Winter Desert

“And the story it told of a river that flowed
Made me sad to think it was dead” – America “Horse with no Name”

So I’m having a serious dry spell. And this, despite the fact that I managed to photograph Motel California (an Eagles tribute band) at a benefit on Sunday and that I managed to take around 300 images to cull for a studio still life project for camera club. I don’t suppose I’m the only one though. Everyone seems to wind down around the winter holiday season while they preoccupy themselves with family and festivities and rev back up again in the spring. The springtime, though, seems so long in coming and instead we’re, as the Facebook meme puts it, stuck in a big ball of cold grey suck.

Now if my current state of mind was a place, I’d say it was the desert. Sort of like a vast, blank vista with the occasional oasis of an idea. What do you think of when you see a desert? Is it a barren landscape like I am now picturing it, dry, with no scenery but scrub and brush and a lot of heat? Or, do you see something beautiful, harsh yet fragile, full of things seen and unseen. Sometimes I think, in terms of creativity, the desert is the place where a person who is stuck for a solution to a particular problem retires from that line of thought and pursues something else for a while. The distraction enables you to take a fresh look at the task at hand and arrive at the place for fertile thought, yielding the solution you seek. In this desert, things that are hidden are exposed and laid bare, pondered on in the glare of the illuminating sun, refined by the scouring of the blowing sands of shifting thoughts, until at last the long journey is done.

In the past, I have been in the desert both figuratively and literally. After the long, hard road in the glare and heat, I emerged as a different sort of person, still me, but with certain aspects of my personality a bit more refined. Now, I’m not so sure I need any more refinement as much as I need a bit more confidence. I have to remind myself that 1) the road to success is fraught with a lot of failure, and 2) nothing risked, nothing gained. Herein lies part of my problem: I’m stuck in a thought loop where I tell myself that I will not accomplish what I set out to do. And so the avoidance begins followed by the opposite reaction, which is to force myself to do the things I need to do.

I’ve been saturating my brain lately with what feels like every photography article, book, video course, and class under the sun, but maybe what I really need to do is just go look at art and above all, PRACTICE. Hopefully the storytelling group starts up again soon, but even if it doesn’t, I intend to photograph and write. We’ve all been in a sort of winter desert. Soon, I hope, an early spring.