Updates

Dear readers,

I started this blog as a space to express my feelings at a time I was down and isolated. As I explored my passions through this blog I realized my interest in photography. After a while I wanted it to be more than a documentation of an ordinary human exploring an ordinary life. I wanted to document all the bird photos I have made, all the good shots, I became obsessed with quality and technicality of what I shared. This kind of attitude often left me frustrated. I also lost my voice and presence. Photos had become just photos with an identification of a species and few bits of information.

Truth is I do have a huge passion for photography. After finishing university with high grades in Psychology, I felt completely lost. I traveled for 9 months yet I did not share a lot of my journey here. I fell quiet and I fell into despair as I could not see where my passions and my life would meet. Moreover, after returning from my travel I worked at a coffee chain to pay off a small percentage of my student debt and to live. The routine did not leave me too much time for introspection and in a way I was grateful for that, for every time I was left to myself I would dig deep into the feeling of being lost.

I feel ready again to go back to the basics. To enjoy life and to share what moves me. To write and to feel. To simply do things without expectation for return. Without ambition. In two weeks I will quit the job and travel to see my family before starting at university to study social and political thought. I do not know if it’s the right path, but it is a path that does not offend my soul too much. It is better than taking no action at all.

This is an acknowledgement of my own struggles in the past two years and a promise that I will go back to finding beauty in life (meeting-soul).

“In spite of everything, I shall rise again; I will take up my pencil, which I have forsaken in my great discouragement, and I will go on with my drawing. – Vincent van Gogh

I will pick up my camera, I will sit with my thoughts. Thanks for being with me.

Love, Timali.

Lakeside Blues and Pinks

Pink blotched clear blue lake,

now turning a deep green,

Two mosquitoes circling each other

rise in the air

A creature jumps in

leaving ripples dancing

growing outward

to nothingness

Mink, muskrat or otter

does it matter?

Moments pass by

the geese are still making their calls

Ripples form again

as the breeze sweeps in

Bare trees still shaking off winter

double themselves on water

a deeper reflection

their skeletons the blackest of blacks

No pinks no blues no more;

hints of orange fade

between real and shadow.

Twin Souls

I was looking at trees out of a bus window one of the previous days and realized how two trees growing in the shade of each other often look like one tree, but with two trunks.

Here’s a love quote (partly relevant to the earlier thought):

“Love is a temporary madness. It erupts like an earthquake and then subsides. And when it subsides you have to make a decision. You have to work out whether your roots have become so entwined together that it is inconceivable that you should ever part. Because this is what love is. Love is not breathlessness, it is not excitement, it is not the promulgation of promises of eternal passion. That is just being “in love” which any of us can convince ourselves we are. Love itself is what is left over when being in love has burned away, and this is both an art and a fortunate accident. Your mother and I had it, we had roots that grew towards each other underground, and when all the pretty blossom had fallen from our branches we found that we were one tree and not two.”

― Louis de Bernières, Corelli’s Mandolin

Bat-tree (On waiting)

The hanged man – a bat – waits for his time.

When the world becomes dim,

and the rest fear the night,

the hanged man will set himself free.

“Everything I plan must wait, and

having to wait has made me old, and

the older I get, the more I wait, and everything

I’m waiting for has already been planned”

– JOYCE SUTPHEN