Anyone following my posts for awhile know that I went to Pennsylvania this summer for a few weeks to do night photos in locations from my past. Since I returned to NC, where I now live, something shifted in my consciousness, sort of curtailing my obsessive shooting style, leaving me with more time on my hands, fewer images in my computer....not that I don't agree with the need to cut back the time behind a camera lens and get a life, but I found it kinda strange that about a month ago, I seemed called from within to San Francisco...another location that I lived for 6 years, back awhile ago.
My reason for making the trip was actually for another reason: to do a particular initiation with a spiritual master from India, on the weekend, up on a mountain top in Laytonville, 3+ miles north of SF. Figuring I was already all the way out there, I planned to stay with friends in the city for the following week.

Although the photographs I've chosen to show don't all have specific connections to the past experiences of living there, the trip did take me back into my past again. Specifically, the apple orchard...I stopped in Sebastopol to visit friends on the way back down to the city, and got lost....pulled into that orchard to call for directions again and spent time shooting photos. The next day, as I was leaving he said, "By the way, that orchard you went into was the same one we all picked apples in for the apple juice we bottled and sold at the farmers market"....being location and directionally challanged, plus many years later on top of that, it was quite a shock to have been deposited squarely into my past, with camera in tow. A few days later, standing infront of an apartment I lived in on Potrero hill, on a whim I knocked on the door, only to have the tenant open the door and invite me in to look around when I told her about visiting previous homes I've lived in. I shot a few frames inside, however it was daytime, and it doesn't count for my night series.

So, another part of my past came forward for scrutiny and enjoyment. I'm not sure what any of this means, if anything, but it was fun hanging out there, exploring places photographically I knew from before and others that were new.

I had an interesting conversation with a girl from San Francisco about whether the pursuit of perfection is good or bad.

She said that if you pursue perfection you can never be happy. She recommended pursuing excellence instead.

I argued that excellence consists of mastering what already exists and pursuing perfection consists of inventing things that don't exist.

Pefection is an ideal. And, as a gentlemen from Washington added, ideals can be appropriated.

I think that there is nothing wrong with not ever being satisfied. In fact I would argue that not being satisfied is a christian ideal. How can one be satisfied in this world that we live in? Still, I believe one can be happy and one can be content and one can live a life full of meaning.

But I just don't believe that it is possible unless one lives ones life in pursuit of an ideal and what better ideal than perfection which is merely another name for God.

Even if one can never actually become one's ideal, the process, the journey one takes in trying to get there will lead to a vigorous and full life, and will also take you higher than you can conceive of.

It will cause you to dream and then to pursue those dreams. It will cause you to create things that don't exist. Pursuing perfection is our attempt for our mind's to romp with God.

It is where all great art originates - right at the point where we abandon the emptiness of excellence and embrace the uncertainity of creation.