Drift Woods

Richard Long (the inspiration for this project), an artist who walks to create and/or inspire his art, says, "I consider my landscape sculptures [to] inhabit the rich territory between two ideological positions, namely that of making 'monuments' or conversely, of 'leaving only footprints'." Richard Long documents his walks in numerous ways, sometimes creating sculptures out of the materials he finds, sometimes simply documenting with photographs or text. I have always been one to "leave only footprints" myself and so I felt that in drifting, at least this first time around, I would simply follow my feet and watch where they went. I was interested in capturing (my) feet-in-place-and-time throughout a journey, showing movement, progression, and pattern. The ground and its textures and little details that we walk over also intrigue me since I feel those things are often overlooked in normal passing.

So I went drifting through the woods at the Ecological Preserve on Livingston Campus on Monday, around and after noon. Sometimes there was a trail and sometimes there was not. I cannot tell you where I went precisely, but perhaps my feet can...

"we make the road by walking"

Still Searching

these two people struck me as each in a time out of time, stopping in their own lives to wait for someone else's to arrive so as to continue on together

the moon.... so i got to wondering, isn't any picture time out of time and place out of place? in the act of taking a picture, aren't you creating a heterotopia?

the small glass place

it's all just numbers

Place and Time Out Of

I felt I could see into other places. And you never know about time...

through my porch steps

operator?

rained

traveling places in a moving box of space while lost in our own worlds of music and minds

why, come in or out

under and over

T-shirt Week

mapping our week on a t-shirt...

What I carry with me.

I don't have things so I feel kind of empty... I am missing my notebook for my poems that feel like an extension of me, of my thought, as they are and as a process. But I don't like to feel attached to things, to objects and this is always creating some kind of inner conflict in me. I like to think of myself as non-materialistic, though I'm fairly sure that's not possible for anyone in this kind of Western consumerist context/world/life, maybe not for anyone, except maybe for Buddhas. In theory, they can just be and earthly things don't matter. I would like to just be. Without my notebook and without all my things. Camping is good for that, as a start. I want to give everything away sometimes. So I purge. And then later I often regret. Where did that box full of lovely little paper scraps go? Recycled and on to a new life, I guess, I should feel happy... or at least content or apathetic. Maybe they have become someone's newspaper or seven-years-in-the-making book. I can't stand the popular "news". All that sensationalism and bias and more sensationalism about death and disasters and sex. What a wonderful world. Sorry for the cynicism. Which brings me back to why I'd like someday to be more like a Buddha, more at peace with the way things are. To let things go and to be so understanding and wise. And I try, but how much can I really get beyond the world as I see it, or my mother's stress and judgment. I am her child, after all. I do love her, after all. If it weren't for her I wouldn't be here (after all). And by here I mean alive, and I mean in college so comfortably, and I mean thinking the way I do and speaking in the same tones. We sound so similar on the phone that my Pop-pop talked for ten minutes with my mother last week thinking it was me, before she realized what was going on and gave him a surprise. Maybe it was just his hearing aids. Asumption and expectation can do a number on our perceptions too. Hard to say sometimes. Old age does funny things. Meanwhile, I keep collecting things. Like fortunes from fortune cookies and yogi tea bags. I like to hold onto them, then give them to my friends or leave them on tables and benches for strangers to find. I would like to find more surprises myself. More un- and extra-ordinary little tidbits to wake thought and shake us out of our daydreams we wrap around us so tightly. I like to look at how many names there are in the sidewalk when I walk. Zoe. Dave. The Speeedster. Michael. JM loves KV. Jimmy. They were put there to be noticed, after all.