course are not foreign states for me. They’re ones I find myself inhabiting regularly, if not striving to obtain more routinely and consistently.
The concept of home is one that is often on my mind, but especially so in these last few weeks.
How many don’t have a safe or comfortable one to retreat to in these times.
How many I have had over the years.
How tired of mine I am.
How happy in mine I am.
How I often ascribe the feeling of home with temporary places or people that I meet.
(Most recently with a man in a pair of raw denim jeans, beat up leather boots and kind eyes, standing on a sidewalk…)
I am fortunate to have had many homes.
Indeed, to still have many homes.
And while I am both in the midst of trying to find a permanent place and home that is wholly mine, and also get back to one of my homes (The Road), I am still pressed to move into a state of gratitude for it all.
So here’s a little collection of film photos from one of my old Richmond apartments.
My favorite one in fact.
Taken in a new season of my life, albeit long ago, and blossoming with exciting potential, contented wonder and settling in.
And as hard and utterly frustrating as some things have been in this current season of my life, I still associate those same aforementioned feelings with where I am now.
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Quarantine: A Self Portrait
I continue to be healthy and well, as are those closest to me and I am grateful for that.
I haven’t wanted to write about what’s going on because, frankly, I’m tired of reading about it and talking about it and thinking about it.
But in a world of rising unsureness, it is in a way unnerving to attempt to make plans and think about the future when you’re not really sure what the future is going to look like.
When will things go back to normal?
What will ‘normal’ even look like after all of this?
Will everyone I know and love be okay?
Will I be able to pay my bills?
Then again, that is largely how it’s always been.
There have always been bad things going on in the world, things we haven’t been able to control or understand, and while this particular case is unlike anything we’ve seen in many of our lifetimes—every generation has such events.
There have always been daily invitations into downward spirals of stress and anxiety.
Things to draw our attention away from resting in contentment and finding joy in our present.
So while we wait and watch the world around us shifting into more panic and fear, regardless of our feelings on it being warranted or not, there are two things we can do:
1. Take it all one day at a time.
2. Be grateful for the good that you have in your arms to hold and the ability to hold it.
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What's Coming Next
I am coming back to blogging.
I have found myself saying that often over the past few years in my sporadic sharing on this platform. This is the year I am really going to do it! And then….. five posts later, Okay now THIS is *really* the year I am going to do it…. cue same result.
And perhaps this time is just like all of those other times, but honestly this time feels different.
Because now this time, in many ways, it’s all I have.
With the world in its current state of social distancing and staying at home and daily doses of fear that invite so much confusion and anxiety—It feels like now is the time more than ever that I need to remember who I am.
And one of the things that has always pulled me back from any edge I have ever found myself on (we won’t get into how many there have been… I am an emotional creature) is sharing the beauty I see in the world.
Through words.
Through images.
Through stories.
It is a common understanding that we are all made of stories, and yet it is one of my biggest pulls to any individual I cross paths with.
Everyone’s unique narrative and my ability to bear witness to it.
I am living out one of my own that feels important to share. Not for the validation, though that is often the temptation, rather for the specific ability to offer a communal understanding and empathetic view of shared experience. Of opening up our minds and hearts to things unknown to us until exactly now that were found only within the bravery of open expression.
I also feel the need to share honestly in that part of me has felt empty since coming home.
And that’s largely because when I pulled into Virginia four months ago, after living a life on The Road for 333 days last year, I stopped telling stories.
Sure, verbally I told a few to some friends and family, and the occasional stranger who I’d meet that would pull one out of me because they’d comment on my jacket, or my hat, or the fact that I-don’t-look-like-I’m-from-around-here-even-though-I-am-it’s-just-that-I-hang-out-with-cowboys-too-much….
But mostly I’ve kept to myself and closed up in the unknown of what’s coming next in my life.
I stopped writing.
And writing has always been an integral part of me.
I have long felt that as long as I made time for both reading and writing, it was a day well lived.
The coupling of learning something new, and sharing my experience.
All of our experiences are different, especially during a time like this, but it feels important now more than ever to share that.
Resources, stories, kindness, wisdom, love, understanding, empathy…
It is within the recognition that there are experiences outside of your own that life is most often meant to be lived.
Which is why yours is one worth sharing.
The Road
I think this film photo from Washington a few months ago is just about the most accurate and perfect portrait representation of my year.
The Road.
One of the foremost loves of my life.
I have been home for two weeks now.
333 days before that were spent largely in my car all across this country.
But now I am back in Virginia, I won’t say for how long, mostly because I don’t know. And though it makes others uncomfortable I’m usually okay with not knowing. It puts me in a place of trust in something (someone) other than myself and I know that’s the best place to be.
I am happy.
To be amongst my people and the other strips of pavement that don’t represent the proverbial “Road” to me, but are open and inviting nonetheless. Familiar in their curves and bumps, they illicit a different type of pleasure. One of anchored contentment, knowing and recognition.
Of home.
Consistency too.
Which has always been one of the two dualities in my makeup.
My love for nesting, being in a space of my own and near my people who I’ve spent a decade or two or (nearly) three doing life with.
But also my addiction to newness—it is the thing in me that tugs at my center when I’ve been stationary and stagnant too long.
Which I recognize not only as a physical state but a mental one as well.
Most people think this is a thing I will outgrow.
A characteristic of indecision and lack of maturity. Of youthful “wanderlust” and do-it-now-while-you-can.
I used to believe them.
Used to be ashamed of my insatiable appetite and voracious curiosity. “You’re just restless” people would say.
“Oh, you’re finding yourself…”
But actually, I’ve known for quite some time who I am.
I have for most of my life.
As a child I remember being quite sure of things. Sure of myself. Sure of what I wanted to do. It is only with age that I somehow reverted and lost this confidence.
Perhaps because there is more at risk. But I don’t even know if I really believe that.
I think we get tricked into thinking there’s more to lose, but really, it’s the same always. We are just more trusting when we are new and resilient to the voices trying to tell us otherwise.
I’m fortunate to have a few people in my life who encouraged and watered the garden of my abnormalities but there is only so much you can do in the way of becoming grounded in yourself with others trying to do all of the work for you. At some point you need to take root in the knowing yourself and do some pruning of your own.
I encountered a great many people this year who thought what I was doing, traveling alone as a woman, quite insane and unsafe.
But I also encountered those who encouraged it.
But neither should matter. Whichever way the scale tips in its outward affirmation of who we are: we know.
We know because if you pause long enough to listen, you will hear that rhythm inside of you that was created and placed in exactly you and made to push you towards your place of purpose.
Read MoreThe Right Reasons
This is somewhat of a belated follow up post to my post last month on Rhythm and Routine.
I mentioned that my life long struggle has been to find the balance between contentment and dreaming.
How to hold both.
How to be present and enjoy what you have and where you currently are, while still striving to better yourself and achieve more.
This topic of thought has been even further at the forefront of my mind after reading this passage in A Journal of A Solitude by May Sarton :
Rhythm and Routine
It’s been a stationary week and a half.
I’ve been spending some time in a little coastal town in Oregon working on some projects.
Something I’ve really relished after the rush and spiritual high of driving up the Pacific Coast Highway earlier this month.
Driving up Highway 1 was a venture I embarked on for the first time last year when my brother and I drove across the country and back over the course of a couple months. It was a highlight of that year in a way that I have been unable to put into words in person, or virtually, since.
So of course being back on this side of the country I knew I needed to do it again this year.
My left shoulder is a bit darker than my right from the sun ushering me up the highway, but my heart is lighter for having done it.
Anywhere on the water is a place I call home.
Finding balance in stillness amidst the motion I am so drawn to, has been a reoccurring theme in this season.
The ever constant duality in my life of holding both contentment and far reaching dreams.
I am unsure if it is the heightened self awareness I have at this point in my life, or the constant information overload that plagues my generation especially, that keeps the search for this balance at the forefront of my mind more often than not.
But I am finding that, wherever I am, it is in the tiny in-between things that I choose to make time for and often the things that have little to do with work or “making a living”, that bring that balance.
And to be sure it is a choice… It’s rare that the things that sustain us in life are easily earned or just so happen to fall into our laps.
We have to choose the important things.
We all know this. We do. But we so easily let them slide by and time unrolls behind us and all-of-a-sudden we look back and think… Did I even enjoy that? When I was there, in that place, did I appreciate it for what it was?
I am trying to do that more. Enjoy the now. Especially on this journey of being on The Road this year. To not look ahead to the next place quite so much and just be present in the morning I have here.
Such has been the gradual accumulation of tiny motions of thought towards the goodness of searching for symmetry.
The Same But Different
Sometimes it’s good to look back at where you were three years ago and recognize how far you’ve come.
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In chasing after long held dreams that were of the waking hour variety more than the sleeping kind. The dreams that you were scared to say out loud because they seemed too crazy to share with even your most intimate friends, for fear of being told how weird they were.
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And now those dreams are your reality and they’re just everyday facts that you share with strangers you meet at bars and in the checkout line at grocery stores.
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Time stamps of growth have always seemed important to me. To witness records of becoming. I look back often in this way. At old writing and photographs, to remind my current self of how good life really is. Of how much hard work really does pay off. (And dogged determination and sheer stupidity sometimes too...)
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But also I’ve realized the importance of recognizing how the same you are in various ways is worth noting too.
Life On The Road
It’s been a little over six months since I hit the road in my Subaru, Blue Moon, and headed West.
I thought I would make more time for posts here on the journal, have a proper road log if you will, but clearly the last post having a time stamp of ‘March’ proves otherwise. I’m even silent on Instagram most days.
While I do make time to write at least a little almost every day, I am too engaged with the real world it seems to enter into the virtual one to share with you all as much as I would like.
The validation of life lived outside of screens and not shared with others, aside from whoever you’re presently with, is a thing I admit I wrestle with on occasion. Especially in my profession as a photographer. For what are images to be made for if not to share and tell stories with?
I have a pretty solid line when it comes to my personal life in this way, but I am finding the line moving closer and closer the longer I choose to travel and live in the way that I do. Whether that’s a specific feeling that comes with age or with a learned focus in the value of intimacy— I am still in the process of understanding. Perhaps it is a little of both.
It’s been a very busy year though, and I have been working on a myriad of projects that I hope to share more about soon. Most of what I’ve been working on is still in the process and creation and becoming stages, which is a space I’m not sure I’ve ever spent quite this much time in before.
My turnaround time for projects and ideas is usually a bit quicker, or there’s at least some measure of sharing about the journey of it all along the way, but I am finding that the richer and more rewarding projects deserve more space and time to become what they deserve to be. I am learning to sit with things longer than I am used to being comfortable with and not rushing creation for the sake of producing and proving productivity.