in these bodies we will live, in these bodies we will die...

Recently my friend Danielle called me...from Australia. It made me very happy and has since made my days better because she pointed me to this Australian band I hadn't heard of before. They're called Mumford and Sons, and I love them. Especially The Cave and Little Lion Man. I'm sitting here tonight on a Friday evening sorting through wedding photo sessions for my website and drinking gin and tonic with grapefruit ice cubes. I'm enjoying the empty feeling of my house tonight. Beth is out with friends and Karen is gone to enjoy her reading week elsewhere and I'm at the kitchen table. The only light on in the house is above me and the banjo and piano riffs are tinkling out from my computer and disappearing into the dark around me. Soon the house will be filled with the sounds of visitors and I am so looking forward to that, but tonight, it's just me and some good music and some good gin. And there's something about that, that allows me to expand into this place.
I feel like I've spent so much of the past year always moving, always containing 'myself' into a book bag or a suitcase and that has taken a toll on me that i forget about until I have moments like these. It feels like it has been a long time since I actually "lived" in a place. I'm in the process of feeling out what "home" means to me and how to create and nurture that. As I write this, Mumford and Sons are singing "where you invest your love is where you invest your life". I think I've found some pretty spectacular things to invest in in the past few years. I find it strange that I've only really discovered photography 4 years ago and to look back and to see what has come from that is incredible. In only 4 years. Sometimes I find myself panicking about what I should "do" in life. I always find that I love too many things to really simply immerse myself in only one. And I'm realizing bit by bit that loving and pursuing lots of things at once is okay, is healthy, is part of who I am.
And so I will book more weddings to photograph. I will put on more photography shows. I will read more biographies. I will take more classes in English Lit and Sociology. I will put time and effort into my garden and into growing things. I will write more. I will travel more, and I will love more people whose paths I cross. I will do all of these things because I love them all and its less about making time for them as it is allowing myself to follow all of them. Does that make sense? Maybe.

don't you wanna get out of cape cod, out of cape cod tonight....

So I did some scanning of interesting things in old books today. I find myself doing that a lot lately, but some days are more interesting than others. Today was incredibly interesting. Mostly all because of one book. I'm starting to realize that poor penmanship was the norm in the 1700s & 1800s but in today's documented 1835 publication of the complete works of Byron, I discovered not one, not two but THREE handwritten letters.

The guy who bought the book or owned it at least, is Bufus Prime or Prince (best I can make out) and he's written at least one of the letters...the four pager about Vampires, which I will get to later.

The first handwritten note I found was a poem. A love poem. I don't know whether it was a Bufus Price/Prime original or a Byron or whatnot. I haven't spent much time looking at it really, but it was interesting to pull out of the first couple pages. The best part about it, in my opinion, is the embossed 'P' on the top of the page. It was a nice kind of paper. Thick. Liney. Like Linen.



Further in, I found an incredible four page letter folded neatly and pasted into the pages of the book sent from Venice by Mr Prince/Prime to Paris:


Now, here's my favourite part. Turns out that guy in Paris had been publishing work referring to our dear Mr Prince/Prime as the author of a certain work on vampires and not only that, citing biographical details about Mr Prince/Prime's past travels. Apparently Mr Prince/Prime took great offense to this and makes very clear in his needlessly long 4 page letter that he is not the author of that work or the traveler of those stories. In this letter he is asking Mr lack of fact checker in Paris to publish a 'contradiction' to set the record straight. My favourite line is when, after listing the reasons why he cannot possibly be this man being referred to, he states: "I have besides a personal dislike to vampires, and the little acquaintance I have with them would by no means induce me to divulge their secrets."


Now, the last letter in the book kinda makes it look like maybe he was divulging too many vampire secrets, despite his little acquaintance with them and the vampires didn't like it. Looks like they got to him. That is, of course, if a decrease in grammar and sentence structure and penmanship indicate a vampire attack.

time has a knack of changing me...

I've been away from this blog again for too long. I've had a lot of things to write here and I've been thinking a lot in the past couple weeks, but for some reason or another, it hasn't been transferred onto here. Lets see...I'm sitting in my room, on my futon with the afternoon sun streaming in through the window and splashing across the side of my face, so much so that it's difficult to see the computer screen unless I squint. So, what's new. My show at Sugarbowl is coming to a close. It's been really awesome. The owner of the place has already booked me in for another show next year and I've sold over half the pieces which means I've more than broke even! Plus, I've got to meet a lot of interesting people who are purchasing my work. The person who is buying my favourite piece of them all turned out to be this awesome girl who I had a 2 hour conversation with. Turns out she's part of this excellent band called "100 Mile House". And right now, you need to go look at their website and listen to them (www.100milehouse.co.uk) - Jamie and Sarah, I am speaking specifically to you here...but everyone who reads this should go have a listen. My current favourite songs are: Fight, Jonah and Songs we all know.
In other news, I've lined up some refreshing spring/summer work. There's been a lot of anxiety and trepidation for me in the job market area. I've spent the past three years relying on the knowledge that I would landscape in the summer and make a decent wage. Well, three years of landscaping has taken its toll on me. I'm so desperately sick of dust and dryness and dead grass. So I called up a market garden farm I worked on for a summer 4 years ago. They have a spot for me doing work in the greenhouses in the spring and then transplanting into the fields in the early summer. The money is about half of what I made landscaping, but I can't begin to say what growing things and using my hands to bring things to life from soil and water will do for me. It will be healing. And I'm in need of some after this past year.
I went to the King's IS Conference last week. It was on Homelessness and one of the session speakers was a local Anglican priest who is running a photography course for street youth. He was so absolutely passionate about it and I really enjoyed hearing about the project. I talked with him after and ended up meeting him this week to talk about potentially being involved in the project myself. It sounds pretty cool and he's got some awesome long term plans for it, so I'm going to start becoming involved when the next course runs in March/April.
We got to talking about a lot of things during my chat with him and one of them was about recognizing trends in our art and style. I'm starting to notice that my photography is so based upon S-P-A-C-E. I'm still thinking about what that means. Maybe I'll have more on that next post.

Happy Tuesday!

Body to body, heart to heart...

So its been a long time since I've written here. Like a LONG time. So, as per Jamie's request, I'm writing. I don't know what to write about exactly though. I've been working at the University lately and its been fun. Except lately, when the internet is not allowing me on. So I'm limited to having internet only at home. Which I suppose, isn't that different from how I usually spend my summers, but in the winter, I feel like the internet plays a bigger part in my life. However, I feel that this lack of continual connection is becoming a growing experience for me. I'm finding I'm wasting less time surfing around on the web and sending more emails, learning more important things from it and spending more time just listening to music and reading. In fact, I find I'm being more intentional in what I take in in a day (music, video, etc) in general.

That being said, in the past few months I've really been interested in WWII. I don't know where it came from really, but suddenly I'm reading biographies about people on both sides, I'm watching movies and documentaries about it, I'm spending my time on the internet learning about the concentration camp system and the allies who found them and what happened to them after. Its been very interesting.

Also, I've been planning a lot of visits. In february, Patrick's sister is coming to visit for her school break and I'm pumped, despite the fact that I think Edmonton, while FANTASTIC in summer, is only perhaps mediocre in winter (this has less to do with Edmonton than it does with my distaste for cold weather). Then it's off to Vancouver in early March to make a very short, but very overdue visit to some wonderful friends out there. After which, most of the rest of Patrick's family is coming to see Edmonton! From there it's only a burst of hopefully spring weather in April before I jet to LA to see a good friend there. I have only ever been in LA once before, and I spent half that time puking on the curb and half the time curled around my luggage in a gravol induced sleep - this was after a flight from Tokyo which was also the worst turbulence I've experienced EVER. I hope to remedy this view of LA with this trip.

What else do I have to say...I LOVE my slow cooker. I now own two cookbooks for my slow cooker (thanks Jamie!) and have been using it regularly. Seriously, its the best cooking invention ever!

Other than that, I've decided I'm going to try to take photos more regularly in the next few months. I can't remember the last time I took photos for myself intentionally and I need to return to doing that more often.

As a final note, I've been listening to Cher while I've been writing this (not intentionally, but due to "random" on iTunes), and I'm kind of feelin' it.

while catching up on my friend's blogs (long overdue) I came across this beautiful gem from Lisa (you can see her link on the right hand side cause I'm too lazy to make her name a link in here right now).

My lover asks me:
"What is the difference between me and the sky?"

The difference, my love,
Is that when you laugh,
I forget about the sky.

Nizar Qabbani

your hands are cold...

I'm at my sister's house. Babysitting her kids while she visits friends in Vancouver for a few days. Patrick is downstairs watching some poorly produced Hannah Montana-esque movie with them while I clean up breakfast dishes upstairs. Its snowing outside, big, beautiful, floating flakes. The kind that makes you remember that Christmas is less than a month away. I'm sitting at a clean table in a clean kitchen that still smells of breakfast (in the good way), drinking eggnog and listening to the Pride and Prejudice soundtrack while I watch the snow. It came late this year. This is the first real snowfall that has felt like winter. It has been such a strange fall in so many ways. Lately I've been feeling like I don't know where to begin...in the way that things have kind of all been melding together for the past number of months. Even when I finished up something or started something new, it all just felt like it ran together. I don't like that feeling. I love the way things transition and wind down and open up to exploration. I could never live in a place that doesn't have seasons because so much of myself is bound up in the constant cycle of change and movement in nature. That hasn't happened this year, for many reasons in my life, and the long, unpredictable autumn hasn't helped.
But today, watching the snow fall and breathing and listening I feel like something is moving again. Something is beginning again.

told you through the glass...

Its 2:48 in the afternoon. I'm sitting in my office at UofA listening to Album Leaf and watching the sun reflecting golden against the windows in the offices across from mine. I'm holding a book in my hands. An old book. A book that has survived the people who created them, bought them, passed them on to following generations. A book that has seen centuries and wars and disease and natural disaster. A book that has traveled continents and thousands of bookshelves to arrive in my hands right now. Its my job here to document this collection of books in images. I get to scan all the interesting parts of them and I get to photograph them in such a way that gives a sense of the book as a physical object. I like this job a lot. Sometimes it gets monotonous and boring yes, but for the most part, when I look at the images in these books and the knowledge written in them and read the author's name and see them through my camera, trying to get an angle that will make someone half a world away feel as though they are holding it in their hands, I am far from bored. Part of it is the books themselves. They're all manner of texture and shape and colour and they're beautiful to hold and look at and read. But what's more interesting to me is thinking about the people these books represent. The authors who wrote them, the noblemen who paid for their production, the printers whose hands were covered in the ink that pressed against their pages. And then I think about the people who bought them originally, whether they read them, whether they were simply collectors or people who spent a quarter of a month's wages to learn from it, for their children to learn from it. I think about who may have learned to read when they were holding this book or who had this read to them while they lay sick or dying. I think about all the people who have held this book before me in the past 200 years and I am overwhelmed. There's something very personal about history to me. I have a hard time explaining it, except to come back to Dorothy Livesay's poem "Eve" again and again. There's a line in it that I just can't separate from "In fifty seconds, fifty summers sweep and shake me". That's how I feel when I hold this book.