Home Security

This is a picture I took last month while on vacation in Mexico.

I was struck by the criss-crossing wires, the open windows and the abundance of potted plants. It seemed airy and breezy while at the same time cozy and secure.

This month my own home was burglarized.

They got away with several things (including the new camera that took this picture) but what they mostly took was a sense of security.

Part of me wants criss-crossing wires surrounding my house, and inaccessible doors and windows.

I wouldn’t mind the Pacific coastal weather either, but that’s a different picture.

The new year, a new fable, a new sky

The stress and activities of the holidays have passed, and so has a long-in-the-planning large group family vacation. Vacations are fun, and often filled with stressful hassles, not so unlike the holidays. It seems as if it’s been nothing but go-go-go, and for the past month or more I’ve felt like I was on some treadmill to finals week.

There’s a poorly mixed metaphor.

tangerine sky

Now, though, I’m ready to put my energy toward other things, and take on 2011 for the challenge of a new year. I’ve an itch to find inspiration, to take something and explore it, alter it, enhance it, change it in to something new and unexpected. I want the challenge of discovery and creation, and the exhaustion of hard work.

I have some ideas to examine, which range from a pile of scripts to read, to an original video to shoot and edit, to the all-encompassing endeavor of writing and work-shopping a new play.

The new play revolves around a mystery and the search for the truth. But it’s not just the truth but really a search for what is truth. What defines truth is becoming whatever it is one believes, based on knowledge or facts to which credence is given for whatever credit and value is assigned by the believer. Personal opinion has become its own monetary and marketed system, its own economy, its own actuality.

It’s an exploration of our modern society where my truth and your truth co-exist and each maintains its credibility despite the conflicting facts, and it fractures the world we once knew.

It’s all there in a simple modern fable, just waiting to be written and told.

That may be the tangerine sky I’m seeking.

Picture in My Mind

This morning was another moment of me wishing I could have my camera with me at all times. Imagine along with me….

There’s the early sunlight on a very cold winter morning. White piles are everywhere after our record snow fall, and smoke drifts up from the car engines at the busy intersection.

The sky is almost perfectly clear but for the few wispy, high clouds that are slightly rippled, and a warm pink and orange sunrise is hitting them with brilliance, accenting their contours.

Almost silhouetted in this light is the last remnant of the Purina Mill, an eight-story tower, cut open and surrounded by the block-long rubble of destruction…while towering out in front of it is the demolition crane, with its wrecking ball tied up for the night, waiting to crank up for another day of smashing the concrete structure to bits.

It looked post-apocalyptic, and I wanted to capture it, that one moment that I know cannot ever be recreated. But the light changed and traffic moved on to take me away.