George Dewolfe: My second conversation.

 Photography  5 Responses »
Jul 052009
 


The way of things
As mentioned in a previous post, I was considering doing mentoring with George Dewolfe. I saw “was considering” because I am no longer considering it … I will be doing it at some time in the future. I just have to get the money together. I believe that it will be a worthwhile journey and fits in perfectly with my learning and belief system at this time. I don’t think that I could have found a better teacher, truly.

George’s mentoring is unusual, as compared to the classic way of thinking about teaching, but I certainly understand and agree with it. If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you know that I like to read and contemplate on The Tao Te Ching (pronounced dow de jing). Here is a small sampling of the books that I have read or am reading. This is important to explain George’s mentoring and why I think that it fits with me. The books:

  • Tao Te Ching: Derek Lin translation.
  • The Tao of Pooh. Benjamin Hoff – A great place to start off understanding Taoism
  • Chuang Tzu: Thomas Merton translation
  • Meditations in Tao: Osho
  • A New Earth: Eckhart Tolle
  • The Power of Now: Eckhart Tolle
  • A Thousand Names for Joy: Byron Katie

Those are just a few of the books. The Tao talks about the natural way of things, whatever it is. Flowing with life. A New Earth places a great emphasis on realizing the traps that the ego provides in our daily lives. If there were any one thing that all of these books have in common, it’s about removing masks and rolls that we’ve become associated with. Our thoughts about ‘who we are’. OK. That’s a enough book review.

Back to my conversation: George’s program involves working with a student to first find out how they see the world and how they organize things visually. Then, the real work begins. Over the next year, there is an attempt to help the student remove all of the layers of other people’s work that they’ve seen and get down to their true essence. To get down to showing the world as they truly see it, sans ego (story) about who they think they are or how they think things should be shown (unquestioned beliefe in thought = story = ego).

Without getting into specifics, because you should really contact him if you think that you might be interested, the year sounds supremely challenging and is will worth the price, in my opinion; however, it would not be for everyone. This mentoring will test you to question your very core, as do the above list of books. Many, many, many people are not ready to let go of those thoughts of who they believe themselves to be. This is called becoming conscious. Others will call it cult thinking, new age rubbish, etc. I started down that road about 3 or 4 years ago. George has been on his journey for greater than 20 years! I’ve a lot to learn.

He asked me where I wanted to go with my photography. My answer was: I don’t know. I’ll see when I get there. As I said my post about passion: Sometimes I come back with a photo, or photos, so sublime, I wonder if I took it. That doesn’t necessarily mean that it will be sublime to anyone else, but that I will recognize it as the work of ‘self’. That, I think, is a glimpse of my authentic self peeking through the layers. The idea here, is to be able to access that more often.

So, I will be working with him, but not immediately, though I want to. There are a number of things that we need to accomplish this summer with regards to helping our friends and, of course, Tony’s never-ending basketball. So now is not the time, but it is on the top of my list.

 Posted by at 08:35

SoFoBoMo:Somehow I finished

 Photography  13 Responses »
Jul 042009
 


Though it was not my intention to finish, somehow, I did. I started “a” project on May 10th, then quickly abandoned the idea. I started another and another and another. All were abandoned. The spirit wasn’t there. It was, and still is, knocked about by a number of outside influences, all family related. I continue to read and grow and trying to maintain some modicum of presence. We all have challenges on multiple fronts. My life is no different.

When I went to my niece’s graduation, I took time to visit my old neighborhood, schools, and surrounding areas. I had wanted to do a book about them for some time, yet, each time that I went there, I never took the time to do so. All of the photos were taken in the space of about 4 hours. During the past week, I have been assembling those photos into a book complete with my thoughts about growing up. I wanted a book containing text as well as photos, not just photos. Even when I uploaded it, I had no idea if I had even met the minimum number of photos, 35. I find that I had met it with 47.

This year, Scribus fought me all the way. It crashed a few times. As the book was getting longer, it was taking 5 to 10 minutes to load it and then was very sluggish. Later, I found that it was partially my fault. I had exported all of my images as TIFF files and they were each 69 MB. As a software developer, I can see holes in the design of Scribus. They try to load all pages into memory at once … this is what took so long! But, that is neither here nor there as they say. I finally got it done. I redid all of my pictures in JPEG, which made them much, much, smaller.

Anyway, here it is.

 Posted by at 10:47

Another tool for the bag

 Photography, Spirituality  10 Responses »
Jul 022009
 


Childhood memories

This weekend, as I walked around my former elementary school, McEbright Elementary, I was aware of a number of feelings. Feelings of nostalgia. Feelings of joy. Feelings of sadness for innocence lost. I wanted to keep these feelings alive because I thought that they would make a great project. Certainly, I didn’t want to slow down the process by writing. It’s too cumbersome.

I had been thinking of purchasing a digital recorder. So, I went to the only place that I was pretty sure would be open on Sunday morning, Walmart, and purchased a Sony 1 GB digital recorder for about $60 USD. It’s compact, very easy to use, and has a number of features to make organizing one’s thoughts fairly easy. You can organize your thoughts into folders: A, B, C, D, E.

After I made the purchase, I came back to the school, got back into the mood, walked around the playground, the building, and recorded my thoughts and memories. All through the rest of the morning, I simply pressed the record button to record any thoughts that I had. It’s a great way to take notes, etc. of those great, yet fleeting, ideas that you have along the way. I think that this will be my constant companion from now on.

When I returned, I sat down and, as I worked on my book and listened to the snippets that I had recorded. It was fantastic way to recapture those on-the-spot feelings that often soften and even disappear after a very short time.

The downside to this particular recorder, as well as other Sony recorders, is that it is a proprietary format and has only Windoze software available for it. There is no Mac equivalent that I have found. I did see a post on a forum of a work-around. Plug the output of the recorder into the Mac and record it directly to the machine. Yeah, it’s digital to analog to digital, but at least it will be captured on your computer. Also, I found in that same post that Olympus recorders are Mac friendly.

I can say that I would have bought an Olympus, if Walmart would have had them AND I would have known about the Sony Windoze-only issue. However, it’s not a show stopper. I’m glad that I bought it. However, I could have saved about $20 by getting a 512 MB model.

Another non-photography tool for the bag. I think that I’m now officially multimedia! :-)

 Posted by at 08:16

Summertime blues!

 Photography  5 Responses »
Jul 012009
 


It’s almost 6:00 PM and the temperature has cooled down to a chilly 91 degrees. :-) On my way home, about 4:00 PM, it was 101 degrees and quite sunny. As you can probably guess, I’m not so interested in going out and shooting in this weather. All thoughts of going to the beach, marshes, or anywhere quickly dissipate when I walk outside and am wrapped in the loving arms of 101 degrees and a good bit of humidity. I think: “Hmmm! Looks like a good day to do some more post processing!”.

While I was in Akron, OH this weekend, I did enjoy the 60 degree mornings and 80 degree days. It was quite pleasant. I took a number of photos, too. I took quite a few at my niece’s graduation as well as quite a few for a photo project that I’ve been wanting to do for a number of years. I started it last night!

I’ve started walking again. I reserve the mornings for that. It’s amazing how much better I feel through the day after a 45 minute walk in the morning. It’s slightly over 2 miles, but it is invigorating. So, I’ll have to figure out a time when I can go shooting. Perhaps on the weekend. Perhaps occasionally I’ll tough it out and brave the heat, but it seems as though my creative juices have trouble in that kind of weather, or perhaps they don’t … maybe the juices just boil away in the intense heat!

I’ve noticed that the natural June/July slowdown of blog postings is in full effect. Northern Hemisphere summer play time, I suppose.

 Posted by at 00:00
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