Sappho's Gift This Spring Morning

Can passion or creativity come ex nihilo? I don't know but I believe they can be cultivated; they can grow. I know for me passion for photography and video is greater today than even just last year. I think images all the time now—when I'm on the treadmill at the gym, while driving to UPS or sipping my McDonald's senior decaf looking at what's new in the spring garden.

A pristine love for words and writing comes and goes. I like elegant paucity which is why I adore poetry, but only when my mind is clear like a spring morning. The few words that run across the page in a lyric poem seem all to shine with the gravity of heavenly thoughts. They fall, as my piano teacher once instructed me for plucking notes from the piano, like pearls dropping on a wooden floor when the string breaks.

This morning, lounging in bed while the sun cleared the sky of nighttime clouds, I read Willis Barnstone's translations from the Greek of Sappho's poems (Sweetbitter Love: Poems of Sappho, Shambhala, 2006). From "Prayer to Afroditi":

Come to me now and loosen me

from blunt agony. Labor

and fill my heart with fire. Stand by me

and be my ally.

The poems struck two chords. Like other Greeks of her time, praying to the Olympian gods must have been as commonplace as Christians today praying to Jesus: for gifts of love or harvest, for relief from sickness or love's agonies. The other chord goes mano a mano with this morning's sunlight: love, spring love, adulterous love, any kind of love!

Sometimes love feels like a giant feast's aftertaste in the mouth or morning-after mouth: too much, and too much regret. Love can sate to the point of repugnance. Other times love regains its spring-water freshness, a feather touch on the skin, a simple, devastating "hello," a quick kiss, a whisper of choir in a quiet church, her faint perfume while you're cleaning the house months after she has gone.

Now

when I look at you a moment

my voice is empty

and can say nothing as my tongue

cracks and slender fire races

under my skin. My eyes are dead

to light, my ears

pound, and sweat pours over me.

I convulse...

This woman Sappho, in Barnstone's translation (I didn't much care for his translation of the New Testament Gospels but here he shines), sound like a modern woman—soft, bold, loving and envying, needy or in love. She speaks of emotions you or I might have today, this moment. And she makes us feel less alone with our solitary thoughts, our despairing feeling. We're linked, all to one another, like Indra's net in which are caught the jewels of consciousness, of our pure humanity.

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Paying the Dues of Passion and Time

In 1989 I read Marsha Sinetar's book, Do What You Love, The Money Will Follow: Discovering Your Right Livelihood (available at Amazon.com for $11.56) and liked how it sounded. I was years then from discovering for myself how this principle worked. I'm a thinker, late on doing.

I was seduced by the promise of digital movies in 2006 when I did a week-long certification seminar on Final Cut Pro. I finally leapt off the cliff and quit my daytime job in March 2008. In May I shot my first model, Kaleb, after testing lights on my neighbor, Ryan, who was kind enough to sit on my posing stool for images he wanted to send to his Greek friend. Kaleb was my first teacher and I was no longer just being seduced. I had fallen completely in love.

It has taken almost two years to move the inch I needed from dreaming to doing. I've done 18 photo shoots now and it's starting to feel like home. I have lots more to learn, enough that I am not eager to push myself into commercial light. I suspect, if Sinetar is right, the push will come by itself. Passion makes one devote his time to what he loves and what he loves makes him talk about it, share it, enthuse and lyricize about it. The magic is simple and fundamental and to think that life is rife with magic like this!

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The House of Flying Daggers

Shi mian mai fu in Mandarin, directed by Yimou Zhang, was the second Chinese movie I’ve seen in the past week.

I watched it in Blu-Ray and the first thing that struck me was the opulence of colors. The costumes and the interiors made me think China’s old culture was every bit as decorative and beautiful as Europe’s. Maybe Chinese art has been more perishable. Everything in the tropics unless made of stone or metal deteriorates. China’s elaborate designs—dragons, chrysanthemums, peonies, clouds, all with great curling, curving lines—take getting used to. I was not a fan of European baroque either but Mexican baroque, also known as Mexican Churrigueresque, warmed me to all those garish curlicues and tiny embellishments reminiscent of beautifully crafted silver jewelry. Chinese decorative art is simpler, more often painted rather than sculpted.

The second thing that struck me was the beauty of the women. Even the men were strikingly handsome. The women though had the smoothest, whitest skin. It’s mostly makeup. I imagine living with one of those women they would not appear like the celestial beings they are on film when newly risen from bed.

The movie struck me as much by the images it portrayed although the ballet-like fighting and the amazing special effects as the plot. Daggers, swords, arrows, even women’s long sleeves zip through the air, impossibly hitting their targets a long distance away. Warriors of Heaven and Earth, according to one review, had less of the fantastical motion of fighters and a weapon so was better. Me, I like them both. I like that we in the West are now seeing Chinese culture portrayed eloquently in films.

China and America may not agree on political and human rights values but through art and the humanities we might yet see the two cultures give and take and shape each other for a better world for us all.

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Disrupting Comfort for Seeing

In photography (and videos, or, for that matter, any creative enterprise), we need to break beyond the familiar to explore something new in ourselves. Every shoot for me, when successful, explores the unfamiliar and cracks the comforting, conquering certainty of what I already know.

After working in videos for the past eight months I did a photo shoot last Saturday with a male and a female model. I was just going to shoot Coty but when I suggested we do a duo shoot with a female model he took off with the idea and Jacqueline was the result.

The only other male-female duo I shot was Scott and Chanté in 2008, my first shoot with two models with the same Scott and Arron who brought him in for the shoot earlier that year. Models when they're new to me don't feel free to pose for the camera. A friend behind the scenes can loosen them up. Posing is both serious and fun. When seriousness dominates we can get stuck in deadpan images, what in Filipino-Spanish we call "de cahón." Straight out of the box. It's quality we've come to expect from the industrial age, quality that is identical from one item to the next that rolls off the conveyor belt.

I must admit that my goal these last two years has been to achieve that industrial sameness, a certain minimum of quality in the shoot, because I was new to the craft. In the normal course of events a young person goes to college or undergoes apprenticeship, this latter now too a vanishing phenomenon except in the higher echelons of business and art to which few of us have access. I'm an autodidact. I study and learn on my own, a modus with disadvantages and advantages.

While still working on industrial quality I find myself comfortable enough in the medium to widen its expression. What I need to do is to create artistic discomfort, to see anew, to push the medium not to the reaches other photographers have created with their own disruption of comfort but to my own Loki realities. What is beautiful but something that makes us look and see again as though we've had eyes to see just moments ago?

I want to do more duo shoots. I think two women, one older, almost a mother, one younger, could be interesting. Meanwhile Arron is bringing his girlfriend, Brittany, for a shoot this evening. That can be interesting, too because Arron is a natural in front of the camera. A craftsman has to take what he can get and shape it into something worth seeing, worth having as part of our familiar world. We've always had this, we say of anything we've seen once but it takes a special eye to dream it before it came to being.

Knowing When You're There

Terry Gross's last interview with singer Johnny Cash in 1997 was phenomenal. The man was at the peak of his life, wise, modest without being falsely so, generous to those who've helped him on his rise to success and fame, still the genuinely respectful boy he was growing up with his cotton-farmer dad and mom and a man who still remembered the moment when he had arrived. 

After a false start in Michigan when he graduated from high school, Cash went back to Arkansas and joined the army. He got out in 1954 when he was 23 and moved to Memphis. He sold appliances for Home Equipment but couldn't sell anything. "I didn't really want to. All I wanted was the music, and if somebody in the house was playing music when I would come, I would stop and sing with them."

He called Sam Phillips who had produced Elvis Presley's "That's All right" on his Sun Records label. He told Terry it didn't take nerve to call. "I was fully confident that I was going to see Sam Phillips and to record for him." When Phillips told him a flat no, Cash went down to the studio and met the producer as he came in. He told Phillips, "If you'd listen to me, I believe you'll be glad you did." He got his first record. "That was a good lesson for me, you know, to believe in myself." Three months later, Elvis asked him to sing with him at the Overton Park shell in Memphis. "And from that time on, I was on my way, and I knew it, I felt it, and I loved it."

Fresh Air interviews singers, actors, movie directors, and writers, genres of artists that fascinate me. I learn from hearing their stories. I am sure what they tell Gross is not everything that happened. We all edit our stories, delete insignificant, non-dramatic parts and craft a plot just as a good fiction writer does. Our stories how something come about arise from our insights into a stream of experience that has no chapter or paragraph markings. Along the way, some piece jumps at us from the stream and becomes an event. One such event that interests me hugely is the moment when an artist or craftsman believes his or her career took off. It underlines for me that moment when I've become what I'd decided I wanted to be.

It is working. When I decided in late 2007 to learn to shoot professional photographs and videos I set four years as the goal for getting my work up to commercial standards. The goal was arbitrary, based on a piece of otherwise irrelevant fact: when I could earn substantial income again without jeopardizing the source I'd tapped to use until my work began earning meaningfully. Two years later and I feel my decision vindicated seeing what I've done. Starting out I didn't know what I would need to go through. Truly we make the path by walking. From the first model shoot I did with Kaleb in May 2005 to now as I prepare for my 19th shoot is an adventure beyond belief. The struggles day after day are there but they're forgettable for the moments of achievement, when I look at what I am now able to do.

The process involves many phases. To create good photographs I needed to learn how to use a DSL camera, learn exposure settings, lighting, printing, and other outputting media. I needed to learn software for postproduction. And there's more. I found websites for tutorials and to see what professional photographers were creating. I learned about social media and marketing. Just over two years after making that decision, I feel I am on the cusp of fundamental change. I'm not there yet but I feel it's going to happen within the coming year. I know it, I feel it: I'll have a moment as Cash had when he knew he was on his way.

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Living, Writing & Creating with Boldness and Dash

I listen to Terry Gross's guests on Fresh Air (named aptly) and think: I should live with more of their brash and brio, more of their daring and dash; I should create more wildly and in life take more risks instead of cowering in my corner, afraid of making a mistake!

When the sun is shining as it is this early spring morning amazement and gratitude flood my soul. I am really blessed. I may not live  in that Paris house over looking rooftops, with glass doors between rooms, shared by Tiffauges, the cat, with his master and slave, the writer Abel, but my small condominium is modern and bright with light, situated close to the places I like to frequent, its wood floors a marvel of warmth, a tiny all-season garden outside that I can visit in the morning before I start working in my study with a sparkling Macintosh computer, hundreds of books, CDs, and DVDs at my fingertips (or at most, a few steps away). In Yves Navarre's A Cat's Life, Tiffauges writes and comments on his owner's life, a clever device for insight into human foibles. It is not too daring a literary device but it does provide a unique point of view.

Daring, I guess, comes after some homework to stretch not just our skills but our imagination. Without that stretch, it is hard but not impossible to leap with panache into strange worlds where our familiar fears grow luminous with new eyes, new ears, new skin for feeling and contacting what? Just our own selves, but transfigured by the risk we take without which growing does not follow stretching.

Action is paramount. Avoiding what feels unpleasant or arduous we don't gain the energy of achievement. Our lives are small because we don't make more of the world ours. More space is available just for the taking if we just stretched out our hands and grab. Thorns might prick us and we might get burned or wounded or sickened but we would have experienced something that our inner world is larger thereby. We are fools not to dare and be more alive.

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Photo Shoot - Think Fun, Think Surprise, Think Live

I don't think the weather would allow us to shoot outdoors at the pool on Saturday so it will be an all-studio shoot. Props would be important: bright-colored beach balls, basketball or soccer ball, bright beach towels, gym towels, sweat bands. A clean bike would also be a nice prop, or inline skates or surf board. Windbreaker or jacket and shades for action and lifestyle shots. Vintage clothes would be nice, and vintage beach props like vintage portable radios, beer cans and bottles. We don't have access to shoot in a gym so think outdoors activities and outdoors sports.

Think color. Solid bright colors or large patterns. Thin stripes don't always show well on TV or computer screen, fat ones are okay. If Jacque has a fur coat or handsome winter coat, that can contrast with swimwear tho that would be more fashion than fitness. Scarves and a bright tie for interesting shots with swimwear.

Think different. What would make the images stand out in the crowd. Toned bodies alas are plentiful so we'll have to find images that stand out. Jacque may want to bring girly stuff like barrettes for the hair, ribbons, dangly earrings, charms, something to soften the often masculine fitness images. I like some of the photos in your Fun times album. Photo shoots should have that fun, spontaneous, surprise, live quality.

See the full gallery on posterous

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See the full gallery on posterous

Photos from Jacque's FB album.

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Model Photography One.mov

A review of Duende Arts models the first two years (not quite but close enough).

Valentino the Last Emperor, and the world and market for women's beauty

I rented Valentino: the Last Emperor from Netflix because it was on Blu-Ray and featured fashion and the fashion industry. It was just the thing to watch this morning. Uncanny and freaky-unpredictable, events sometimes come together, the outside world with the inside, the dream with the jogging reality. After Coty emailed me to say he was ready for a photo shoot, the energy shifted direction. When I mentioned that I wanted to shoot him with a female model, he volunteered that he knew a couple who might be interested. Jacqueline has consented to shoot with us. After ten days being energized by video, days feeling focused on writing, words and how to combine them efficiently and beautifully, now I am thinking and dreaming images and photography.

The movie tells the story of Valentino and his lover/partner, Giancarlo Giametti, whom he met in Paris 45 years ago (at the time the movie was made), and Valentino's last collection in 2008, five months after he announced his retirement from an industry that had left him behind. I was interested in the relationship between the two men, artist and business manager, but what got to me the most was the fabrication of beauty in women, a lifestyle of creativity, and the rewards that came when one is driven by the passion to create. 

I've shot more men models than women. Women's images are more complicated, more of a challenge. Men's beauty is straightforward, clean and easy. Between the two is a great divide, like the sweet pond of your childhood and the immense Pacific. For whatever reason, the image of women in Western society is complex, driven biologically, sexually, romantically, and now politically but photographing it is all about beauty and how beauty moves us. I'm more familiar with women's psyche than men's. I had two sisters and grew up surrounded by women my father, a mysterious appendage, an afterthought. Maybe I wanted to distance myself from what I knew. Familiarity breeds contempt but in attempts at art is deadly.

At the gathering at my house last Sunday I accused a friend of having champagne taste. Champagne is okay especially when you throw in money to spend but one's lifestyle does not have to be so materially endowed. In the 1980s I discovered Buddhism and Zen and since then have found simple the most daring form of beauty. What we lust after fades quickly after attaining its avatar and we are hungry again. Simple is as tough, maybe tougher to find than the byzantine excesses lust conjures for our pursuit. With moderation, one can have both sensual and simple and that's the path I have to discover.

Balance, always: the elusive goal. When the Lord God in Jewish scripture ordered light to appear he did not destroy darkness. Between black and white is the array of colors that if judiciously employed can do the imitation of life to which we aspire.

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Back to Stills Model Shooting

I am preparing for a photo shoot next week. I have not shot still images in months so I am brushing up on exposure, shoot styles and techniques, and lenses. I have a small but nice collection of lenses that frankly I have not learned to use to their full potential. For model shoots I like to use the EF 24-70mm f/2.8L, EF and 24-105 f/4L and the cheap but good EF 50mm f/1.8 on my Canon. Preparing for the shoot I am also reviewing my old model shoots and processing the Raw Files in new ways. I am also reviewing my favorite photographers like Greg Gorman's 2009 In Their Youth. I plan to pay closer attention to mood and lighting, and shoot video, too. I am trying to hold off buying the new Canon 7D with manual exposure and selectable frame rates of 24, 25 and 30 fps. Canon is releasing a special FCP plug-in to facilitate the addition of time code and saving the CF files into a burnable disk image. Truly we live in a fast-changing digital world!

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Casting to Concept and Back

See the full gallery on posterous

Filmmakers and photographers cast for projects they want to produce. I do the reverse. I find the models then develop the concept for the projects in which I can use them. It's not a bad way to work, not until I've acquired enough skills that I can devote time to starting with a concept then finding the talent to work with and realize it.

I've been exchanging email with Coty for over a year. Finally he says he is coming down for a shoot on March 20. He wants fashion modeling but is open to doing videos. This will be the first time I'll be shooting video with a model so I am very excited. Coty emailed me his Facebook url and we became friends this morning. Looking at his photos is making me redesign what I had in mind for the shoot. He loves bodybuilding so we should probably take advantage of what he's worked hard to acquire. But maybe not...

I've shot two kinds of models. Most of the men are into bodybuilding. In fact I've found a couple of my models at the gym. Fashion modeling on the other hand tends to go for tall, slim men. I need to remind myself that there are other kinds of modeling e.g. product and body parts modeling, like for gyms. The first model I shot, Kaleb, had a fine physique but he was more into actual modeling than bodybuilding. I feel compelled to take advantage of a male model's physique and play on sensuality, even eroticism but isn't that shorting the model?

As I move into videomaking I'll be thinking of acting and actors. Videos can utilize well-built models in a different way. I need to think about commercials and corporate videos although frankly working for businesses and corporations just does not appeal to me. Commercials and music videos are more my cup of tea. Short videos can showcase the cutting-edge technology that appeals to me. And the Internet with viral marketing is ripe for video delivery.

If Jobs is right, the iPad can revolutionize the creation and distribution of journalistic and entertainment media. Publications can create apps that combine text, graphics (photos and images) and animation (videos) seamlessly. My three interests shall have come together!

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The Right Time for the Right Products

Ideas took shape as I watched Charlie Rose interview three tech journalists about Apple's iPad. My goal at this time is still to gain the skills and craft in writing, photography and videos. Since January I've been posting to YouTube; since February to Facebook. Posting videos and text on the Internet is my market research for what people like, for what the market wants or is ready for. I can see the two lines converging and that time feels thrillingly closer!

I've always had the idea I would be distributing digital images and videos on the Internet. I'd love to do a theatrical feature but to be realistic I don't have the time to develop the skills, networking and financing to do that, unless, of course, I do well preserving physical and mental health. Virginia Woolf is quoted to say that in her early 40s she had to be a miser with time. She had to focus on what mattered to her. Of course, she may have had ideas of suicide even then and suicide radicalizes the picture.

Another feature: I've worked with Apple products and the Macintosh so I'll be using Apple or Apple-compatible software. This is not as much an issue today when cross-platform is more the rule. Even Microsoft has been making critical software available for the Mac and Avid in videography likewise has paid more attention to the Mac with the Mac's impressive showing through this recession. Premium pricing has not inhibited Apple's growth. Jobs was right in setting the lead instead of following the herd.

The Rose interview commented on Jobs's strategy and success. He has creative and innovative genius but these are lens through which he looks for what is missing in the commodities market and designs a beautiful product that fills that niche and that people get passionate about. His high tech design is high art.

I still don't know what products I shall eventually be making that will get monetized. Right now, I am still interested in doing model photography but I don't think I'll be doing fashion spreads. Documentary and drama are more interesting to me. I am definitely into videos not film. Right now I am producing 4 categories of videos: travel, modeling, commercials, and people interest. The last is the most intriguing but needs work to develop it so I can give an elevator speech in one sentence. Narrowing the focus is what skills acquisition and market research is about.

Meanwhile here's the elephant in the room. I love images but long ago I already had a first love: words, what I am calling right now "text." Once I feel I've acquired enough skills and craft I can push the envelope and call what I do writing. It's the elephant because it's what gets me up in the morning to start working; it's how I spend my mornings. It's an elephant because compared to video and photography work, writing feels the least likely to become monetized. What I can do is combine my love for words with my love for images, drama and people interest: write my own screenplays, direct and edit the video. Right now that feels like something in a remote future i.e. one to two years from now!

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Life and Drama in Photographs and Video

By dramatic images I mean images that convey mood or emotion not only by the model's facial expression but by his or her whole body. I like to capture close-up, full-length or three-quarter images of a single model and employing multiple models adds more possibilities for portraying emotion and relationship. This would involve acting that models already do without thinking they are acting. We call it "striking a pose." I just want to make acting out emotions and relationships more conscious.

Admittedly this focus is bound up with my interest in moving images—videos and movies—where emotion and relationship are captured through more than one frame. Movement conveys change.

I don't off hand have an image from my own shoots. This is a weak example, a man bent down as if in despair while his companion sits quietly by his side.

In a future shoot with model Coty, I want to shoot video as well. I can have the video camera shoot in the background while we shoot still images (unless I can find an assistant to man the camcorder) but I also want to use part of the shoot time to shoot these extended frames. Maybe I am too ambitious for the time we'll have but I do want to shoot a short vignette of Coty telling his story. No acting will be required because I'll just ask him some questions that he can answer (or not answer if you choose) from real life. As much as I love still images, I think moving images up the ante. This is the director in me.

Two subjects interest me that I want to document in photographs and video: life in small-town America and the lives of ordinary Americans, not the people we see in the news at night nor the intense drama of prime time TV.

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Wes Bentley in The Last Word

The Last Word (2008) was directed by Geoffrey Haley who also wrote the story. I'd not heard of him so it was because of Wes Bentley who played the main character, Evan Merc, that I chose to watch the movie. I liked it. I liked the character of Evan, a reclusive writer who made his living writing suicide notes. The character is not only reclusive but restrained, his range of emotions, emotional responses and daily activities so circumscribed they'd fit on the head of a pin.He is also dressed with the same restraint in almost monochromatic earth hues. The shirts hint at a man who dressed as he did as a teenager, someone who did not care about clothes or his appearance.  

All through the movie, the Evan character is flat and two-dimensional, a cartoon character without emotion and the barest of life. When the sister of one of his clients, Matt, pursues him, he resists but is drawn into a relationship when Charlotte (played by Winona Ryder, another movie personality I am not familiar with) casually offers sex on their third "date." His emotional involvement with Charlotte and with Abel (played by Ray Romano of the long-running TV series, "Everybody Loves Raymond") leads to Evan's castled restraint falling apart. Desolate when Charlotte finds out he had written her brother's suicide note, Evan who does not drink (or eat out, a "saint" according to Charlotte) goes on a drinking spree at a bar. When he leaves, a man follows and holds him up. Evan is surprised at the intense rage incited by the hold-upper. He punches the man to unconsciousness. His emotions are awakened. He stops Abel from killing himself and together they realize Abel's dream of making a cliff living. They allow people irate with some purchase or possession to hurl the darn thing over the cliff and watch it detonate as Abel pushes a button and the client watches on a monitor.

The story concept is original. It gives the movie an understated weirdness. It's like the elephant in the room because the movie is otherwise presented almost blandly. I'm afraid I won't remember this movie after a week and wonder how it could have been a more memorable film. On the other hand I get tired of action-driven films with explosions and acrobatic fistfights every second frame. The Last Word is memorable for how Haley constructed Evan's character. There is something lovable about this ecru-and-earth-dressed man who was drifting through life after an abusive childhood. He makes a "horrible boyfriend" but hooks me emotionally because we're all at one time or another felt we needed distance from the madding crowd to have some control over what Evan calls "issues."

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Attaining the Crest of the Curve

Sorrento 2007

Yesterday was my best day of the week and it shouldn't be. I was groggy from having stayed up till half past three and was up again at eight. I've often wondered if I do my best work, whether editing videos or writing, when sleepy or when pushing myself into the morning's wee hours.

I stayed up Thursday into Friday morning to finish my video, The Amalfi Coast from the Emerald Grotto to Amalfi. It was exactly a week since I finished my last video, A Visit to L'Isole di Capri.  Both come from videography I did on my 2008 walking tour of Naples and the Amalfi Coast, the best videographed of all my foreign travels. These two latest videos are the longest I've done since I started posting to Facebook on December 7 and to YouTube on January 4. My first YouTube video, Training To Fight 2, featuring Arron, was 2 minutes, 5 seconds long.

I'm starting to feel competent using iMovie. I started relearning Final Cut Pro ten days ago. FCP has features I want to use e.g. alpha channels, more control over audio, and animation but I can do a lot with iMovie I discovered its undocumented features. Most operations are as set but I've found out that most these defaults are easily modified. I can, for instance, start a project using a theme. When I cancel the theme I can modify its defaults i.e. beginning and closing titles, default transitions without losing what I've already edited into the video. The theme's special transitions then become available to me. Titles can be modified using Apple's built-in Fonts panel, not the Fonts panel that came with iMovie. I can choose from my computer's entire font collection, add shadow, outline and color, far beyond what Apple made available in iMovie's own font panel. David Pogue's O'Reilly manual has been invaluable. It is truly "the book that should have come in the box."

I went into photography and videography two years ago not only to explore my latent artistic bent, nor only to find another way to earn a living but, most important, to pursue necessary personal growth changes. I am back to 1969 when I paused medical school after getting overwhelmed by what I was doing. I was overwhelmed by what I was. I've made many adjustments but at core are still essential adjustments. I need to learn my own work ethic.

Learning to use iMovie has proved once again an old dictum. To succeed with a new skill one must go through and complete the learning curve. If one stopped short of achieving the crest of the curve, he would just have wasted his time. The goal each time is mastery. One needs focus and perseverance. I am learning the importance of attaining the crest of the curve.

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Dan Andrews Location-Independent Lifestyle

Kalanchoe in the Window

Early this morning, while waiting for my video to export, I checked my email. Someone had started following me on Tweeter and this person's location was the Philippines. I followed the link to Dan Andrews's site, Tropical MBA, and watched several of his "Lifestyle Business Podcasts."

Since signing up with Tweeter everyday I get notice that someone was following me. Most of these are businesses trying to create themselves on the Internet. They have something to say but after a couple of weeks I lost interest. Business has never interested me. This is why I remain poor. I don't have the patience to study business situations nor the boldness to pursue strictly business algorithms. My older sister gets nonplussed when confronted with the simplest mechanical problem. My Waterloo is business.

Despite my allergic reaction to business ideas, Dan's ideas persevered. It may be it's just the lateness of the hour. It was three this morning. I had wasted yesterday afternoon but after I finished watching The Time Traveler's Wife last night I took advantage of the return of creative energy and finished editing my Amalfi Coast video. But I don't think so. We become persuaded by ideas we'd already been primed to accept. Truth is simply what aligns with what we already believe.

Andrews and his buddy, Ian, are traveling in SE Asia. They are in Manila as of last notice. They both love to travel but not as much as they love travel when mixing business with pleasure. Location Independent Lifestyle is doing business where you enjoy spending time. It is doing business and earning money without being tied down to a location. It is creating business opportunities where you like to be.

Dan Andrews's idea to combine business with lifestyle is precisely what I've formulated over the last 20 to 30 years. I remember when the idea first occurred to me. I had just come back from Barre where a nine-day meditation retreat shocked me out of complacency. By sitting with physical and mental pain instead of running away, the quality of mind shatters through its normal states of operation. One experiences breakthrough moments. I experienced happiness for the first time in my life.

Coming back home I wondered how I could have time to continue meditating and deepening the practice. I knew happiness was real because I had experienced it beyond reasonableness and doubt. I experienced happiness under the most counter-intuitive circumstances. I didn't have a job, was not earning money, and the relationship on which I had laid great store had just broken up. Happiness did not depend on material accomplishments, on money or any of the usual methods we think we'd achieve it.

My money supply was very limited. I was not ready to stop earning money. I knew I would have to go back to work, save money so I could stop working permanently. The only opportunity that came up meant returning to doing medicine. I took it but set limits. I began working just one day every other week. Through the next 13 years I built up my work week to three days a week. My boss persuaded me to take advantage of the company's IRA plan. The diversion granted me two very important gains. I salvaged my professional self-confidence and I saved enough money to live on for a while.

When I took a leave of absence from clinical work two years ago, I had decided I wanted to work creating digital media. I became excited with video editing in 2006 when I took a week-long seminar on Final Cut Pro. This became the nidus for my vague plans. Four years after that seminar I have at last started creating videos good enough to post on the Internet. I've learned to take photographs of acceptably good quality. I am far from the quality I need to have to venture into business based on the skills I've learned but I have more of an idea of where I am if I still don't know exactly where I am going.

Dan Andrews is making his dream of freedom in my hometown, in my own backyard. He has the advantage of looking American and of having had an American childhood. Both attributes still count for something in developing countries. They count for a great deal in the Philippines where people are still struggling to find their own self-worth after centuries under Western powers. Moreover I have an attribute that goes counter to progress so that in effect I am working with three disadvantages.

Nevertheless listening to Dan last night I was reminded again of some of the ingredients for the success I've begun to envision for myself. His website blog and podcasts are the latest in a series of encounters just in the past week pointing me to a resolution of impediments. Creativity is easy enough in certain states of mind. How one thinks is the key.

Posted via email from Duende Arts