i am restless, as i usually am when i am working. in my work i am often exposed to humans and their humanity, and sometimes the weight of human emotion and often human suffering can be a heavy load to lift with my own psyche.
i go walking when i feel restless, i find a lot of peace in hitting the pavement in my blundstones, with my headphones on, because then i can just think and when i’m thinking, i can let things go.
in my walks, i often end up at the thrift shop – there’s one downtown that i love and i go there frequently. i like to visit the ladies there and say hello. i’ve written about this thrift shop before here and here and also here.
i love this shop. i love the piles of papers and cards and old books.
i find a stack of photographs tucked into an old book at the thrift shop. it is december and snowy outside. i am moody and listening to a pensive swedish hip-hop song about forgiveness.
the photographs are not dated. printed on fujicolor paper. there’s no indication of who took them or why – i don’t immediately recognize the locations, either. using google lens, i am able to place the photographs as a trip to california, nevada and arizona.
i am, of course, as i always am with the photography of others, fascinated. i begin to romanticize who may have taken these photos, what drove them to the desert? what called them there?
maybe it’s because i live in a desert myself, that i know this call of the heat, the dry, the dust, the coyotes shrieking to the sky, rattlesnakes sleeping on red rocks. i know this desire, the murky darkness and scorching heat.
as a canadian, i also know the fascination with the vastness and the loneliness of the united states and it’s american dream. i feel like, we have traces of it in canada as well, this loose sense of loneliness that pervades our iciness here in the great white north.
it’s a little romantic for me to find someone’s photographs like this, such an intimate look into the life and dreams of another, this anonymous other. they’re beautiful.
i love moments like this – just the briefest feeling of connection with another human in our shared humanity, in our shared little lives.
(if these photographs belong to you, let me know here if i can reunite you with them)
hospital vespers 