Nov. 9, 2025
The Blur Sharpens
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abstraction helps us grasp the real thing.
it’s been a minute.
the last time I released an episode was in May-
right in the midst of the loss and grief that swallowed me for a while.
this is not a grand re-entrance, just a stumbling ramble back into this unending conversation of what it means to see in real time.
In this episode I talk about the moment I finally opened my nostalgia now photographic journaling ritual again after the longest hiatus I ever took from it.
Through it I rediscover how the blur and abstraction, instead of taking me away from reality, actually pull me closer to it.
every photograph doesn't have to be about what’s gone,
it gets to be a correspondence with what’s still here.
I share what it’s been like to feel creative again after loss
and to find the side doors back into presence when the front one feels jammed.
this is me re-entering into this space- blurry eyed and awake.
subscribe on substack for the visual version of this episode.
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I am Bianca, Liam, Mora, and this has helped me see.
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I started this podcast because I kept realizing how much of life I was moving through without actually seeing it.
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Like really seeing it, even though I was paying attention to all of it as a photographic artist, a mother, a hoarder of memories I am committed to seeing.
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I have been since I was a kid, but I could never quite shake this weird, slippery feeling that the photograph is not the point, even though we're taught to worship them as proof, but proof of what? In the midst of deep grief, I looked to my photos for comfort in the way I was trained to, and realized that it was never about the photographs.
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It was about the impulse to take them.
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They weren't souvenirs from life gone.
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They were living, breathing, embodiments of the moments I was most alive.
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They weren't frozen time.
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They were the melting of boundaries between time and space, feeling and vision the most here I ever am.
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They weren't remembrance.
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They were revelation.
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A way to be in conversation with the past, but in the now only ever.
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Now, this podcast isn't lessons or best practices.
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I'm not interested in telling you how to take better or more meaningful photographs.
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I'm here to show you how every picture you've already taken is a world of realization in and of itself to show you how your cell phone photos are more important than the ones you paid the professional for.
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How you are answering your life's biggest questions in every picture you unconsciously take.
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This is part reflection, part confession, moments from my own life where seeing becomes a way of understanding and where I work that out in real time.
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Our photographic practice is our deeply personal conversation with truth, how we see what shapes that seeing and how it keeps changing as we do.
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It's not really about photography.
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It's about philosophy of attention.
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It's about letting how we see the world show us who we are.
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If you're someone who's yearning to see what's right in front of you before it disappears, you're in the right place.
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Let's dive in.
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Hello, hello and welcome.
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To another episode of, help Me See.
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Whew.
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It has been a long time.
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Uh, I actually had a look and see when last time I record an episode was, and I released one on May 6th.
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Um, this year has been hard.
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I had a pregnancy loss and, uh, grief and overwhelm and.
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Disorientation just took me out and it's just taken some time to feel again.
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No, not feel again, but feel life, life force again in the way that.
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Feels authentic and wanting to share in this way.
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I apologize if you hear elephants stomping around upstairs.
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Um, but that's my life.
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That's my kids running around being really bad at playing hide and go seek.
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There's, I don't sidebar.
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This summer we got them a slip and slide and they were just so naturally bad at it, and I don't remember that being a thing when we were kids.
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I don't know, maybe it's, I dunno.
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Maybe that's just me getting old.
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I.
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But even with hide and go seek, like they just are such bad hiders.
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Like they'll, they'll be in the same room in the corner and say, I'm ready, and I'm upstairs, and like I open my eyes.
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I'm like, you're right in front of me.
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Okay.
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Anyway.
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Um, so I don't really think that there's a point in trying to catch you up on mm-hmm.
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Um, much, it feels too overwhelming to do that, and I think thinking about it in that way has stopped me from recording this sooner.
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I, I guess I just wanna roll back into our conversation here by sharing that.
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Um, I created a new nostalgia now template, which if you're new here, Nossal Janelle is.
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Traditionally a monthly photographic journaling, um, ritual really, and.
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It's the thing that had for years kept me tethered to an in sync with like, the flow of my life and feeling really connected to myself and what was going on.
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And, um, you know, I, I really feel that the things that we know help us the most become the things that we retreat from in the times where we need it most.
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And I had gone a really good amount of time.
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Without doing this journaling.
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And it was the, actually the first really long stint not doing it since I started.
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And that was like, what, three years ago or so? Um, and so the first time actually I was voice noting with a dear, a dear friend, like.
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Client slash actually more so dear friend who I love so much, and she ever so lovingly was like, Hmm, sounds like you should probably do it.
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Nostalgia now template.
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Even if you do one that's old, just redo it.
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Oh my gosh, she's right.
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And even then it took me weeks, no, probably months longer to, um, to actually do it.
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And then I did it in a cafe, um, before a therapy appointment and just had this like full body goosebump, like coming back to life, like, oh yes, of course.
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Uh, and it felt really good.
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And, um, yeah, so I'm gonna share both.
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So that original one that I didn't get to share because I was more so focused on like reintegrating and feeling into that.
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Um, and now I created another one today.
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So I'll be sharing both, uh, on my substack.
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If you are not subscribed to Substack, um, you can do so, uh, either as a free or paid subscriber.
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that's kind of the home base for, you know, visual versions of podcast episodes that I create.
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Um.
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Uh, picture portals, which is kind of like free writing slash poetry paired with photographs and, um, this photographic guided photographic journaling practice ritual.
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So, you can find that there.
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But I'm just gonna share a little bit about my experience with this month's template.
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I'm just gonna read just a little blurp of journaling that I did from one of the templates.
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When I was looking and reflecting on the images that came to me and that I used on the template.
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The sentence abstraction helps us grasp.
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The real thing we were seeing came to me.
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Um, I noticed that in the images I was looking at that I chose for this particular template, they were all either super blurry or.
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Like a indirect image of something, like a silhouette or something that I had, taken and then completely repurposed, for a post, months afterwards.
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And witnessing the fluidity of that and witnessing, how specifically when I'm looking.
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I'm taking a picture, sometimes I will purposely blur 'cause it feels like I'm seeing more of what I'm seeing when it's blurred in the same way that like if you taste something really delicious, you'll instinctively like close your eyes to taste it more.
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Um, that's kind of the sense that I gravitate to when I'm dealing with stepping into photographic consciousness and photographic consciousness is I.
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Basically a fancy term for being awake through the lens of picturing life.
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And through that lens being brought closer to it, it's just, it's so crazy.
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I, I sometimes when I'm talking, I get in my head and I feel like, oh my gosh, you're making it so much worse and more confusing the more you speak.
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But I can't, I can't help it because it's just so interesting how this abstraction and the barrier that can be the camera.
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Is the thing that pulls us closer to the real thing that we're responding to when we're looking at these photographs.
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Um, but I'll, I'll pause from that.
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Right now I'm also, I guess I went from this huge famine of just being zoned out and.
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Paralyzed from creating, even though I was still taking pictures, but paralyzed and creating in this way to now.
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Um, I don't know.
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The floodgates feel open.
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I, um, I felt really breathless with sadness when the due date, uh, came and went thinking about what would have been, or what could have been, and, um.
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I just feel very compelled to use, um, sorry.
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I feel really compelled to birth something, so I am.
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Um.
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Birthing these templates again, and I am, uh, working on, basically, a rebirth of my original course.
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Manifest Your Memories, which is all about redefining your, photographic practice.
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And it's the same idea, but it's deepening into.
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What the philosophy of what that really meant, which was diving into photographic consciousness, and that is ob obviously coloring.
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What I'm seeing as I look back on the pictures I've taken each month and and doing this practice again.
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I also wrote, seeing them all together in this way makes me proud of what I see.
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It reminds me that the gnawing feeling that creeps up on me, whispering that I'm not doing enough, whispering that I'm not seeing the point of my life or that I'm missing something.
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Devastatingly important.
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It is wrong.
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Every unconscious act of taking.
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A picture is a split second of becoming conscious to my life, and in this ritual of reflection, I anchor in the trust of my present moment and the trust in myself to see it and to hold it gently with tingling hands and gloriously blurry eyes.
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Um, abstraction can seem like a barrier to specificity, but it can also be a way in, it can be the side door we need to take when the front door is locked and tangled with thought.
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Sometimes when I wake up to something that is important, a feeling and insight, a revelation, I lean in.
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I try harder.
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I clench my fist to keep it.
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But what if I relax and sit back? I don't need to see sharper or try harder.
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If I allow my gaze to gently unfocus, I can see beyond.
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If my body melts instead of clinches, I can be beyond the gripping and into the living.
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So what this looks like in real life.
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I envision is when I notice that gripping, when I notice that furrow brow, which is why I have this, these fucking 11 lines in my forehead, my constant resting, worried face.
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What if I just remembered to breathe and to like, melt, melt my muscles, melt my face, melt my posture, bring my shoulders down from my ears, and just be with whatever it is, however it is.
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What if I close my eyes to see even more? What if I ask myself, where's the side door here when I'm trying too hard? And what does softer look like? So these are all just free writing insights that came from.
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Looking at the photographs I took of my last month, like literally scrolling through them and picking a few based on the prompts that I have in this template.
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And then just free writing.
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I really can't overemphasize how.
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Looking at the photos you've already taken in a way that feels like correspondence instead of lamenting instead of.
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Oh, it's gone instead of through this lens of grief.
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Not that there's anything wrong with grief, but through this lens of what do you have to say to me? I took this picture in a largely unconscious like autopilot way.
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Through all of the beliefs and thoughts and experiences of my life.
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I saw this and I pressed a button.
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What is this picture saying to me? What if this picture was a stranger? Can I look at it with the new eyes that I have right now? Can I instead of.
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Being a passive reflection or a prompt to me further shaming myself and thinking I should have been more present at the time, or whatever it is.
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When the things that we can do, when we look at old photographs or critique how we look, or some other dumb shit like that.
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What if we.
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Neutralize and witness what if we feel through that raw.
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Connection of what it feels like to see now and let the experience be a conversation, a back and forth.
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One of the pictures that I used, um, was a picture when I was in my bedroom, and my partner and my sons and my dog were in the backyard playing football.
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And I said I was trying to freeze time, but instead I was warmed to life.
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I was trying to recharge, get space from the noise and the needs, and I looked out my window and swelled with love for the scene.
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This is now, now, now, but I saw the memory.
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I felt the ping of my future self seeing this as if for the first time my sons have scruffy beards and families of their own.
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I focused on the screen.
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To blur them more.
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They look like a painting.
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I felt like I was painting them with love with my eyes.
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In another picture.
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I have a super closeup I took of my son's hair.
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It was a crop in from a larger frame where he was s smelling flowers.
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It was a super abstract crop of just blurry hair.
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When I get that close, it becomes blurry and abstract, which makes it more difficult to see clearly, which then makes it easier to see.
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Clearly.
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The blur of his hair brought forth the sensation of how I breathe in his hair.
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He was breathing in a flower in the full image, but this blurry picture of his hair helps me breathe more.
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I don't know if it's mind numbingly boring to hear.
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My reflections on the, my personal nostalgia now template.
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Um, I'm like reading this and all of a sudden I'm like, is this like when someone's telling you about their dream and you're like, oh my God, kill me.
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What part of, but part of me is like, well, depends on the person.
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Sometimes I'm interested in the dream regardless.
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Um.
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Yeah, it just felt right to share a little bit of where I'm at, to kinda get back in the flow of meeting you here in the space that feels, that feels very familiar and new at the same time.
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In the previous month.
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Nostalgia now that I'll also share separately.
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Something that I uncovered, which I've actually been recognizing as I move through, therapy.
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I've started with, a therapist that specializes in internal family systems and recognizing the different parts of us, and I've realized how uncomfortable I am with fragmentation.
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And how I feel.
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I always want everything I love and care about, and that's important to me.
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I wanna, I wanna see it at all times.
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It's like, if, if everything was a piece of paper I'd be surrounded by, it's pretty much what happens to me in my office fucking wreck.
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It's like I don't wanna put it away.
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'cause if I don't see it, I might forget it.
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And of course that's like probably my A DHD, um, certainly a DHD.
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Tendencies, but I, I have noticed that in trying to grasp this feeling of wholeness, I.
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I have looked past the whole of me and have overemphasized only a few specific parts that are the most familiar, the parts that I feel most beholden to and enmeshed with from my whole life, and.
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In the seeing that in the not trying to fix that in the, I will look, I will look towards you.
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I will not squint my eyes and look away in the looking at it.
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The softening heart and not what the fuck is wrong with me, that I'm still in this place, that I still feel like this and that everything begins to melt into like the innocence of this little girl that.
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Sees everything with such love and for a really long time, such fear and, um, the putting together different parts like the fragmentation, the fragmented photographs that are seemingly disparate into one template and seeing them all together.
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It begins a way to visualize, huh? They can all coexist.
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They're all a constellation.
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They're all in me and I can swap out a gajillion photos in each one.
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It never has to.
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As much as I love anyone photo, it's never the most important part.
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It is the whole that happens like through their interconnectedness that creates the experience of life and when we can get used to this feeling of fluidity, when we can release this over control of, I must make it look like this or I must reinforce.
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The identity that I'm used to, we can expand and open our eyes to so much more possibility and so much more of our lives.
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So yeah, the, uh, the grid that I.
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That I created for the September template.
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Touched on different parts, three different parts of me.
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And what do those conceptually look like and what do pictures of giving it, what it needs look like? Like if this is the part.
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What's a picture of what it would look like to give it what it needs? Some of the journaling that came out during this, this one was the intensity I feel doesn't have to be taken away or surrendered to softening, allowing lightness, allowing the nuance of gray creates the bridge to allow it to be held and touched.
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I think for so long I wasn't allowing black and white to touch.
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Lightness allows me to move with it.
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In the template, one of the most important pictures I took was this.
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Basically like a light burst.
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And I wrote the, I didn't know what I was doing when I took the picture.
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I still can't really even see what exactly it was, but I remember when I took it that it felt right to take it and.
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I didn't know if it would come out or not, but it didn't matter.
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And now it becomes the image that affirms everything.
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I didn't know I already knew.
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It became a metaphor for everything right now.
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So the invitation here is the idea that you feel this impulse to take a picture and I go look up.
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And for a split second, I think.
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This is probably not going to turn out.
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So I jumped from impulse of like, oh, I, uh, like, mm, and then after the mm was, oh, picture, like I want to picture very, very close after the impulse.
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And then I look up and then.
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The programming me, the conditioning, the the per, the one, the self that knows how to do this and how this works.
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I'm using a lot of air quotes, um, said, oh, that probably is not gonna come out.
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That's not gonna come out.
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It's too far.
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Da da da da da.
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Like, whatever I knew and then I did it.
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I pressed the button anyway because it didn't fucking matter if the picture came out well or not.
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It's this like physiological honoring of, huh? Experience.
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Huh? Here it is.
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I'm touched by something.
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Ugh.
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And then we get to see what happens.
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And the picture is the byproduct of life erupting from you meeting life and whether or not that byproduct is.
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What you expected or not expected, or something you like or don't like, or what, whatever that is, that's an a whole nother conversation.
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So now this picture that quote unquote didn't come out very well, quote, quote, quote unquote, my bunny fingers are like freaking out right now.
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Um, it becomes a symbol.
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It becomes a, oh, I honored my impulse and I took this photo, and now it's this abstract burst of light out of darkness, and I love it.
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Okay, well, I'm gonna stop here.
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I'm happy to be back with you.
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If you want to join the conversation, be sure to subscribe on Substack because you'll be getting visual versions of.
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Podcast episodes, whenever they come out through that.
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You'll hear when I'm done with my new project on photographic consciousness, and just be there for the journey and all my ramblings.
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Thank you for being here, and I will see you next time.
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I am Bianca, Liam, Mora, and this has helped me see.
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I started this podcast because I kept realizing how much of life I was moving through without actually seeing it.
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Like really seeing it, even though I was paying attention to all of it as a photographic artist, a mother, a hoarder of memories I am committed to seeing.
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I have been since I was a kid, but I could never quite shake this weird, slippery feeling that the photograph is not the point, even though we're taught to worship them as proof, but proof of what? In the midst of deep grief, I looked to my photos for comfort in the way I was trained to, and realized that it was never about the photographs.
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It was about the impulse to take them.
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They weren't souvenirs from life gone.
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They were living, breathing, embodiments of the moments I was most alive.
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They weren't frozen time.
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They were the melting of boundaries between time and space, feeling and vision the most here I ever am.
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They weren't remembrance.
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They were revelation.
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A way to be in conversation with the past, but in the now only ever.
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Now, this podcast isn't lessons or best practices.
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I'm not interested in telling you how to take better or more meaningful photographs.
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I'm here to show you how every picture you've already taken is a world of realization in and of itself to show you how your cell phone photos are more important than the ones you paid the professional for.
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How you are answering your life's biggest questions in every picture you unconsciously take.
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This is part reflection, part confession, moments from my own life where seeing becomes a way of understanding and where I work that out in real time.
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Our photographic practice is our deeply personal conversation with truth, how we see what shapes that seeing and how it keeps changing as we do.
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It's not really about photography.
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It's about philosophy of attention.
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It's about letting how we see the world show us who we are.
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If you're someone who's yearning to see what's right in front of you before it disappears, you're in the right place.
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Let's dive in.
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Hello, hello and welcome.
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To another episode of, help Me See.
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Whew.
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It has been a long time.
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Uh, I actually had a look and see when last time I record an episode was, and I released one on May 6th.
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Um, this year has been hard.
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I had a pregnancy loss and, uh, grief and overwhelm and.
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Disorientation just took me out and it's just taken some time to feel again.
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No, not feel again, but feel life, life force again in the way that.
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Feels authentic and wanting to share in this way.
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I apologize if you hear elephants stomping around upstairs.
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Um, but that's my life.
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That's my kids running around being really bad at playing hide and go seek.
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There's, I don't sidebar.
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This summer we got them a slip and slide and they were just so naturally bad at it, and I don't remember that being a thing when we were kids.
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I don't know, maybe it's, I dunno.
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Maybe that's just me getting old.
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I.
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But even with hide and go seek, like they just are such bad hiders.
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Like they'll, they'll be in the same room in the corner and say, I'm ready, and I'm upstairs, and like I open my eyes.
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I'm like, you're right in front of me.
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Okay.
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Anyway.
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Um, so I don't really think that there's a point in trying to catch you up on mm-hmm.
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Um, much, it feels too overwhelming to do that, and I think thinking about it in that way has stopped me from recording this sooner.
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I, I guess I just wanna roll back into our conversation here by sharing that.
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Um, I created a new nostalgia now template, which if you're new here, Nossal Janelle is.
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Traditionally a monthly photographic journaling, um, ritual really, and.
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It's the thing that had for years kept me tethered to an in sync with like, the flow of my life and feeling really connected to myself and what was going on.
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And, um, you know, I, I really feel that the things that we know help us the most become the things that we retreat from in the times where we need it most.
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And I had gone a really good amount of time.
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Without doing this journaling.
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And it was the, actually the first really long stint not doing it since I started.
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And that was like, what, three years ago or so? Um, and so the first time actually I was voice noting with a dear, a dear friend, like.
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Client slash actually more so dear friend who I love so much, and she ever so lovingly was like, Hmm, sounds like you should probably do it.
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Nostalgia now template.
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Even if you do one that's old, just redo it.
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Oh my gosh, she's right.
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And even then it took me weeks, no, probably months longer to, um, to actually do it.
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And then I did it in a cafe, um, before a therapy appointment and just had this like full body goosebump, like coming back to life, like, oh yes, of course.
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Uh, and it felt really good.
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And, um, yeah, so I'm gonna share both.
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So that original one that I didn't get to share because I was more so focused on like reintegrating and feeling into that.
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Um, and now I created another one today.
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So I'll be sharing both, uh, on my substack.
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If you are not subscribed to Substack, um, you can do so, uh, either as a free or paid subscriber.
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that's kind of the home base for, you know, visual versions of podcast episodes that I create.
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Um.
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Uh, picture portals, which is kind of like free writing slash poetry paired with photographs and, um, this photographic guided photographic journaling practice ritual.
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So, you can find that there.
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But I'm just gonna share a little bit about my experience with this month's template.
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I'm just gonna read just a little blurp of journaling that I did from one of the templates.
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When I was looking and reflecting on the images that came to me and that I used on the template.
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The sentence abstraction helps us grasp.
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The real thing we were seeing came to me.
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Um, I noticed that in the images I was looking at that I chose for this particular template, they were all either super blurry or.
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Like a indirect image of something, like a silhouette or something that I had, taken and then completely repurposed, for a post, months afterwards.
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And witnessing the fluidity of that and witnessing, how specifically when I'm looking.
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I'm taking a picture, sometimes I will purposely blur 'cause it feels like I'm seeing more of what I'm seeing when it's blurred in the same way that like if you taste something really delicious, you'll instinctively like close your eyes to taste it more.
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Um, that's kind of the sense that I gravitate to when I'm dealing with stepping into photographic consciousness and photographic consciousness is I.
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Basically a fancy term for being awake through the lens of picturing life.
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And through that lens being brought closer to it, it's just, it's so crazy.
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I, I sometimes when I'm talking, I get in my head and I feel like, oh my gosh, you're making it so much worse and more confusing the more you speak.
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But I can't, I can't help it because it's just so interesting how this abstraction and the barrier that can be the camera.
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Is the thing that pulls us closer to the real thing that we're responding to when we're looking at these photographs.
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Um, but I'll, I'll pause from that.
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Right now I'm also, I guess I went from this huge famine of just being zoned out and.
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Paralyzed from creating, even though I was still taking pictures, but paralyzed and creating in this way to now.
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Um, I don't know.
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The floodgates feel open.
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I, um, I felt really breathless with sadness when the due date, uh, came and went thinking about what would have been, or what could have been, and, um.
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I just feel very compelled to use, um, sorry.
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I feel really compelled to birth something, so I am.
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Um.
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Birthing these templates again, and I am, uh, working on, basically, a rebirth of my original course.
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Manifest Your Memories, which is all about redefining your, photographic practice.
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And it's the same idea, but it's deepening into.
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What the philosophy of what that really meant, which was diving into photographic consciousness, and that is ob obviously coloring.
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What I'm seeing as I look back on the pictures I've taken each month and and doing this practice again.
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I also wrote, seeing them all together in this way makes me proud of what I see.
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It reminds me that the gnawing feeling that creeps up on me, whispering that I'm not doing enough, whispering that I'm not seeing the point of my life or that I'm missing something.
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Devastatingly important.
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It is wrong.
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Every unconscious act of taking.
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A picture is a split second of becoming conscious to my life, and in this ritual of reflection, I anchor in the trust of my present moment and the trust in myself to see it and to hold it gently with tingling hands and gloriously blurry eyes.
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Um, abstraction can seem like a barrier to specificity, but it can also be a way in, it can be the side door we need to take when the front door is locked and tangled with thought.
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Sometimes when I wake up to something that is important, a feeling and insight, a revelation, I lean in.
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I try harder.
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I clench my fist to keep it.
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But what if I relax and sit back? I don't need to see sharper or try harder.
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If I allow my gaze to gently unfocus, I can see beyond.
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If my body melts instead of clinches, I can be beyond the gripping and into the living.
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So what this looks like in real life.
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I envision is when I notice that gripping, when I notice that furrow brow, which is why I have this, these fucking 11 lines in my forehead, my constant resting, worried face.
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What if I just remembered to breathe and to like, melt, melt my muscles, melt my face, melt my posture, bring my shoulders down from my ears, and just be with whatever it is, however it is.
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What if I close my eyes to see even more? What if I ask myself, where's the side door here when I'm trying too hard? And what does softer look like? So these are all just free writing insights that came from.
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Looking at the photographs I took of my last month, like literally scrolling through them and picking a few based on the prompts that I have in this template.
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And then just free writing.
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I really can't overemphasize how.
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Looking at the photos you've already taken in a way that feels like correspondence instead of lamenting instead of.
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Oh, it's gone instead of through this lens of grief.
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Not that there's anything wrong with grief, but through this lens of what do you have to say to me? I took this picture in a largely unconscious like autopilot way.
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Through all of the beliefs and thoughts and experiences of my life.
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I saw this and I pressed a button.
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What is this picture saying to me? What if this picture was a stranger? Can I look at it with the new eyes that I have right now? Can I instead of.
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Being a passive reflection or a prompt to me further shaming myself and thinking I should have been more present at the time, or whatever it is.
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When the things that we can do, when we look at old photographs or critique how we look, or some other dumb shit like that.
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What if we.
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Neutralize and witness what if we feel through that raw.
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Connection of what it feels like to see now and let the experience be a conversation, a back and forth.
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One of the pictures that I used, um, was a picture when I was in my bedroom, and my partner and my sons and my dog were in the backyard playing football.
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And I said I was trying to freeze time, but instead I was warmed to life.
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I was trying to recharge, get space from the noise and the needs, and I looked out my window and swelled with love for the scene.
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This is now, now, now, but I saw the memory.
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I felt the ping of my future self seeing this as if for the first time my sons have scruffy beards and families of their own.
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I focused on the screen.
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To blur them more.
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They look like a painting.
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I felt like I was painting them with love with my eyes.
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In another picture.
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I have a super closeup I took of my son's hair.
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It was a crop in from a larger frame where he was s smelling flowers.
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It was a super abstract crop of just blurry hair.
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When I get that close, it becomes blurry and abstract, which makes it more difficult to see clearly, which then makes it easier to see.
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Clearly.
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The blur of his hair brought forth the sensation of how I breathe in his hair.
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He was breathing in a flower in the full image, but this blurry picture of his hair helps me breathe more.
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I don't know if it's mind numbingly boring to hear.
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My reflections on the, my personal nostalgia now template.
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Um, I'm like reading this and all of a sudden I'm like, is this like when someone's telling you about their dream and you're like, oh my God, kill me.
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What part of, but part of me is like, well, depends on the person.
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Sometimes I'm interested in the dream regardless.
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Um.
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Yeah, it just felt right to share a little bit of where I'm at, to kinda get back in the flow of meeting you here in the space that feels, that feels very familiar and new at the same time.
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In the previous month.
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Nostalgia now that I'll also share separately.
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Something that I uncovered, which I've actually been recognizing as I move through, therapy.
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I've started with, a therapist that specializes in internal family systems and recognizing the different parts of us, and I've realized how uncomfortable I am with fragmentation.
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And how I feel.
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I always want everything I love and care about, and that's important to me.
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I wanna, I wanna see it at all times.
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It's like, if, if everything was a piece of paper I'd be surrounded by, it's pretty much what happens to me in my office fucking wreck.
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It's like I don't wanna put it away.
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'cause if I don't see it, I might forget it.
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And of course that's like probably my A DHD, um, certainly a DHD.
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Tendencies, but I, I have noticed that in trying to grasp this feeling of wholeness, I.
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I have looked past the whole of me and have overemphasized only a few specific parts that are the most familiar, the parts that I feel most beholden to and enmeshed with from my whole life, and.
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In the seeing that in the not trying to fix that in the, I will look, I will look towards you.
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I will not squint my eyes and look away in the looking at it.
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The softening heart and not what the fuck is wrong with me, that I'm still in this place, that I still feel like this and that everything begins to melt into like the innocence of this little girl that.
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Sees everything with such love and for a really long time, such fear and, um, the putting together different parts like the fragmentation, the fragmented photographs that are seemingly disparate into one template and seeing them all together.
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It begins a way to visualize, huh? They can all coexist.
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They're all a constellation.
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They're all in me and I can swap out a gajillion photos in each one.
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It never has to.
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As much as I love anyone photo, it's never the most important part.
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It is the whole that happens like through their interconnectedness that creates the experience of life and when we can get used to this feeling of fluidity, when we can release this over control of, I must make it look like this or I must reinforce.
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The identity that I'm used to, we can expand and open our eyes to so much more possibility and so much more of our lives.
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So yeah, the, uh, the grid that I.
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That I created for the September template.
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Touched on different parts, three different parts of me.
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And what do those conceptually look like and what do pictures of giving it, what it needs look like? Like if this is the part.
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What's a picture of what it would look like to give it what it needs? Some of the journaling that came out during this, this one was the intensity I feel doesn't have to be taken away or surrendered to softening, allowing lightness, allowing the nuance of gray creates the bridge to allow it to be held and touched.
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I think for so long I wasn't allowing black and white to touch.
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Lightness allows me to move with it.
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In the template, one of the most important pictures I took was this.
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Basically like a light burst.
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And I wrote the, I didn't know what I was doing when I took the picture.
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I still can't really even see what exactly it was, but I remember when I took it that it felt right to take it and.
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I didn't know if it would come out or not, but it didn't matter.
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And now it becomes the image that affirms everything.
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I didn't know I already knew.
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It became a metaphor for everything right now.
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So the invitation here is the idea that you feel this impulse to take a picture and I go look up.
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And for a split second, I think.
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This is probably not going to turn out.
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So I jumped from impulse of like, oh, I, uh, like, mm, and then after the mm was, oh, picture, like I want to picture very, very close after the impulse.
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And then I look up and then.
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The programming me, the conditioning, the the per, the one, the self that knows how to do this and how this works.
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I'm using a lot of air quotes, um, said, oh, that probably is not gonna come out.
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That's not gonna come out.
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It's too far.
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Da da da da da.
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Like, whatever I knew and then I did it.
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I pressed the button anyway because it didn't fucking matter if the picture came out well or not.
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It's this like physiological honoring of, huh? Experience.
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Huh? Here it is.
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I'm touched by something.
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Ugh.
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And then we get to see what happens.
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And the picture is the byproduct of life erupting from you meeting life and whether or not that byproduct is.
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What you expected or not expected, or something you like or don't like, or what, whatever that is, that's an a whole nother conversation.
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So now this picture that quote unquote didn't come out very well, quote, quote, quote unquote, my bunny fingers are like freaking out right now.
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Um, it becomes a symbol.
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It becomes a, oh, I honored my impulse and I took this photo, and now it's this abstract burst of light out of darkness, and I love it.
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Okay, well, I'm gonna stop here.
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I'm happy to be back with you.
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If you want to join the conversation, be sure to subscribe on Substack because you'll be getting visual versions of.
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Podcast episodes, whenever they come out through that.
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You'll hear when I'm done with my new project on photographic consciousness, and just be there for the journey and all my ramblings.
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Thank you for being here, and I will see you next time.
