4 Years Later

      

Cracked Earth in Death Valley, CA

"It seems like just yesterday" seems to me a trite way to pick up where you left off.  However, we do what is appropriate in all situations, and this one warrants me starting off with...

...It seems like just yesterday that I wrote my first blog entry four years ago.  All things considered, I know it wasn't yesterday, but more accurately 1,501 yesterdays ago when I was embarking on a great adventure, and I can still feel the weight of every single day in between.  I have the scars, ex-boyfriends, college degrees, burnt bridges, tattoos, extra pounds, photographs, and trail dust to mark the memory of those days.  Perhaps more importantly, I have the acknowledgement that it was not all a dream, and certainly not a fantasy.

It is safe to say that I truly struggled through most of that time, as I was constantly fighting the subsequent rebirth aspect of death of self.  And where does THAT leave you, other than an ethereal limbo that is difficult to emerge from?  You simply cannot escape if you barely know you're there.  This state could possibly be compared to that acquaintance that some have who has never fully returned from an acid trip and relates better to a glass of orange juice than to his fellow man.  With the onset of my internship at the Tracker School, I was consciously putting an end to everything that I had previously known and grown tired of, accepting that I was going to start my life over.  It seems I did this without fully understanding the extent of that simple truth, and the painful death that had to come first.

Glass Beach at Fort Bragg, CA

Upon returning to Staten Island, I was lost without a map; up the creek without a paddle.  At times when I could have been growing socially and being more generally productive, it seemed perfectly natural for me to hide from all the world and go off into the woods or to the ocean by myself.  My camera was my faithful companion, and we made memories together.  That's all I needed.  But if we are made to wonder if a tree makes a sound when it falls alone in the woods, then what kept me from wondering if I really existed out there at all, if there was no one there to see me?

(Hence all of the pictures of my feet!  It seems, after reviewing all of my photo libraries, that some very well-developed themes have emerged.  Among them, Isolation, Wilderness, Juxtaposition, Shadows, Destruction, Tracks, Starkness, and my own Feet; surely proof to myself that -YES- in fact I did exist.)

With any crisis of identity (or worse- existence), there comes a very well-marked crossroad; that point when you've endured all the pain and learned all you need in order to choose your new direction.  With any luck, you'll have a welcomed guide to help you across that threshold, as it can be really fucking scary to take that leap alone.  It turns out that while wandering the urban jungle, feeling the isolation and starkness that my photos were portraying, I was never alone.

     

The Beach at Southampton, NY

Neither in the light nor the dark, but in the shadows were my friends and advisors.  Sometimes they led the way, and other times they followed me, but always we walked together.  This realization brought me to and through the threshold of my reality, to my proverbial rebirth.  One of the truths that I learned was that, yes, you can hide in the shadows forever, and lose yourself in that grey limbo between death and rebirth, in the world of dawn and dusk, the beauty of the beginning and the end, but then you'll never feel the warmth of the sunlight, or marvel at the distance of the stars.

I believe the real trick is to learn to live with the shadows, as well as the light and the dark.  One cannot and does not exist without the other, and even if you could conjure up a world where that is possible, the result would be blinding imbalance, that may be nearly impossible to consciously emerge from.