One year

One year ago today, on Sep. 22, 2017, I flew to Nice, France, to attend Karen Hutton's "Artistic Voice Retreat".  I really didn't know what to expect, other than a lot of sheer awe-someness from Karen, because she embodies Awe-someness in every way.  After speaking with her only once by phone prior to this, and general online group giddiness and excitement from the other attendees of the retreat, and the fact that we were meeting in the Frickin' French Riviera, I held no expectations that I would have my entire life changed in the next few days.

Although I had a sense that this had some potential, it didn't really have that appearance that in 10 days or so, I would see photography, my life, the world, completely differently.  I hadn't yet started to meditate, I was still working full time for someone else, helping them get richer while I got more stressed and a lot less closer to rich, and I had precious little self-esteem, not having had much in the way of a date for a few years.  So, ya, thinkin' pretty small, and not very big at all.

As my flight left Montreal and flew through the evening sky towards the Atlantic on the typical red-eye west-to-east ocean crossing, I looked out the window of the plane.  Still don't know why, but I pulled out my brand-spanking new Samsung Note 8 (as in, 2 days old), and snapped this shot.  Actually, at that point, a lot of my photography was shooting straight from the hip (often literally - camera from that viewpoint even), and very intuitive, very reactive. Not always, but often.  And those are the shots I often cherish for myself, because they capture how I was feeling at the time, more than being a photograph, it's a snapshot of the world through my eyes at that moment, i.e. a snapshot of me without my face being in it.

Anyway, by the end of the week, this shot was on my cell phone as wallpaper, because it came to encapsulate so much of what I learned and experienced that week.  Even now, a year later, I remember a great deal about that week, the sights, sounds, sensations, smells, feel of the air, taste of the wine.  Maybe not in explicit detail, but yes, I remember the warmth of the sand and the smell of the salty air. 

And I remember that this shot became so symbolic because by the end of the week, I felt that I had risen that much higher than my life before, that I saw the world from a very different perspective than usual, that the sky was bluer, the clouds wispier and cleaner, and I had new hope that when I landed, I would be starting a brand new journey.  And now, after one year of planning and preparation, the journey is beginning.