Interesting Connections

I love the way these two images looked together.  It is part of my find on the work I'm doing for the exhibit on Spirituality in Nashville.

Yesterday I was exploring and shooting at the Congregation Micah.  I had  the whole temple and grounds to myself.  It was so peaceful.  The openness & receptiveness of the place was in itself spiritual.  I so appreciate the respect, the trust and the welcoming that was extended.  I do not want to work too hard in this project.  I want to glide through the process.  I feel I'd be defeating the purpose if I turn this into to a job.  So I don't even carry lights.  I don't even want to use a tripod.  Impressionistic then it will be. "Focus is over rated." (Henri Cartier Bresson). It is about experience for me, this process.  I am letting go of the results.  

As the sun was setting and I had pretty much finished shooting at the Temple I was standing quietly at the window looking out over the fields and a buck lopes by towards the woods.  His rack looked like a Menorah. ( I've never noticed the similarities before.  But I'm not Jewish and so my mind isn't conditioned that way.)  It was magical; a special moment.  It was just me and him.

I love the feeling I have in spaces.  Just below my diaphragm and deep in  my gut I get a flutter of excitement when I am in a world alone yet comfortable.  Nothing else compares to this feeling.   It is the place of a place that is magical to me.  As a child I'd sneak into people's homes when they were gone.  I was as young as 4 too.  Amazing that I had the desire to do it so early.   I still try to get into empty schools, abandon buildings, vacated homes.  I love going to open houses and estate sales too.  Not so much to see the house but to see the evidence of its history. The chipped paint, the dirty door knobs, the hooks in the walls all tell a story.  

I've been shooting the homes around my neighborhood that are empty.   I live in an area where the older owners are dying and leaving them in different stages of disrepair.  The homes are either torn down or moved or repaired.  Much of the time they're left abandoned for extended times.  It is part of saying goodbye to this part of my life b/c it is the neighborhood I grew up in as well. It all seems to be falling together in someway.   My mother's home, my childhood home being sold, my aging mother, the shift of the neighborhood, the search of peace and spirituality in my hometown all seems to be connected.