It's so easy to live in the moment when you're in the flow of things... when everything is falling into a blissful perfect place... when everything comes grinding to a halt and your left driving around in circles in a concrete jungle of urban sprawl... that's when the road is hard. So hard.

It's in the vacant and ebbing spaces of our reality that we're really and truly forced to face ourselves. It's in these spaces of nothingness that we find our loneliness, our ego, and our personal demons.

It's in this place that I am currently confronting purposelessness and fearful ideas of a film that is nothing while also being everything.

I find myself circling thinking about how I could be shooting so much more in Tucson.. while at the same time feeling that there's nothing that I really want to shoot. I don't see beauty in this world of urban sprawl and ubiquitous concrete. And maybe that's the challenge of this time.. to 'see' in a new way and to find the beauty in what to me is anything but beautiful. If I can overcome that way of seeing, perhaps I can find something truly worth sharing with others.

BE HERE NOW... is a great book by Ram Dass.. but it's also a message that resonates with me right now as well as with our broader times. To be here and capture the light of this place instead of longing towards the images of Mexico and the future. How so easily we get lost in the future, and in doing so, lose the present in all its discomfort, pleasure, pain, and even fundamental beauty.

So I'm going to shoot five rolls of still stock this weekend... one roll of 16mm, and a roll of med format... even if I think it's ugly out here.

Maybe that's why I have a such time with the work I aspire to do sometimes... since photography and film in the very nature of the decisive moment.. forces you into the present, and allows you to be nowhere else but now here.

peace,d