Week 18 — Marvelous

Week 18/52

Oh well. I guess this was channeling every person who's ever done a levitation shot. Which means... everyone.

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I like female writers, when they're serious. I like Virginia Woolf, I like the Brontë sisters, I like 20th century writers, who transformed the way people see women, going from pretty-pieces-of-furniture-slash-sexual-toys to full on, thinking human beings. I am immensely grateful to all of them. But there's one who seems to get to me in a very particular way: Anaïs Nin. I read the compilation of her diaries ('Henry and June') for the first time when I was 15. It was life changing, as is everything at that age, but it's one of the books I keep in my nightstand. So when i read this quote of hers, earlier this week, I knew I had to work my photo of the week around it:

“I am an excitable person who only understands life lyrically, musically, in whom feelings are much stronger as reason. I am so thirsty for the marvelous that only the marvelous has power over me. Anything I can not transform into something marvelous, I let go. Reality doesn’t impress me.”

I'm constantly told, in my life, that I can't just do the things I like, that I have to do everything, because that's life and life is hard and yadda yadda. I know. I recognize and accept that kind of thinking, that kind of paradigm. But the truth is, if it doesn't make me smile in wonder, if it doesn't make my heart flutter with emotion, then I probably won't care much about what happens. And this is what the shot is about.

I spent most of my week writing, which gives me an immense sense of freedom, but also drains me. Writing takes so much more out of me than photography does. But the truth is, it makes me feel alive. Photography makes me feel alive through physical pain, through adrenaline, through putting myself in danger to get a cool shot; writing does that to me simply by pulling on my heart strings and allowing my fingers to run through the keyboard, through taking me by the hand and showing me that it could be like this and not like that. The muse was kind this week, and she lead me wisely through both fiction and photography.

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