What transforms us?

It has been a long couple of days for me. I've been starting with new positions a little farther from home, and I've been working hard. I love my work, mind you, so it's definitely a pleasure, but it is hard labor nonetheless. To top it off, something I ate today has had me feeling, this afternoon, like, well, like a ticking bomb. Sorry. Too much information, I know.



Then I went to meet a good friend for a meal and a nice visit to catch up a bit on each other's worlds. After dinner the sun had already set, but it was still plenty light, so we walked in the local community garden, where she had started working a plot and I recently inherited one that desperately needs my attention to get it up to speed. I was walking uncomfortably around the garden - I have never experienced quite this type of sensation before so it was fairly distracting, and I couldn't help thinking how I would really not want to have to go to an ER on a holiday weekend (ok, I have a hypochondria streak).

As I was turning the car around to take my friend back to her car, I noticed the wall up the hill from where we were. I had to get out of the car and go take some photos. "These," I told her, "are the photos I started with," meaning the first photos I ever took. In the beginning it was all about the transformation of decay in various forms. This has always be the case. I imagine it always will be, in various iterations and of various stages of transformation and decay.


After I captured these images, I got back into my car and realized that I wasn't thinking about my guts at all. Isn't it funny what art can do. Getting into the state of "flow"- as Mihály Csíkszentmihályi coined it - is so powerful. It is one of many ways to inspire our bodies to slip into parasympathetic nervous system state (which massage also invites). It's amazing how simple that is. Completely the opposite of what my body did as I sat at the dinner table trying to figure out just what exactly was going on inside all my tubes and organs. Just taking some photographs, riveted by beauty, turned my system around.

On the way home, the last pink and dark violet wisps of clouds were barely illuminated by the already set sun. They looked a lot like some of these photos.