Inspired, I light a candle.
Sheepishly, I recited an unfamiliar blessing.
Miraculously, the tiny flame filled my home and heart with light.
Peacefully, I watched it burn.

Renewed. Grounded. Blessed.

Sometimes I look at the people around me and think:
damn all these privileged people!

Sometimes I use an electric toothbrush and think:
damn I'm privileged!

makes me feel. makes me see. its inside me. its who i am.
running changes nothing. they always pull me back.
i speak of "them" as if they were. they were always me. me them.
the pain was/is all of ours. spun miles to deny it.
but in their tired eyes is my guilt. my burden.
my heart hurts. my skin crawls.

makes me want to hide, push them all away, call it by a different name.

it remains, Home.

Appropriately titled, this film is a beacon of hope for people dealing with today's rampant unemployment. Having recently dealt with unemployment in our family, I can understand the palpable fear of losing income. Even today my heart races with the memory of the day Dominic discovered he'd be losing his job.

The first thing we did that night was pull out the calculator but the numbers just wouldn't crunch. As a teacher intern, my income barely put up a fight with all our bills. It was scary, and no matter how many times we ran the numbers we always came up red. Yet somehow, despite the ugly truth in the calculator's digital reading, we felt a tiny sense of hope.

It was certainly uncomfortable, at times, to let go of luxuries we had become so accustomed to - luxuries like pricey, cushy toilet paper. Re-evaluating our necessities taught us that we had more than we needed to survive and enough to live comfortably. Through the process we discovered that being a single income family was actually quite a blessing.

For now we are a dual income family again but it won't be for long. My internship is coming to an end this school year and I have to go jobless while I complete my student teaching this fall. This time I'm not tempted to consult a calculator because I already know the formula for balance.

We'll be making lemonade.

It has been 7 years since I last took an antibiotic. 7 years since I had a terrifying allergic reaction to an antibiotic I was not supposed to be allergic to. In those 7 years I have had illnesses come and go with only rest and fluids to catalyze my healing.

Since working with kids, my immune system has been tested and finally met its match. Nearly two weeks ago I caught a silly cold. I took a day off to rest and recover only to find this cold growing stronger. Still it was just a cold and I told myself it was passing.

Flashforward to Sunday morning when something foreign had invaded my body, a friend of the cold virus no doubt. Sinus Infection. The nastiest thing my body has dealt with in a long time. I should spare you the details, but I will say that Hollywood special effects have nothing on the alien slime that has invaded my sinus cavity.

I caved...

Two years ago I started a self-portrait project as a way to practice photography everyday and also, sometimes, get my ego stroked. I'd hoped to use my new skills to tell my story. As it turns out, the story bored me to death and inspiration lulled. So sometimes I used my skills to feign inspiration, enhance the story, or sometimes fabricate one altogether. Yes, I used my lens and our dirty friend CS3 to make it appear as if I'd never had a zit during my 195 days as a self-portraitist.

Maybe this has something to do with living at ground zero of plastic perfection, but I find myself growing bored of zitless faces and tidy spaces. Life is messy. Cluttered. And sometimes the scene can't be broken into thirds.

I have decided to embark on another photographic journey. I'll be traveling very light this time, leaving Stella and her fancy accessories behind. Capturing images with the tiny automatic lens of my iphone. Why? Why would any self proclaimed photographer leave behind the very thing that makes her so?

an unfabricated story...

It was her many features, flash modes, fancy lenses, and oooh the manual focus that left me so smitten. Shortly after our union I was drunk with the delusion that she and I, in our love triangle with Photoshop, would create photographic perfection. Elusive as that "perfect" photograph was we marched on. Inspired by so many others along the way, Canon users too! Suddenly it seemed the whole world was creating images that, to the naked eye, seemed flawless. Why then did every effort of mine seem to produce flawed images or worse, failed images? Oh and effort there was, sometimes hours with Photoshop to get the job done. But when was the job done? When could let it go out into the world to be scrutinized by prying eyes?

and I did it all to myself. I put myself out on display only to feel an acute onset of discomfort with every upload. As much as my being is not defined by their approval, it was. I feel the need here to point out the same need in you, but I won't. I just did. I want so badly to justify how my narcissism was/is a natural condition. A self imposed condition. A self imposed, but naturally common condition. I surrounded myself with them. I wanted to be like them, like me. I wanted you to like me.

What began as a beginner's journey turned into a quest. A quest that had some desirable prize at the end. It was draining as it so often is to find that oases turn to mirages when you seek them. The story I'd set out to find, to tell, became clouded with deceit. I never meant for it to be so, but that's how lies go. One begets another, until you've photoshopped out every flaw that told the truth. This is not to say that all photoshoppers set out to deceive you, nor to say that photoshopping is inherently evil. This is to say that I want to capture my story as it unfolds in my messy, extra ordinary, in-significant little life. Here in this story I am neither the main character nor the producer. I am the audience.

I invite you to join me in the audience if you wish, but I don't expect any of us to applaud, cheer or, even scoff. My intent is solely to see it as it is. As a person of visual acuity and virtual amnesia this is a thing I choose to do as long as the images remind me of what it is I want to remember. That is the number one rule. The second rule is that my friend CS3 will not be joining me on my journey. This story isn't bound by time limits or constraints. It is not bound by subject matter, rules of thirds, or good lighting. It is not a story of how well I can take a photo. It is just a story that I feel like unfolding before my own eyes before I forget.

also I'm just too damn lazy to carry eight pounds of equipment with me everywhere I go.

It starts here...

Time is flying so fast that an entire month has passed in a blink. I intended to write a heartfelt good riddance to 2009 but I don't know where the time went. I can't even make any excuses about being terribly busy or having some tragedy to tend to. I mean, I've been sort of busy with moving and school and tests and germs invading my body, but what else is new?

Honestly, though, I'm really quite perplexed at the speed at which time is passing. I was recently notified that my 10 year high school reunion is this year! Obama has already been in office for an entire year, and my mom keeps telling me the end of the world is getting even closer! My head spins in the whirl of it all.

Thankfully, our new little house in the hills provides reprieve from it all. Every morning I watch in awe of the sun always willing to rise. I give thanks for every beam of light that shines into this tiny home and my heart sings along with the birds outside our window. Not too far away, we can still hear the rush of traffic on the Hollywood freeway but here in this house we find stillness.

This stillness is perhaps the reason (and my favorite excuse) for not posting a new year's blog sooner. As "time" has been passing, or doing whatever it is time does, I have been still. Still and grateful.

I hope 2010 finds you in peace and stillness. Forget time and just be.

Being a kindergarten teacher, I have the opportunity to watch kids grow and change right before my eyes. By the end of the year some of them will have learned to tie their shoes, some will have grown 5 inches, some will lose their lisp, and many will lose their first tooth. All of this is very exciting for them and they're all very eager to reach each milestone, even the one that involves losing a part of their body followed by a stream of blood.

I have watched my students excitedly wiggle their first loose tooth in order to make it happen sooner. The "late bloomers" even wiggle unwilling teeth to reach this exciting milestone. By this time of year half our students' smiles are starting to look like creepy jack-o-lanterns. Yet, this does not stop them from flashing their new toothless smiles at you. They wear the holes in their smiles like badges of honor, telling their peers all the gory details of how they got it.

My stomach isn't as strong as it should be for someone in my profession because I find wiggly teeth and bloody gum holes rather disgusting. The worst is when they show me a tooth hanging on by a thread. Ew. I even had to pull one out with my bare hands once. Yet, as gross as it was there was something magical about it that made it all bearable.

It seems society has done a great job at easing the pain of this early childhood metamorphosis. This is due in part to the fact that this change is inevitable and marks the passage from early childhood to middle childhood. And for little kids becoming a big kid is the most important goal they have, no matter how bloody or ugly it is to get there. It also helps that they are still young enough to believe that a tooth-collecting fairy comes in their room at night and exchanges their bone fragments for dollar bills.

This tooth fairy thing got me thinking that grown ups need something magical to help us through our late life changes. A Wrinkle Fairy? Gray Hair Fairy? Hip Replacement Fairy? First Pair of Reading Glasses Fairy? At the very least it should be socially acceptable to run up to your peers and say "look, at my first gray hair! isn't it cool?"

Change is inevitable at every stage of life. Let's make like kindergartners and wear our ugly marks of age like badges of honor!

Hopefully we all spent yesterday in good company while filling our bellies with sweet, sweet sustenance. We certainly did! And we are beyond grateful, maybe even a little boastful, that our thanksgiving dinner was prepared by a friend who happens to be a personal chef (a really great personal chef). Now that are bellies are filled to the brim we plan to focus on feeding our souls.

While many overfed Americans will be taking to the malls to fill the voids in their hearts and closets, we are spending the day enjoying life just as it is. Today, we will fill our hearts with gratitude for every blessing, material and otherwise, that has found its way to us. Dubbed "Buy Nothing Day" by social activists today will be spent by many in non-consumption as a reaction to the mega-consumption monster that is awakened each year on Black Friday.

In all honesty our household, especially as of late, spends many days without buying a thing but today we will buy nothing with intention. We aren't buying nothing because we are poor, though we are, we will use today to focus on being grateful for what we already have. And what we already have is a life abundant.

Today I will meditate on the words of my father, though I never understood it as a kid, he used to say "It is better to want what you have, than have what you want." My hope is that all of you want for nothing. Let's spend today in gratitude.

Despite the shrinking back of life this fall, miracles still seem to be making their way through the dark. We are thankful some have even found their way to us. It is a blessing to know that we will survive this season of change, no matter how uncomfortable it can be sometimes.

May miracles pierce through for you this Thanksgiving.