Archives for May 2016

What follows is a Facebook update that I wrote this morning, wanting to be publicy pleased with walkng for some distance over terrain. I chose the image because it appealed to me. After I posted it I realized I had gone walking today because I had just heard that a very good friend of mine, with whom I had once danced under a full moon to a “tune that was a hit before her mother was born,” had suddenly passed away.

We had been overlooking English bay, after midnight in the spring. It suddenly seemed such a long long time ago. I needed to get outside and breathe. When I came back I wrote the post, and as you can see it had less to do with walking and my physical improvements and more to do with the grinding reality of Tarmac Meditations in my life:

“I wanted a cappuccino after I did my little lifting routine (2x). I had learned before all this lifting happened that a longtime, good friend of mine, a fierce, wicked smart, loyal Prairie tough kind of gal had suddenly passed away, much too young. ‘Oh no, goddammit’, my first thought. Walking to the store became my necessary and sufficient choice for remembering. I walked to the local market to get the coffee. Then I walked back, downhill one way, uphill the other. The image came to mind and finding it cheered me, but it needled me as well. Maybe the ‘road goes on forever’, but with apologies to Robert Earl Keen, the party (?) comes to an end. ‘Life is a century’, Gregory Corso once wrote, ‘Death an instant’.
RIP Sharon Riis (1947 -2016).”

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

I couldn’t write a word in the last two weeks. I don’t know why or what was in the way; it just seemed so “useless and all” (Bob Dylan). I have struggled with disconnection my entire life: daydreaming, wandering in classrooms where I was meant to be paying attention, drugs and alcohol and an often conscious desire for a hard straight shot of oblivion, no ice no water.

On May 1 of this year I was fifteen years clean and sober.

During those years I have written as I always meant to, with some success. I found entirely by accident that I had an inclination for photo journalism. It became my life passion in the form of building a career as an ultra-endurance event photographer.

Several years ago I ran into an undiagnosed A-fib situation which resolved itself in a stroke, followed by two more events and a bout of congestive heart failure (scary shit that). Aside from the obvious challenges involved in aging, combined with a little bit of bad luck or timing, as the case may be, my ability to keep shooting the events that allowed me to make a living, and to be me, disappeared. My used-to-be caught up with me as a silent daily lament. I was a “good old wagon but Daddy, I done broke down,” an old song says.

So now what? I HAVE TO WRITE!! is an enormous amount of pressure on a compromised system. So I began to go to the gym and rebuild. Every now and then I take my camera and shoot what’s around me; the images that follow are what I have seen with a camera in my hands. The other day I shot a local race event. These daily non-race images are markers of recovery, small celebrations of being present, doing what it is that I can do with what I got – I think.

What do you think?

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.