Life Lens

Lately I’m feeling the need to nest.  I want a space that’s my own and semi-permanent.  Something I can decorate and build upon and make comfortable and welcoming and inspiring.  It might have something to do with an amazing poster I picked up yesterday.  All I want to do is make an enormous frame out of old barn wood and hang that baby on a wall.  The problem is, I don’t really have a wall.  Most of the time I enjoy flowing through life, shape shifting like Jello into whatever mold I land in, but something is tugging at me to sit still for a minute month or ten.  My thoughts are in constant battle. Stay or go, move or grow…  Every day I make a new plan for 2013, but like everything I don’t get too attached to it so by dinner my year is playing out completely different than it was at breakfast.  All my little thoughts, goals and aspirations keep sprouting up like little wildflowers, new and different, multiplying and gathering into bunches.  I wonder which will be picked and admired, which ones will be watered, which ones will wait and grow again next year..

The photo above was taken in Yallahs, Jamaica in 2010.  This farmer was overjoyed to share his spot in the shade with me while he took a midmorning break.  He spent so much time in the fields that he built a permanent little oasis, complete with a hammock, in the shade near his crops.    

Taoist elements are the praise of quietism, seclusion, and an austerely simple life-style; and the belief that softness is stronger than hardness.

a quote that stood out to me, from ‘Siddhartha’ by Hermann Hesse

Punch buggys are known as fuscas here and they are  e v e r y w h e r e .  It’s so great to see something you love around every corner.  I taught my Brazilian friend the punch buggy game [red punch buggy - no punch back] and he’s been abusing it ever since.

peace, love & sisters.

It still amazes me how something so simple can reach out and grab me, like a glass of water sitting on the windowsill of a home in Jamaica.  Photographs have the power to freeze time forever and no one knows this more than the photographer that snapped the shot.  It was a pretty perfect day in Jamaica. I was tagging along as a friend visited different farms for his job when we stopped to talk to a woman who made her own Jamaican jerk sauce.  I told her I wanted to photograph her making the sauce for a personal project of mine.  She ended up getting pretty angry and basically telling me that I was ripping her off, so I told her never mind.  There wasn’t anything in it for me, it really was just a personal project.  As I walked away, thinking the trip was somewhat of a waste, I took this photo and to this day it’s one I always think of when I remember those two lazy months on the southern side of the island.  In the midst of dust and dirt a clean glass of water. a pure intention. nothing more, nothing less. 

Sao Paulo Train Station.  

We’re always on our way to or from somewhere.  Stop for a moment and enjoy the space you’re inhabiting right now. 

home away from home.

http://www.acquavillehotel.com.br/

I’m thankful that this is my view for the next month.  

Remember how far you’ve come, not just how far you have to go.  You are not where you want to be, but neither are you where you used to be.

-rick warren.

The world is talking to you, start listening.

Clouds over Costa Rica

Travel is like knowledge.  The more you see, the more you know you haven’t seen.  

-Mark Hertsgaard

You are anxious because your path leads away from mother and home. But every step and every day lead you back again to the mother. Home is neither here nor there. Home is within you, or home is nowhere at all.

-Hermann Hesse