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Where is that voice coming from?

In the poem, How Intelligence Advises Your Spirit, Rumi says:

and then your mean-spirited advisor, Haman, whose nature is to hate, comments, “Do you listen now to men dressed in rags!”

Before Haman scolds, there is a verse that reads: “Sometimes Moses tells your Pharoah something of such tenderness that it would make the rocks give milk.”

The men dressed in rags, for me anyway, are the parts of myself who have not demonstrated their powers. The photographer me is dressed in metaphorical rags. I lack clients, and I lack a reputation. Haman wants me to avoid this ragged advisor. Haman wants me to embrace cynicism and doubt.

But when I contemplate the spirit that moves me to take pictures, and I reflect on my desire to link generations of families through photographs and text, it makes the rocks give milk.

Let me segue from myself to the high-profile yoga teachers whose careers I follow. Several of them recently relinquished their authority to use the Anusara brand name. Some have written blog posts about their anxiety in giving up this affiliation. Would their students still attend their classes? From what I can gather, the loss of a brand name has brought no decline in attendance. I’m not an advocate of branding yoga, and I am pleased that these teachers have declared their independence. Since courage is central to the practice of yoga one might expect accomplished teachers to demonstrate it when it’s needed, and so they have. I applaud them.

I have several friends in various fields who are aching at their jobs because most work places make people miserable. Creating misery is generally held to be a primary role for managers. My friends have inner advisors who dress in rags, as mine does, and their Haman yells at them to be prudent and to ignore these beggars. I spoke at length to one of those friends last night. My comments were to the effect that intelligence is working through him.

Intelligence advises us constantly, but it’s not a crystal clear signal on account of the ruckus from Haman. Rumi’s advice is to put Haman in his place. I’m working on it myself.

Thanks to all the people who know their own sweet nature, and for the reminders I receive from them not to bow before Haman and his annoying tantrums.

Rumi assures us that “The inner king is your spirit.” He adds, “Don’t think that these are just names! They’re realities. Explore them.”

Be well, y’all.

Gloria Hester talks about horses and yoga

 

Gloria Hester

Gloria Hester is an educator in the emerging field of equine somatics. It is the study of the nervous system of horses and how to use that knowledge to create better relationships between horses and people.

If, like me, your knowledge of horses is minimal, you can get a sense of their magic from many videos posted to YouTube. Stacy Westfall’s 2006 performance riding a horse with no saddle or bridle in competition is a great place to start.

If you want another “gee whiz” experience, read the post in the Simply Marvelous blog about the 55-pound miniature horse named Cuddles who does work normally assigned to a seeing eye dog. These sources will put you in the perfect frame of mind to appreciate what Gloria has to say.

Horseman Jim Swanner on WKAC radio in Athens, Alabama interviewed Gloria in November 2011 for his All About Horses program and liked it so much he invited her back again. Here are the links to the “Best of Gloria” from that show:

Gloria Hester, Jan 23, 2012

Gloria Hester Nov. 28, 2011

She also teaches a great course in restorative yoga! I speak from experience.

Photographing Yoga Oasis, Tucson

Darren Rhodes gave me an assignment to photograph the three Yoga Oasis studios in Tucson. It’s a special privilege to photograph spaces that means so much to so many people. Yoga practice creates a special state of mind, and literally thousands of people have attained that state while in a class or workshop in one of the studios.

Besides the personal bonds that have formed, the buildings are just plain interesting. The original, central location, in particular, houses many delightful accent pieces. The play of light in all three locations is wonderful.

Given all this, I wanted to be absolutely sure I didn’t disappoint the people who cherish these spaces. With that in mind, I took many more photographs than Darren expected, and as a result we decided to work them into a video. The sound track is provided by Darren’s wife, Bronwin. The selection is from her second CD, Adoreje.

The tone of the video and the stills it contains are intended to suit the mood and feel of a venerable yoga studio. Any venue will guide the photographer as to how to portray it. Video inserts in websites can also include live action and narration. The possibilities are endless, and they give organizations another way to present themselves in a friendly and informative manner.

I welcome your comments.

Yoga Oasis

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Searching for your phrase

This is one of my favorite photographs. Lara is a wonderful yoga teacher, and she currently uses this as her Facebook profile photo.

That thing that you do. What is it again?

I’ve sought and received a lot of advice lately about defining my photography offerings. I’ve banged on a lot of descriptions, and they have a hollow sound. That is, until very recently.

I was reading a professional photography magazine and came across a statement by Irish photographer Pedraic Deasy. He described his studio by saying, “Our philosophy is to create iconic pieces of framed wall art to hand down to future generations.”

That resonates for me. It describes what I love both in people and in photography, and sends chills down my spine. It is the Big Challenge I’ve been looking for as I sift through the clichés and the standard advice that abounds everywhere.

It scares me to know what it is I’m committing to because it eliminates my hiding places. It opens me to criticism because, as they say in the pool hall, I’ve called my shot. Slopping a ball in the side pocket isn’t the same as delivering on the shot I’ve called.

Another phrase that is enormously helpful to me is narrative photography. I first heard it in a tutorial by Chris Orwig on Lynda.com. Narrative photography tells a story, whether it is in a single photograph or a photo essay. Narrative photography is sensitive to context, and to the depth and complexity of the person being photographed. A  narrative photo cannot be a copycat photo. It has to address the person in the photograph in a meaningful way.

Combining these phrases gives me a sense of balance. I have a beacon now to guide me. I am committed to making iconic images that will be printed large and displayed conspicuously. It’s a relief to get that out in the open.

If you have found your core phrase, or a short description that gets to the heart of what you love, please share it.

The blues over news

Things change.

One of my hobbies is following the twists and turns of the news business. There is a lot of trouble in that business, and that may be partly because it is a business. For the most part we’ve lost our ability to run businesses in this country.

Newspapers are struggling, in part, because they never assigned value to news. They assigned value to their ability to attract readers who would shop the advertisements. Now Facebook attracts readers more easily than newspaper do, and Facebook has nothing to do with reporting the news. The papers are left holding a bag filled with something they have long acknowledged as having no value. Now they say news does have value. “Don’t steal our news,” they say. The inconsistency is not something the professionals want to talk about. They are not clear on why the same story published in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times has value on both websites.

The original premise that launched the big newspapers was that gathering news requires both time and expertise. In some cases it also requires great courage, as it does in combat situations, or when facing down the rich and powerful. One of the key roles of journalism in society is to penetrate layers of fakery and pretense with plain speaking and eye-witness reports. Now many news organizations create or promote fakery and pretense rather than piercing those veils.

People with day jobs, so the theory goes, do not have time to do all the wonderful things professional reporters are supposed to do. People who lack the proper credentials provided by education and experience might deliver stories that are flawed in some way. For these reasons we are said to need a professional corps of writers, photographers, and editors. It takes great finesse and experience to write a story for the Los Angeles Times about a desperate woman offering sexual favors in exchange for a MacDonald’s meal. Not everyone can do that.

I firmly support the proposition that we need competent journalists, but I am ready for a new definition of that concept. It’s time to retire the old model and start from square one.

As a start we ought to clarify what we mean by news. If you remove all the stories about what some “expert” thinks might happen someday we could save a lot of newsprint and zillions of photons. Then if you remove the redundancy of printing the same story in hundreds of publications, pow! More fat is suddenly gone. If we put our minds to it we could come up with something new and very exciting. I’m sure of it.

I have made this post long enough, and I will close by asking my readers who love the field of journalism to share your ideas about a new model for reporting the news. Things have changed, and the old business model is about as likely to serve us as a Remington Noiseless Model Seven.

Video gets more important every day

Ashley Bowman

Video is rapidly becoming the medium of our day. It’s everywhere, and it is an essential device for anyone who wants to get a point across. This post highlights a few examples including my own low-tech first efforts.

Let’s start with a high-tech production. Dancer and choreographer Ashley Bowman published a beautiful video about herself and her young career in dance, and it won $10,000 in the form of the Buffalo Exchange Arts Award. She is co-director of Art.If.Act Dance Project at the University of Arizona. At 30, she has been dancing for 27 years. It runs about six minutes, and it’s worth viewing if you know her, you care about dance, you admire successful people, or if you don’t have your own video yet and you are looking for ideas.

Ashley says of her work: “My choreography and strength as a dancer is dynamic in form by combining ballet, modern and jazz dance. The style of movement is contemporary and ever-changing through each work I create.” Her performance and choreographic work for the concert, “The Great American Dance Tour of China” will debut May-June 2012 in Tucson and in a five-week tour of China.—From the Buffalo Exchange website

My favorite yoga teacher, Darren Rhodes, now teaches via video through the YogaGlo website where you will also find Christina Sell, Noah Mazé, Sianna Sherman, and many other wonderful teachers. Anyone with internet access can now study with the best teachers in the world, and for a modest amount of money. I’ve spent many hours at the Lynda.com website learning from master photographers. Video, video, video.

I recently published my fourth low-tech video. I have a YouTube channel where my small collection resides. My latest video runs about five minutes, and in it I share some of my ideas for sequencing photos and text in self-published books. I have embedded a copy in this post. Spicing up blogs with video is another great use of the medium.

I know many of the reasons people say no to being in a video. They don’t like they way they look or sound, they think it would be presumptuous, they aren’t willing to devote the time, they think it will cost too much, they plan to lose five pounds and they want to wait for that to happen first, and finally, the kids have soccer practice. In spite of those arguments, video will continue its march to dominance in marketing, educating, and communicating.

The growth of video creates an audience for professionals who provide production services, and this includes still photography and all the other related disciplines. In my view every business would benefit from having videos posted to their websites. Why wouldn’t the chef introduce his or her menu via video? Why wouldn’t the owner of a business speak to prospective employees via the company website? The possibilities are endless. All photographers would have more client requests than they can handle if business people recognized the possibilities.

If nothing else, planning your own video gives you something to think about while you work off those five pounds. Here is my latest. Be gentle, I’m new at this.

Timelines for Photo Books

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Is silence golden?

I’ve had 27,317 visits to this blog, and if you subtract contributions by my half dozen most loquacious friends, I’ve only received 189 comments in four and a half years.

I’m grateful to my friends for their many comments, but I remain curious about the relative silence that surrounds this blog. My interest is not pure vanity, and I would like to explain my motives.

In simple language, our nation’s large institutions are basically collapsing. This includes organizations of all types from Kodak to the post office. Writers and photographers are lamenting the fact that news organizations now want free stories and photographs contributed by the general public instead of paying professionals for this service.

There is less interest on the part of the general public in knowing the truth than at any time in my life, and so the remaining news organizations have shifted their emphasis to entertainment. They know that is where the money is.

People who aspire to jobs are essentially laughed at while factories run 24 hours a day in China turning out cellphones and computers for sale in the United States. The men in the mahogany-lined board rooms do not have us in their thoughts, and they have no regrets about the way things are.

My point is this: The burden is clearly on us to weave a new social fabric, and this social fabric must consist of talented people networked in a way that enables them to create the next big thing. Silence is not conducive to this.

I saw an article in the Los Angeles Times today about a woman who offered sex to customers in the drive through lane if they would buy her a McDonald’s meal. Not only did this non-news item see the light of day in a once-great newspaper, it was shared more than 2,000 times on Facebook. Were readers moved by the level of her desperation for a meal, or did they just want to point fingers and smirk? These are sad times for our nation.

I extend my warmest welcome to all visitors to this blog, but I hope you are participating somewhere in an open conversation on some subject that matters. I hope you see your personal role in networking, communicating, providing feedback, and taking responsibility for connecting people and ideas. I hope you are encouraging people who take a stand, and that you declare your availability where it is appropriate.

As my dad used to say, the world is going to Hell in a handbasket. This is no time for silence.

Tell ‘em Emma sent you

Emma often thinks of the friends she left behind.

Emma Louise has been with us about five months now, and she has friends who are still living at Pawsitively Cats. I met Max last time I was there. The rumor is that they were an item for a while. I almost brought Max home with me. He is a sweet boy.

On my last visit to the shelter I delivered food that Emma bought with her allowance. She’s a frugal girl, and her needs are simple. “What do I need with rhinestone collars?” she told me. “I eat well, get brushed every day. What more can I ask for except that good people look after my friends?”

In the interest of her friends I want to add my encouragement to support your local animals. If you are in Tucson, Pawsitively Cats is a great choice. I’ve been there several times, and they are doing extraordinary work for cats. I was impressed, and I think you would be too.

They are having a wine tasting to encourage donations. Of course, you might bring some cat food with you too. Max will be grateful. This is the story:

We have a wine tasting fund raiser coming up this coming Sunday. Please join us! Pass the message to your friends too! Join us on Sunday, January 22nd from 4-6 p.m. at CataVinos Wine Shoppe, 3063 N. Alvernon Way. CataVinos is sponsoring a wine tasting to help raise money for Pawsitively Cats! $20 for six tastes of wine, with $10 going to the cats. Silent auction and raffle prize featured. We will be accepting donations of canned food and cat litter. Raise a glass for the cats!

I’m amazed at how much life force revealed itself in this little cat once she realized she was part of a family and could claim her space. If there is this much prana, or chi, or shakti, in this little creature, think how much untapped life force there is on the planet.

Meow.

Can the 99% find their mojo?

A street performer in Tucson's All Souls Procession suggests by his appearance the importance of honoring one's muse.

As we lament the decline of the United States by virtually all measures that matter, we would do well to ask ourselves why we take our beating instead of gathering up our mojo and taking charge of our destiny, both for ourselves and for the benefit of young people. The one percent, amazingly, have the upper hand, and they seem to me to be assured of keeping it.

One of my college text books caught my eye this morning, and I pulled it off the shelf. The book is Seeing Systems, and it is about the predictable effects that come from dividing people into classes. Barry Oshry shows us that even when people are play acting in a laboratory exercise, they forget who they were when they walked into the room and they shift into the behavior of the class of person they are assigned to play. His workshop exercise divides people into tops, middles, and bottoms. People surrender their identities in order to not be expelled from the group they are assigned to even when the people are real and the game is made up.

Bottoms are the folks in this scenario who interest me most. Oshry explains that bottoms lose respect for their own distinctiveness, or they begin to see it as a liability rather than an asset. They want to round their edges in an attempt to blend in with the crowd. He writes, “in the Bottom Space, differentiations that are not irreconcilable are experienced as such.” He adds, and this is the real juice of it, “Great power comes to us when we recognize and move past the illusion; and great destruction often follows when we do not.”

We the people are suffering from the sort of illusion he describes. I don’t know about you, but my Facebook news stream is full of posts from people saying, “Shouldn’t somebody do something about this?”

It’s not clear who that somebody might be. Play it safe, and the bottoms won’t expel you. Mr. Oshry tells us that even if the bottoms let you hang with them, you’re still living by their sucky standards.

Forwarding angst-laden messages via email and Facebook is not an act of social responsibility. It is not a form of participation in society. It is not an act of courage. It is nothing.

The one percent, or tops in Mr. Oshry’s simulation, know how the bottoms think and behave. That is why they win. If the bottoms want their mojo back they will have to stop acting like bottoms. They will have to be distinctive, edgy, confident, and proud of that which makes each individual unique. They also have to actually do something, not just post teary-eyed platitudes to Facebook and Twitter.

In the book Iron John, Robert Bly tells the story of a man who sought danger in order to fully express his nature. He ventured into a part of the forest from which men never returned in search of the Iron Man who lived in a swamp. As he approached the swamp a big hairy arm rose up out of the water, grabbed the man’s dog, and pulled him under. Instead of whining, the man calmly remarked, “This must be the place.”

That’s the spirit we need. Choose dangerous missions. Ignore advice from the villagers. Go to the part of the forest from which people seldom return.

Bear in mind that the tops have their own crazy rules, and once you are parachuted into their camp you act crazy too. That is why we cannot expect the one percent to voluntarily change their ways. They can’t do it. Only by declaring ourselves their equals can we have influence over them. We can’t see ourselves as equals if we are apologizing for our distinctive identities, talents, and gifts.

Can we rise to the challenge? History shows bottoms prefer a long and humiliating period of suffering and inactivity before sheer desperation drives them to claim their mojo. It would be good if you and I could help change that.