Recent Photos.

Some photos that I’ve shot recently that I’ve been pleased with for a variety of reasons — texture, leading lines, perspective, flashwork (of all things):               ©Philip Hussong Photography 

On living…from Annie Dillard

From Annie Dillard’s most recent novel, The Maytrees, a proposed theory on life by the female character Deary: 

[Deary] “You see,” she said to Lou, “as soon as you arrive, you start hurting yourself. You burn this fingertip. Later you cut yourself — right there, on the side. Paper cut in the webbing, and years later, another beside where it healed…Another time you bang a knuckle, and maybe twenty years later you pinch its other side. With each injury you learn how that patch of you feels. It wakens. Until it heals, you’re aware of those nerves.” 

 

[Lou] “This is a privlege?”

 

[Deary] “Of  course. Every place you injure adds that patch to your consciousness. You grow more alive. And the point of all of this is,” she beamed up from the sand at Lou, “that when you have hurt every single place on your body, you die! Once you have felt every last nerve ending, at least on your skin, then you have lived in full awareness. Then you die.”

An open letter to a longtime companion…

My Dearest Darling Seething,

 

Please don’t think your visits have not been memorable. You came around a great deal when I was younger, like a friend or cousin with a measure of influence who helps you believe in a grander self. An assured self. A right and righteous self. An attractive self. A bold self. You would visit me when I felt my most alone. When parents or brother or friends did not receive me, could not hear or understand me, you were there. You accepted me, embraced me, and conspired with me. 

You understood me when my mind was resolute. You knew I was right and told me so and would not let me relent until we won our campaign. When Rejection danced above like a champion boxer after a victorious bout, you were in my corner dressing my wounds, applying your stinging salve.

Certainly there have been times where you would stay away, sometimes for a good year or two. Where moderate successes and status quo kept me calm and docile and safe from new adventures or dares. 

But you — you managed always to surprise me when I thought I had fallen in love. Yes, when I was sure I spotted love and put my admiration all into that one spot, one person, one woman. And when that woman in herself, out of her self in selfishness or disinterest did not love me in kind, to meet me on time, or to meet me in my obsession, you were there, faithfully, whispering all the while, “This cannot be any other devil but that demon Love, and you are right that it should madden you.”  

Do you recall when you would dress up for fun as Infatuation or Impatience, excited to shed your disguise later on, so you could reveal your old, blind, angry and commiserative self?  You took nicknames sometimes, other names like Jealousy or Stubbornness. 

We have spent a great deal of quality time together. You always stayed with me as long as it took to see me through my hurt. 

And again you visited recently, as my instinctually assertive plan to leave my job in the promise of something better starts to feel a bit miserable. And as new hopes have seemingly arisen and shattered, it has been you who have bent down with me to try and piece together the remains.

But though we have been together for so long, and you have seen me through much of life, it seems now when you come around you are like a friend I don’t care to know any longer. You make yourself at home, often without me inviting you. You never consider that I have life to get on with, new efforts to try. You want to come by and relive all of our old times, those memories where we sulked outside the fence, locked out of places that we believed to be our destiny. You long to again and again reminisce about those failed missions, all the while keeping me from the new mercy at hand.

Well I think it’s safe to say, I don’t want you here any longer. You have grown unwelcome to me, along with all of your dramatic angling and your pomp, your fatalistic religious tenets, your superstitions and conspiracies.  I know you. You’ll protest and say, “I and all the cursing I bring are for you. I am only offering cheers in my support,” you’ll say. But that’s a lie, a lie to conceal that there is One for me, who has been and always will work to love the bitterness out of me. To love down selfishness and misguidance, refining out their ugliness.

So this is why I want to say goodbye, dear Seething. I know it won’t be forever. I will turn down hall after hall in this life, and at least at times perceive them to be walks of rejection, or isolation, or worthlessness. I will be pushed back into the corners in rooms of fear and doubt. But when you appear to offer your support, I pray now our meeting to only be a moment of short passing, like when faintly familiar childhood acquaintances brush by on the street and memory squints for a moment in effort to recollect but can scarcely conjure a reason as to why.

With all the love afforded me,

 

Philip    

snow.

 

 Driving around in yet another dump of that crazy white stuff, Steve Seel of The Current was putting together a rotation of his favorite ’snow’ songs. He played this song from The Innocence Mission I had never heard. It was so beautiful, and the lyrics stunned me. I don’t know if they can be easily divorced from the music and that angel voice of Karen Peris, and still retain the impact but here they are:

 

 

If I go out in the morning snow 

In my pajamas and my winter coat 

And take from the house our darker thoughts, 

And take away the memory of loss, 

And if I drop them into the snow 

Will we never find them anymore? 

 

To see him, to see him…happy. 

To see him, to see him…happy. 

 

In the same field where we have stood 

To see your brother fly away in spring 

In a light blue and silver plane, 

Now the snow has covered everything. 

I think we will be made clean like the snow. 

I think we will become new like the snow. 

 

To see him, to see him…happy. 

To see him, to see him… happy. 

 

Some winters are harder than others. 

We are going to take our cameras 

And look through at black trees with empty arms 

And sled tracks wandering, as we are. 

 

To see him, to see him…happy. 

To see him, to see him…happy. 

 

 

 

That’s all.