On the last day of this unusual year I spent its brightest hour taking some self-portraits. My hope was that a few would convey the way I am whole, healthy, happy, at ease, and intensely alive at this time in my life. My camera did not let me down, and neither did whatever it is that photos capture. The condition of the soul, some say. Or the way the one taking the pictures regards the one in the photographs.
Twenty-twenty has been my year of awakenings. That this all-consuming emergence has occured in the context of all-encompassing emergency is both ironic and not (itself a neat contradiction).
What do I mean by emergence? The releasing of resistance. To what is. To imperfection (perfection redefined, as I see it). To unguarded curiosity. To movement, change, connection, loss, and risk. Yes, to other people. To the reality of everything outside my skin and to the truth of everything inside it. To yes and no, especially when either is pretending to be something it isn’t. Not to mediocrity, but to the fact of it around me. Not to evil or to harm, but to the acceptance that evil and harm occur—around me, in me, through me. To forgiveness—yes, that old favorite. To courage—yes, that old banality.
Uncomfortable, exhausting, boring stuff, if it’s not what you need. But if it is—then it is life at its peak. Pleasure of the highest order, undiluted pain, irrefutable awareness. A nowhere-to-hide kind of presence.
Of course to stay present can be a challenge for me because I’m confusingly great at so many illusions of presence: analyzing things at the atomic level, manifesting apparent directness, maintaining the house in a state of playful gleam. So yes, there is skin on fire, sometimes, or temples exploding, and now and again that old lead weight behind the right brow ridge that may or may not be a migraine. But sooner or later I keep rediscovering this cool new urge to just be and to see what gets happened.
My road map has been my body, a source of wisdom previously often out of reach and always hard to decipher. The tools I’ve used to decode the messages have included osteopathic medicine, the dance-based movement practice known as Gaga, breath work, voice work, face yoga, and learning to play guitar. I have learned that accessing my reserves of energy and good sense requires nothing more and nothing less than relaxing every part of my body that isn’t keeping me engaged in the present. A simple plan, really. Allowing the breath to just happen is essential—and great practice for allowing most other things to just happen, which just might be the secret to it all.
I exit 2020 grateful for 366 days of deep connection to life itself—and to the people who fill my life with their wisdom and care. I look forward to more high-stakes being, moving, breathing, and loving in 2021.
All photos taken by the author on December 31, 2020, with the Fujifilm X-T20 and the Fujinon 35mm f/1.4 using the in-camera 10 second delay (because rigging the app that enables use of the phone as a remote controller elicits some high-grade resistance in this writer’s body).