Quotes of the day: “Progress has not followed a straight ascending line, but a spiral with rhythms of progress and retrogression, of evolution and dissolution.” — Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Spiral Art Displayed at One Yoga Studio in Mpls

Always arriving, never there…

Do you remember asking your parents as a child, “Are we there yet?”

I do. On long car trips (and short ones too) I couldn’t wait to get to our destination. The car ride was just something to endure until we arrived.

The funny thing is, I hear variations of “Are we there yet?” every day amongst adults I know. I hear things like, “I can’t wait until xyz then things will be better,” or “If I could only lose  N pounds, I would be happy,” or “If I can just make it through yyy, then I’ll be happy (fulfilled, successful, …)

This morning I heard a story about a family of nomads who were traveling through the desert on camels. The child in the family asked, “When will we arrive?” and the father answered, “We are nomads. This is what we do. We never arrive but we are always arriving.”

Found these guys growing by our patio yesterday

I love the idea of always arriving.

Imagine how different my experience of all of the car trips I’ve ever taken would have been if I had been relishing each moment along the way instead of impatiently waiting to “get there.”

I sometimes do something similar with my photography. I want to get somewhere other than where I am. I want to be more skillful, imaginative, artistic, activist—I want to get to the illusory “there” that my mind’s eye defines as a successful professional fine art photographer.

When I introduce myself as a photographer, I am often tempted to qualify my introduction with, “I am a photographer. But I’m only beginning my professional work.” Or I think things like, “I’m not really a professional trained photographer yet. I make mistakes, my photos are OK but they’re not as good as X’s photos.”

This urge to compare and dissatisfaction with where I am comes and goes. Perhaps it is the fate of all artists, to aspire to be better than they are. Perhaps this is the illusion we all believe in, that there is some THERE where we will have arrived and we will be enough.

Top view of mushrooms beside the patio

So when do I arrive?

When do I become a real photographer?

Wrong question. What is real?

“It doesn’t happen all at once,’ said the Skin Horse. ‘You become. It takes a long time. That’s why it doesn’t happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don’t matter at all, because once you are Real you can’t be ugly, except to people who don’t understand.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit

The questions that matter to me are things like, “What makes my heart sing? What am I learning? How can I serve life?”

I am a real photographer. I make photographs. Of course I have more to learn. I will always be growing, learning, changing, arriving and I will never be “there” even if I live to be 100 and make photographs for the next 40 years.

They look like little fairy houses to me