Up in the pristine mountains, nature achieves its own balance. Snakes, lizards, bees and trees coexist, each living and helping each other. Spider webs abound. The catch of the day could be seen between their entanglements, as sunlight shines through their tenuous threads. Their sheer beauty, intricacy, and simplicity fascinate me. I stand humbly between the towering trees in awe of nature's order, chaos, and magnificence. All is love. All is beauty. Simply perfect.

In the darkness of night, the head and tail lights from fast moving cars on the freeway become paint brushes as they create enchanting designs. The sense of time and space captured in the photographs reveal the uniqueness of each moment.

are you near or far
between sunrise and twilight
police sirens blasting
sobbing mourners nearby

did i hear right
is it true
that you are not here
how quickly you passed by

how could you leave her behind
how could you leave without a good-bye
i cry for her
i cry for me

what's it like to live
what's it like to be left behind
how did i die
and survive

Recently, my digital camera broke. I've carried it on me ever since I received it as a gift many years ago. It has served as an extension of my vision and memory. Sometimes I see through my photographs, the view finder, more than I see in real life. That's the problem. I use to say I am doing it for art. But all of that is just BS. My camera prevented me from truly living each and every moment. I relied on my photographs to help me remember. My camera was my crutch. Not until it broke did I realize the ways it kept me from experiencing life to its fullest.

Initially, I felt terribly lost without my camera ... just pure anguish. How will I remember? What if I don't remember? So what? Since then I've realized that it is all about what I can capture and retain in my own mind. I rely more on my memory now. Each moment is made more precious without my glass eye. There's no other physical or digital record of it.

I spend a little longer with each person. I listen more closely. I hear the emotion in someone's voice and not just the words. I observe and notice minute details, the way someone smiles, the wrinkles forming around the person's eyes. I paint my own mental portrait of the person during the encounter. I live and reflect more deeply. Life is calmer. By not imposing the responsibility to document life on myself, I indulge in it more fully. It is about the here and now. Being present. Being. Living.

Life is ephemeral. Beauty is ephemeral. Why hold on? Letting go is beautiful. Living, loving, aging, dying - the whole process is beautiful.

I've been interested in free association and the ways perception affects conception. Using random photographs from my personal library and the sortable feature from Thomas Fuchs' Scriptaculous library and modifications to Greg Neustaetter's lists, I've assembled a sortable photo collage. Does the order in which the images appear affect our conception? Do we weave different stories in our minds based on the order and size of the images? Does the subject of the set of images change as they are rearranged? Drag the images to reorder them and see for yourself.

---

What would we do without the commercialized holidays? Just as Thanksgiving was approaching, I started seeing Christmas merchandise and hearing jingles all around me - at the supermarket, drug store, and mall. Our lives and activities revolve around the scheduled holidays. Most people follow the created traditions of the holidays. We spend more than we should and could afford, usually buying unwanted and inappropriate gifts. I love gifts. Nonetheless, I see the impulse to spend unnecessarily during the holidays, just because we have been programmed to over the years by billions of marketing dollars. We have become slaves to our possessions. Often, we give of things, rather than from the heart.

Christmas isn't here yet, but it is fast approaching. On my walk, I saw Christmas lights being thrown out. It was unexpected. I don't usually see that until after the holidays, when it's uncool to still hang the lights on our windows and dead trees. The sadder sight for me would be to see the tossed out, dried-up Christmas trees. Every year they laid on the ground by the curb like corpses awaiting the garbage truck. They are the saddest sight. Why do we sacrifice living trees for our amusement? What does it all mean anyway?

Button-down blue jeans with frayed cuffs laid on the pavement haphazardly as though someone had just taken them off. Their casualness took on a strange beauty. They didn't seem to be belong to anyone anymore, yet they were the perfect pair of jeans. I could have owned them. They looked worn and comfortable. I thought to myself, "Who just took off these jeans?" I could still sense the body that wore them. The previous owner's height and proportions were revealed in their size and cut. They were lovely.

No matter what language the message was written in, the danger of cancer from smoking came through on the used cigarette package. Walking around the neighborhood, I was struck by the amount of cigarette buds that littered the pavement. Like grafitti artists, smokers left their marks everywhere they lit up.

Living in sunny Santa Monica, the beach beckons me every day. I spend most of my free time laying on the warm sand and staring up at the clear, blue sky ... thinking absolutely nothing. How beautiful to just be.

When I awoke this morning, I could feel the air getting cooler and the sky getting gloomier. Summer is slipping away, but I will continue seeking out my inner peace. I will continue heading towards the deep sea. The closer I get to the water, the closer I am to that calm. As the waves crash against the shore, they wash away my worries and turmoil. I get lost in the rhythm of the undulating waves. I feel small. I feel insignificant. I feel the need to continue the fight.

I have a fascination for birds, especially crows. On a recent walk through my neighborhood, I noticed a crow sitting on a powerline. It was very still but attentive. As I pointed my camera at it, it started keeping tabs on me.

Its behavior confirmed my thought that photography is invasive. In trying to capture a moment, I have altered it. Beauty is. If I try to hold on to it too much, I will destroy it. The lone crow serves as a reminder of that for me. There's no photograph that could properly convey what I felt at that moment or how the crow reacted to me. Our awareness of each other and that shared moment in time and space can only exist in our minds. In learning to live in the moment, I am free.