Balance of Ego and Vunrability

When I signed up for the photography class, I was kind of full of myself. I mean, I have published art photography and sold framed prints. I love my own work, I find it pleasing.

But I have never taken a class, barely understood the how to books I bought, and just rely on my instinct and auto setting. Finding and framing the moments.

I walked into class, the very basic beginning class at our local community college. First, there are students in the class that I am pretty sure have taken classes from me online. I'm on the other side of the fence now and it is really hard to readjust to being a student instead of in charge of the classroom dynamic. Second, there are professional photographers in the class. Actual professionals with successful businesses, mostly portrait and weddings. There are also students who have never used a camera other than their phone to take selfies and/or are semi literate (can't read or understand the syllabus, the class notes, or the assignments). I am too used to being the smartest person in the room and it is unsettling.

And necessary.

There are other times that I feel like an impostor. I've written about that before. That my lack of experience or credentials will reveal me to be a big faker. The thing is, over and over, I have faked it until it was real. At least, that's what it feels like. I was a city girl, in Target muck boots, pretending to farm- now I teach others farming ethics and techniques. I was a stumbling 1st year professor/grad student using a template syllabus and borrowed textbooks and assignments and ten years later I am a seasoned professor, creating my own lesson plans and creating new syllabus that others use.

I am taking the class because I love photography and need help learning the technologies involved. The math is really getting me. The vocabulary is confusing me. The technology is complicated. It feels very much like when I attempted fiber arts, but instead of my fingers fumbling, my mind is tangling up around the textbook concepts and camera settings.

Still, I am hanging in there. Dedicated and determined.

Here's a link to the work I am posting for the class (and some of my older work):
Danelle Stamps Flickr

Midnight Writing

I've said this before: everything seems more meaningful when done at midnight. Baking bread? Mundane. Baking bread at midnight? Magical. Writing poems? Meh. Writing poems at midnight- 3am? Brilliant and beat poetish. Cooking anything, making art, even just listening to the things outside are just simply more interesting in the middle of the night.

Except when one is battling coffee induced insomnia and it is one in the morning, then everything is just freaking annoying.

So, here is my Eat The Frog post for the morning.

This weekend Chad and I had a date night. We went to an antique shop and then had dinner with friends and played Cards Against Humanity. Whoa is that an interesting game.

 I am inspired. I really want something just like this to store my camera items next to my desk.

And this for the bedroom someday. Love the look.

Snacks while we chatted before dinner. Iowa cheese. Oh yum.

And this was a couple nights ago, but so beautiful. I ran to the car to get something and found this, pulled out my phone and captured it into my visual record of moments I have stood in awe. This is why people can believe in something greater than just the here and now, beauty like this overwhelms us.

I am still hanging in there, getting work done, preparing for the travel next month, and cleaning and grading and creating art. This is my life, the busy punctuated with moments of quiet grace.

Farmiversary and Reverse Bucket List Update

In 2010, just days before Isaac was born early I wrote this: The Reverse Bucket List. Someone, I don't even remember who, called me a failure. I was mad and sad and pregnant and huge and well, when I feel like that I write.




Today, I don't feel like that at all. Nope. I do feel like adding to it though.

First, the five things I wanted to add to my list in 2010:  

Things I would like to do:
1) swim in the Mediterranean
2) walk inside a building that is more than a 1000 years old
3) drink milk still warm from the cow
4) finish my novel(s) 
5) help someone else succeed at breastfeeding

Did all of those except #1. But I was pretty darn close. And #2? The building was probably only 800 years old, to be fair, but I say it counts.

1. Gave birth to a special needs baby, on my own terms, with a c/s that was how I wanted it to be. 
2. Fought to breastfeed and taught a doctor how to measure how many ounces a baby drinks from the breast by using a scale. Seriously. 
3. Learned how to audit my own hospital bills for errors. 
4. Learned how to shop around for better prices regarding hospital tests and labs. 
5. Learned how to ask for help.
6. Learned how to milk a cow and that Chad is better at it so it can be his job. Ha. 
7. Made cheese. Made a lot of cheese.
8. Explored caves. 
9. Started dying my hair purple again.
10. Tapped maple trees and made my own syrup.
11. Taught others how to tap and boil for syrup too.
12. Took a pottery class and made my own dishes.
13. Loaded pigs in a trailer, alone. 
14. Brought chickens to the butcher and helped in the initial kill. 
15. Returned to Chicago after a really long time.
16. Found her. She's not dead.
17. Applied and attended a writer's retreat in Georgia. 
18. Rode a bus cross country.
19. Assisted, alone and with the vet, pulling lambs from a ewe in labour distress.
20. Bottle fed lamb, calf, and piglets.
21. Published photography.
22. Published poems.
23. Published an essay. 
24. Got my passport.
25. Went to Europe. Took pictures.
26. Sang at Karaoke.
27. I wrote poetry again. 
28. I took myself seriously as an artist. 
29. I prayed at the Bone Chapel in Kutna Hora, Czech Republic. 
30. I rode a train across the countryside in a faraway country. 
31. I learned how to make tinctures and teas. 
32. I healed some more.
33. I cooked a pheasant.
34. Hosted a holiday meal at my home. 
35. Learned to kayak and row.
36. Built fence and rotated livestock.
37. Attended a wound that required actual first aid to stop the bleeding.
38. Learned to hula hoop.
39. Wrangled a loose calf.
40. Kept bees.
41. Rebuilt relationships, and nurtured other important ones.
42. Learned about Permaculture and shared it with others.
43. Made time for my art, and nurtured my own being again.
44. Helped a mama get donor milk for a baby in NICU.
45. Did the right thing even though it was really hard. 
46. Encouraged someone else to take their writing seriously too.
47. Got back on stage and read poetry aloud again after 16 years of being terrified to do so.
48. Learned how to cook lamb.
49. Bottled and started selling my secret spice mix.
50. Raised food for 60 other families in the last 5 years.
51. Stopped complaining about my toe. 
52. Grew my hair to my waist. 
53. Loved fiercely.
54. Walked on ice.
55. Brined olives (it takes two months and is kind of hard!)
56. Taught my son to walk. 
57. Started and admin several facebook groups that do a lot of good in the world. 
58. Read more books. 
59. Photographed a punk concert.
60. Ate Vegan food and didn't die. It was delicious actually! 
61. Learned to spin wool, even though I am terrible at it.
62. Sent that packet of poetry back in, revised. They didn't want it after all this time, but I got a personal response back and at least now I know. 
63. Didn't let rejection shut me down again.
64. Learned that most of the time, when people are being jerks, it's not actually my problem or about me. 
65. Learned how to apply eyeliner. 
66. Threw myself a birthday party. 
67. Joined a book club.
68. Made Crown Roast. 
69. Learned that I am my own worst anchor, let go of that chain.
70. Toured Jim William's mansion. 
71. Tracked wild pigs in Georgia. 
72. Watched turtle lay eggs and later watched the eggs hatch.
73. Drank Kumbacha. Yuck.
74. Rode a horse. 
75. Paid attention.

To do:

1. Go on a sail boat. 
2. Visit California. 
3. Write and Finish the fairy tale book I am working on.
4. Take a photography class. 
5. Set up my own website for my writing and art.
6. Go to Ireland and go fishing. 
7. Return to New York City and read poetry there.
8. Take pictures of mountain.
9. Play with my kids more. 
10. Learn to fly a plane.
11. Learn to drive the tractor.
12. See Lady Chablis perform live.
13. Write even more.
14. Love even harder.
15. Grow more food, feed more people

Here's to six years on the farm, a fantastic adventure, and a freaking awesome life.

"It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot

At Bonaventure Cemetery. Not anyone I actually know.

"It is never too late to be what you might have been." - George Eliot 

Part two of my photography bio. This is the hard part, the personal part.

My grandmother was a photographer. My mother's mother. She was good too. This was in an era of dark rooms, chemical developing, and actually knowing how to use the aperture on a film camera. She took amazing pictures- of her children, landscapes, of things happening.

My grandmother was also abusive to her children, enough that two of them danced on her grave when she died. Their memories of her photography are tainted by this abuse. To me she was a doting grandmother when I was a child and a sickly old woman with a temper and dementia when I was a teenager. She once grabbed me, by my neck, from across Thanksgiving dinner to accuse me of being a lesbian because I invited my female best friend to eat with us that holiday. I know she was mean and violent and I never doubted any of the stories told about her.

I know that she handed out a lot of pain to people in her lifetime. I have a difficult time sifting through all the memories of my family though because every single person was also a liar when it came to telling it to us as children.

For example: A drunken uncle once told us he had secret documents relating to the JFK assassination taped to the back of a picture at his house. Later he told us that our grandmother was the Babushka lady, the lady with the headscarf seen unflinchingly taking photos of the assassination and that no one has yet tracked down.

She was in Denver when John F. Kennedy was assassinated.

Another family member claimed that Melba was actually Princess Anastasia of Russia and showed us a hand typed autobiography that she had written about her escape to America.

She wasn't even born yet when the Tzar's family was killed.

It was all bullshit. Intertwined with accusations of child rape, drug abuse, and other illegal harms. We believed it all, as children often do. There are no dinosaur gizzard stones that the Smithsonian tried to buy. The Life magazine didn't steal anyone's negatives. My grandmother was not the elusive babushka photographer nor was she Anastasia.

So when one of my family members reminds me that my grandmother was a photographer too? That my work reminds them of her daring work? It is very much not a compliment. It is the worst insult they can think of in the moment, a sweet and subtle emotional stab wound to the heart. No one overhearing the conversation could know what horribleness that drips from such words, but I do.

I write poetry like my grandfather and photograph the world like my grandmother. I still have all my fingers though and I try really hard to be the end of abuse in a line of awful mothers, cherishing my children and being mindful of the power and cruelty of words as well as hands.

I am sure I take more after my aunt than I do any of the others in my family, not just because she is one of three people from that side that still talk to me. I hope I also take after my dad's side too, I know I look quite a lot like his grandmother Madeline. But how much of this inheritance actually matters? I am not them. I have my own life experiences that have shaped me, my own abuses, loves, and travels.

I am not them.

This is the anchor that holds me to the seafloor when pursuing photography as an art. Twisting and twining of seaweed and rusty chains, these associations are what hold me back- not just in art but in writing too. When I dredge up these family and childhood memories, they are not just mine and it picks at the wounds of everyone involved. I can only hope that they all understand that I tell my own history, tell my own stories, and that telling them sometimes keeps me up at night.

This is the photo bomb that I was thinking of yesterday. Legacy and letdown. The phoenix rising from the ashes of a dysfunctional history.

Can I take from this and create some new legacy without whitewashing the histories that brought us here? What is it that is said in writing?
“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.
-- Anne Lamott”

It isn't too late for me to be a photographer, a poet, a memoirist. It isn't too late for any of it.