Making Your Unknown Known: Creative Angst, Grief, Nature, and Photography

Whether you succeed or not is irrelevant. There is no such thing.

Making your unknown known is the important thing.

~Georgia O'Keeffe

 

About a decade ago I went through several years of terrible writer's block and resulting writer's angst. I say terrible because it consumed me, and I moaned about it constantly to anyone who would listen, mostly my oldest daughter, herself an actual writer, when we explored the Seattle area together after she moved there. Cameras in each of our hands, we drove through neighborhoods and across floating bridges; we sat at our favorite coffee shops and walked our favorite parks, we took ferries and explored nearby islands. So many of those otherwise wonderful memories are infused with me going on and on about how I couldn't find my voice, didn't know if I had a voice, couldn't write to save my life.

Somehow, exactly how I don't remember, I eventually found my way back to the flow with words. I don't think it occurred to me to grieve the loss of words after having written daily for a year and a half before that, producing over three hundred pages of a story that felt vital to tell. One day a friend, also a writer, said bluntly, you just have to face the page, Debby. Every day. There's no way around it. And then I remembered Hemingway's famous quote about just writing one true thing, one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know. Again and again I came back to those two things: Face the page and write one true thing. To this day those two things are my constant, intrepid writing mantra. 

When I bought my new camera and my new Lensbaby lenses, when I signed up for an online photography course to help me find beauty in my immediate surroundings, when in my off the charts excitement I dove full-on into webinars and Instagram feeds and tutorials about using Lensbaby lenses, the last thing I expected was that these things would bring on a whole new round of artist angst; that in a few short days I would go from being excited and inspired to feeling less-than on good days, and like a dismal failure on all the other ones. 

In this new journey with this new camera and gear, I'm discovering so very much. I've discovered and fallen in love with a neglected and very shabby public garden in a neighboring town, and also a neglected and very shabby giant old rosebush in the heritage cemetery a block from where I live. I've discovered that as opposed to an iPhone, taking good photos with an actual camera is hard work. It requires muscles that I never really developed, even when I took photos with my previous "real" cameras. Actual muscles, for sure, always coming back home after shooting for a couple of hours stiff and sore, my body standing and bending and twisting in ways it is just not accustomed to. 

But other muscles as well. Like patience and discernment and tenacity; like slowing down and being more mindful; sitting and communing with the tree or blossom I am endeavoring to capture. And reminding myself to see. I mean truly to see the whole of what is in my viewfinder, both foreground and background, not merely the one particular thing or place that I am focused on. 

Once again, as in art, so in life. Wanting to see a fuller picture, longing to understand, I dive into angst, both literally and figuratively. I find that angst, a word that seems little more than a cliché these days, is real, and can be exquisitely painful. That dictionary dot com defines angst as anguish and then defines anguish as agony. The morning I read that I walk outside into the warm sun and without provocation the sweet birdsong impales me and suddenly I want only to keel over and sob, feeling the acute pain of frustration and disappointment, the wounding of the heartless self-criticism and judgment, the perceived unworthiness, the unfulfilled longings. In therapy we explore how so much of this is related to my past, and even more, we see and honor the one who yearns to give expression to all that is within, who craves wild creativity, who hungers to be worthy of this camera and the incredible elegance and grace in our world; to create beauty from beauty as she, as I, experience it.

Like facing the page in writing, each day I pick up my camera and I practice again and again, just like my therapist who tells me about learning to play the piano, her fingers dancing with the keys creating chords and scales and much loved melodies. At the same time, each day, I endeavor to take one true picture. Not in terms of success or failure, which for me anyway is anathema to my creativity--and also a habit that is really hard to break, living in the world that we do. One true picture would be capturing what I see and feel and perceive in the way that I see and feel and perceive it; moving beyond general aesthetic to personal aesthetic, to exploring less with ideas of right and wrong, and more with curiosity and openness, wonder and marvel; though mostly, simply, it is one that makes my heart skip a beat. 

Hours of insomnia bring confusion, deeper questions, and ultimately, more profound truths. Silent inquiries about angst and guilt and privilege. About suffering. Both big picture and closer to home, and about loss, both universal and intensely personal. About the way chronic illness has stripped one of my beloved daughters of everything that has ever brought meaning, pleasure, or joy to her life; how it has taken her very ability to care for herself, how she has lost not only her independence and autonomy, but her ability to function even remotely normally; and how it has altered my own life in huge and fundamental ways as well. 

When I seek to understand the artistic related angst I am experiencing and have experienced in the past, I see suddenly that I cannot do so in a vacuum. I can only do so understanding the role that underlying grief has played. Those years of pain about not being able to write were against the backdrop of the enduring grief over the ending of my marriage, the loss of my home and flower garden, my life as I had known it and thought it would continue to be. The same is true for the pain I am experiencing now with my photography; that it cannot be understood as separate from the grief I live with day in and day out, for our world, for humanity, for my daughter, for myself. 

Yesterday morning I left the house at sunrise. After weeks of focusing up close on flowers I craved a more wide-open expanse, the kind I can only get right now by driving into the nearby hills where I am surrounded by their vistas, their soft rolling curves, their massive oaks and native grasses--caught right now between winter green and summer gold--cradling bright orange poppies everywhere I turn. Turkey vultures circle high overhead, actual turkeys are mere feet from the side of the road in full amazing spectacular strut, sparrows dart in and out of wild rosemary bushes, and a single Anna's hummingbird perches on the vivid red-blossomed grevillea, just right there, right in front of me, at first blind to it, then shocked as I reached, with all the stealth I could manage, for my camera. 

There, away from the busy intersecting freeways, the noisy city streets, I breathe in the fresh young air of early morning. I don't so much hear the quiet as feel it, and even more, the vast, empty-yet-full stillness that is the mysterious and invisible texture of existence. I see instantly what my camera has given me. It's true gift. Not the resulting images, as satisfying or frustrating as they may be, as much as I may adore them, but the experience. Those moments, I see now, are the process part of the perennial process not product wisdom as it relates to all of life and in particular here to photography. 

Part of the reasons that justified the purchase of the cameras and lenses was that life was hard and I needed something to help. But they've given me so much more than I could have imagined. They've given me back early mornings, my favorite time of the day by far, and the natural world in that pristine time when she is just waking from her night of slumber. They have given me not just permission to leave the house--something my daughter is not able to do--but to give myself rest and respite, comfort, nurturance, and momentary amnesia; a time to sit, to walk, to breathe, to be, to let nature do her work massaging the jagged edges and soothing the breaking heart. And even more, bringing freedom and inspiration, and the life blood of creativity in the form of observing and recording nature, even when life is hard and uncertain and sorrowful, especially when life is hard and uncertain and sorrowful. My camera and gear help me to put my own mask on first; they help me attend to myself in order to be able to attend to those whom I love and that need me. And just as important, they keep me feeling the feelings, even when said feelings are anything but clear, even when they keep me mystified and on the hunt, even when they are unknown and simply longing to be known.