Photography

No person is your friend who demands your silence, or denies your right to grow.
http://mediawebmonster.com/FavoriteQuotes/EncouragingWords/
widget 365 Days of Encouraging words.

 Most puzzling to me is parents that in their own world demand that their children keep quiet about what happens.  Deny children truth and stunt their growth.  I remember writing a report in 8th grade that I wanted to be an interior designer.  I knew I would need home ec classes to do this.  I signed up for home ec instead of Biology.  As soon as my father found out he marched me down to school and changed my schedule.  He felt science is what I needed to be doing.  I was good at it.  I liked it.  But it wasn't the direction I wanted to grow.  I buckled down in school and worked hard in math and science just as my parents expected.  I married and quit school for a long time.   When I returned, I obediently went back into engineering.  I was very good but hated the classes.  I just felt so strongly I needed my degree in anything.  Over 10 years ago I applied for a job in the School of Art at the local university.  They needed a computer tech, I needed a job that I could get a discount while taking classes for me and my kids.  I figured it would be a great match.  They didn't want to know about computers and I didn't want to know about art.  Little did I know that this would be a life changing experience.  For the first time in my life, I interacted with people that not only allowed me to grow they actively encouraged it.  Imagine being required as part of my job to sit in on the Photography 101 class.  The first day the professor declared that Photography is science mixed with magic.  What a transformation this was for me.  It was during my second Photography 101 class (I hadn't registered for the first one so I didn't have credit,) that the teacher assigned us to do a self portrait using pictures representing who we were.  The assignment blew me away.  I took three rolls of black and white film.  One roll I had no idea where the pictures came from.  I knew I didn't share my camera but there were all these pictures that didn't seem to belong to me - yet they did.  Photography created the first dent in the shell I used to protect myself.  Photography some how breached the gap between me and my alters.  They liked using the camera too.  I took the 8x10 prints and formed them into a mobius strip.  For the next 10 years I worked with men and women that thrived on learning.  Pushing me to grow in ways I never dreamed possible.  They taught me that pre-visualization limited me to what I could think of.  Where as, taking the camera in hand and following its lead I could expand my world to things I never been too.  Photography became an integral part of becoming who I am today.  Photos in my book We Are One are all mine.  My use of the camera to liberate from the secret recesses of my mind my past forever altered me.  The photos also helped me to make connections and process information.  I held a photography show called Baseline that addressed my emotional reaction to having cancer.  Photography lets me explore the world in ways that I never knew existed.  I marvel at the delicate intricacies of tiny desert flowers, ooo and awe taking pictures of fireworks, chuckle when capturing grandkids at play, marvel at a beautiful world that was I always looked at but didn't see until I had a camera in my hand.  It is only fitting that photos would document my integration.  Joyfully photography still plays a major role in my life.