I had a lovely conversation the other day with my friend Adrianne Ryan, a horsewoman and photographer who lives on Martha’s Vineyard.  We were talking about work and she said, “Well, I am blessed to be obsessed.”

Me too.  Movement – finding it, growing it, blowing it open, turning it into something ineffable, inevitable and fierce is my obsession (one of them.)

It is work and it isn’t work.  The movement claims, re-shapes and hones me.  And then I want to share it – speak through it, connect with it.

Last year, during a creative residency, I became obsessed with editing and layering these photographs taken by Pam White (above) that have become a part of The Traveler, one of the dances in the LFRM trilogy. I wanted to evoke something about layering, overlay, what is there and not quite there in all of us.

Yesterday I listened to a wonderful Diane Rehm podcast with Buddhist priest, philosopher and writer Mathieu Ricard.  He was talking about his new book Altruism: The Power of Compassion to Change Yourself and the World.

Listening to him, I realized that my wanting to share and connect with the world through movement is a form of altruism.  Maybe earlier in my career it was about something else, something less generous.  But now it is about making a connection, about sharing the best of myself and reaching out to the best in you.  I felt that so clearly when I watched Kyle Abraham’s solos filmed by Carrie Schneider, that his vulnerability was a deep gift to us.  I was/am so deeply moved by that.

As artists, I think we have to aim higher than personal ambition, beyond what we know to reach that skyward, earthly part of ourselves that connects to the skyward, earthly place in each other.

Please help me share my work with you.

You can do that by making a donation to my

Indiegogo campaign.

Thank you!!

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I am a budding (pun intended) photographer, so it seemed just right to be out in the garden early this morning with my honey who is a Professional Photographer.  She has a 100 mm macro lens and I have a 30mm macro.  I am not sure of the difference, but I am pretty sure she will post her results here, and we can compare.  She was shooting with her Canon Mark V and I was using my lovely Sony A77.

It was strange to look up and out at the mountain coming out of the fog after focusing intently in and in for about an hour.  Looking in, I forgot there was out.  Maybe because there was so much big in the small, if you know what I mean.

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for sale:  “The Messenger”

This toned photograph has a story.  It is a picture of me as the character in my performance  piece, The Messenger.  The character appears in the film clip on the home page of my website.    We shot this photograph in Wellfleet at dawn about 20 years ago.  I still love it.

11 x 14 or 16 x 20 print with charcoal and pencil and text.

You can purchase by contacting me HERE, or with Paypal.

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for sale:  “Body Mine # 7”

Original framed photograph with charcoal and pencil and text.

This week’s price only   $97 plus shipping.

You can purchase by contacting me HERE, or with Paypal.

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for sale:  “Tintoretta”

Signed, limited edition print of a toned photograph by Pam White. 

This print from Highland Studios is 16 x 20 on acid free archival paper, and mounted on foam core, ready for framing.

Cost is $87 + $7 shipping.

Sale price (usually $2500) for the original one-of-a-kind framed photograph:  $1700.  (Price includes shipping.)

You can purchase by contacting me HERE, or with Paypal.

This print is available this week only.

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for sale:  “Shadow”

Signed, limited edition print of a toned photograph by Pam White. 

This print from Highland Studios is 16 x 20 on acid free archival paper, and mounted on foam core, ready for framing.

Cost is $150 + $7 shipping.

Original one-of-a-kind framed photograph:  $2000.  (Price includes shipping.)

You can purchase by contacting me HERE, or with Paypal.

This print is available this week only.

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Our friend Lynn Mordas is the owner of Dashing Star Farm, just about a mile down the road from us.  It is where we get the most delicious eggs in the world, in shades of blue that are almost green, an astonishing range of whites and light browns.  For the past couple weeks, I have been driving by the farm and pulling over to admire the lambs.  I love watching them bask and nurse and explore. When I decided it was time to photograph, I had a humbling lesson about shooting livestock.  I stopped by on the evening that shearing was about to happen, so the Moms and the lambs were separated and all in noisy distress.  No one was standing still for a bucolic shot.  Absolutely none of my chicken shots made the cut. . .

This photograph reminded me of something that I have been noticing lately:  how different an issue can seem depending upon which side of it you are looking at.  When I see something from the perspective of possibility, it has an entirely different look than if I am looking at it as a problem.   If I am worrying, the color and shape of things is very different from when I am appreciating.

I am also noticing a tendency this spring to see financial situations as immutable, unchangeable.  I realize that if I do not see money as a renewable resource, then it simply cannot be.  If I am focused on the outflow and not aligning myself with nourishing inflows, they cannot come! (Thank you Napoleon Hill).

When I realized that this was a fairly hardwired point of view, I was not happy.  Then I remembered my wonderful teacher, Linda Tellington-Jones, who when looking at an intractable problem with a horse, says, “Isn’t that interesting.”  And that interest opens the door to a solution – to engagement and possibility, rather than driving deeper into the problem.  And that certainly seems worth a try.

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This is Jules snoozing in the sun yesterday.  Jules is a BIG greyhound with a BIG intimidating bark.  He has a sweetness and a gentleness about him that is extraordinary, but he is fiercely protective. We love that about him.  No one is going to hear him and want to approach.

I have been writing a lot about the landscape of the body and the way that our bodies partake of and reflect the earth.  About learning to enter the landscape of our own bodies, to become cartographers of our own terrain.

I had to lie very flat and quiet to take this picture, and was so focused on not startling Jules that I did not even see the crest of Indian Mountain behind the curve of his ribs or the bristles of winter’s grass in the foreground and his whiskers behind.  I think that as I become a better photographer,  I will see more of those things, but for now, I like the happy accidents.

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(I apologize to the photographer, Marconi.  I cannot find a really good link to his work.  If any of you have one, please pass it along.)

I don’t usually include the work of other photographers in my blog.  It feels dishonest, a little like cheating.  But that is just an old tune in my head. When I find something this beautiful, it has to be shared.

Here is what I love about this photograph.  It is completely kinetic – when I look at it, I can feel the contours of the landscape in my body, can feel the breath and music of it so clearly through my terrain of skin, muscle and bone.

When I was just out of college, I took a dance improvisation workshop with the great choreographer Trisha Brown.  One of the things she asked us to do to create movement was to “read” the a wall in the studio with our movement, to translate what we saw into dance.  We all got busy dancing the basketball hoop, the windows, the bleachers, the sky beyond.  That experience kicked open a door to something that has always stayed with me – connecting what is outside with what is inside – finding that creative, generative impulse from everything around me.

I teach a workshop called Cookbook for the Bonehouse.  Here is a recipe for you:  Sometime today, maybe right now, stand up and face a direction you usually don’t.  Let your shoulders or your hips or your nose “read” (translate) whatever you are looking at into movement.  Do it again, but this time slow it way down.  Do it again fast.  What are you feeling?

Tell me about it!

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This photograph is one of a series that I took on one of my morning pajama outings to catch the light.  I love the negative space, and the filigree of carts and trees.

This year is the first that I have been taking pictures, and it has thrown me into a relishing and savoring mood about light.  In the past, winters were dark, period.  Camera in hand, I am a light hunter, a sun seeker, and discoverer of color everywhere.

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