Travels Chapter 10: Pluie Normandie

somedays,

 I miss so France so much my bones hurt,

it was softer there.

This day was strange, and happy.

It rained buckets,

but we laughed anyways.

Homesteads

 My sister owns a farm in the far north east
which I visited most recently,
oddly it was warm and misty despite being the middle of winter.
I read omens that this season would be mild and hushed,
but few have believed it beside myself.

That place was full of light, but it was hidden like pearls,
eclipsed in short days and oncoming nights.

Travels Chapter 9: Noir & Blanc

Je rêve de ce lieu.

Dans tout cela de chagrin et de tristesse, ce est encore un havre de lumière et de beauté.

(All black and white film, the first six from Bretagne,

the last from scattered corners throughout France)

Travels Chapter 8: Fading Pages

Seldom a place exists filled both with faraway lands

and familiar nooks, escapism aside homely comfort,

but a bookshop is one of them.

I've collected them since I was a child.

This rather lovely one left me dreaming there since.

 Found in the Grassmarket district of Edinburgh, Scotland.

Recollection & Unfolding

 Thus a New Year begins and another fades,
the last was trepidous and beautiful,
the next is certain to be all the more lovely.

Looking back at the collection film photographs I've taken over years,
I am reminded amidst all changes that my rapture for
analog photography has only become more fervant.
It has taken me across the world and back time and again,
immortalizing all sorts of untidy souls, and bits of life,
and now eyes turn forward
 to what it might wield in the future.
Onwards into the great unknown, and another year of expression.

Winter Runes

I have no eyes for a harrow, colorless winter.
I see only a deep and faded kaleidoscope,
 a sleeping season.

(film soaked in tea)

Travels Chapter 7: Here Lies the Circle of Stones

This day was warm and rainy.

 I had a general idea of where I was headed,

what I was looking for

but no mapped route to follow, only the word of some passerbys.

That's how most of that corner of the world came to be for me,

how I ended up there, and how I left it.

I followed a lane a few miles past stony and inviting homes,

upwards through pastures.

English trees tend to reach for each other,

and in doing so create alluring passageways to follow everywhere.

Reaching a plateau in the altitude, I sauntered into a clearing,

and found a holy place.

The earth was sown with mist and silence here.

Stones nestled in a corridor between mountains,

asleep for centuries,

humming within my hands as I traced them

 alone beneath a full moon.

(kodak ektar)