in the brazen volume of the things i too often watch and hear through screens it can be hard to still hear the voice. the one that only whispers and flickers out quick.
for the most part i listen to that voice, and when life is in alignment the listening is continuous. instead of a struggle, things come easy~ fit into place.
have a tendency to hold onto things until they seem utterly unusable. there’s a practicality and a joy of watching a camera, or a chainsaw or a bedsheet go through various stages, from the dopamine brand-new cellophane stage through the years of taken-for-granted usefulness to the broken, stained, duct-taped together endgame. and even then, an item is never truly useless. the bedsheet becomes a dishrag, the camera a playback deck, the chainsaw a junkyard of parts.
edited the short film above a couple years back when the voice inside was saying not to buy a new camera- even though the focus no longer worked on wide-shots.
so i listened to the voice awhile longer and kept the old battleaxe going, the one that’s filmed on farms and homesteads for close to twenty years, been dropped on the flatbed of a pickup truck in california, slid off the top of a tripod plate next to the oldest burr oak in ohio and been oft-repaired in a camera repair shop near providence.
this past summer in a moment of impatience disguised as necessity, i stopped listening to the voice and bought a new camera. immediately, things went wrong. the shiny viewfinder would go black intermittently while recording. it refused to work in manual. sent it back to be repaired, and in the meanwhile used old reliable. when the new camera returned months later it soon began to produce horizontal artifacts in images during low light, and the colors are muted and sterile. and it was yet another lesson: this is what happens when we don’t listen, when we force things.
so here’s to minimizing the distractions, here’s to living our life in alignment with what matters~ here’s to listening.
best thoughts,
graham
