Rose LaCroix

OK, so now I can give a little more details on my visa situation.

I applied for the Chancekarte which would have allowed me to stay for 1 year while looking for professional work.

Instead I was approved for a full work permit which allows me to stay for 4 years until I renew or get naturalized.

This greatly increases my opportunities and makes nearly everything easier.

I start my new job Thursday.

And I will be putting prints of my photography on sale as soon as I can find a suitable website for photo printing and order fulfillment!

A kiosk in Leverkusen-Manfort.

Much of my art is of dark compositions looking for a source of light.

When I took this picture I was living in a boarding house that was furnished like an army barracks, and I'd had no legal address for roughly a month, in a country where I barely spoke the language.

Such is the life of a queer immigrant, running from a country that openly wants to erase you.

And in those dark times of rebuilding from nothing, seeing any place open, with the lights still on, is all you need to shake off your most dangerous melancholy for one more night...

Even if that place is just the nearest 24 hour kiosk.

📷Pentax K1000

I've come to Buddhism at a bad time. I see a lot of essential truth in it as far as the core doctrine that pretty much all Buddhists agree on. But the state of organization, understanding, and ascetic practice is really suffering and sanghas all over are trying to survive under systems that don't really provide support. Meanwhile Buddhism in an ersatz feel-good package is marketed as a commodity based on vibes only, not on actually living any kind of meaningful change.

There's a belief baked into Buddhism of a "dharma ending age" which, if I'm honest, is based on something essentially true: that sound teaching may vanish from the world until it is rediscovered. But it's invoked with such declinist resignation at times. It comes with a lot of fatalism when many Buddhists talk about it, especially Eastern Buddhists oddly enough. That resignation seeps into the more serious Western sanghas at times. It's pervasive.

Given the overall attitude of resigned despair in the world, it seems to me that we can't call this a "dharma ending age" so confidently unless we endeavor to not only preserve the soundest teachings we know, but also examine our own reasons for thinking this decline is inevitable. Inevitable decline, after all, absolves us from having to preserve something precious and irreplaceable. Perhaps there never was a golden age full of fully realized masters. And I know that sounds unthinkable to some Buddhists but I'm legitimately starting to think our attachment to the narrative of decline is just another klesha.

I cannot take it upon myself, a diminished practitioner at the receiving end of diminished practice upon diminished practice, to be the great white savior of the Dharma. But perhaps I should be more open and vocal about what I see happening because I DO love and treasure the Triple Gem and it's a beautiful thing that has, to my experience, proved right on every major point that mattered. Where it was wrong, there was always a sectarian difference on that point.

I don't expect to convert any of you who aren't already convinced. That's not my job. But I do want to talk openly about my passions and disappointments in my own space as always, and this is absolutely one of them. To me, Buddhism is more than just a commodity and to see it reduced to garden statues made by slave labor, or posters with quotes that are badly out of context or not even Buddha, or luxury meditation retreats on some gorgeous Pacific island really saddens me. To begin to understand something beautiful and joyous is to begin to understand how little this world understands real beauty and joy. And to love something beautiful and joyous is to mourn when it is mistreated, mishandled, mismanaged, and miscommunicated.

I am not one of great understanding. But such understanding as I have, I will share about what it actually means to be a sincere lay practitioner in a world where it's really not a great time to be one.

A year or two of steady, predictable domesticity might fix me.

Day job, weekends off, small but comfortable apartment that we'll be able to afford for a long time, a little city car, a little money for hobbies, chances to make money doing other things.

That's all I want. A couple years of that before the next crisis.

I have a job offer in hand but I'm waiting for immigration to approve. I don't know when my first paycheck will be. Could be some weeks from now.

Any help is appreciated!

So I recently discovered Joakim Möller, a photographer based in Stockholm. I thought “how does he get images like these?” so I watched an interview with him. One of his main techniques, it turns out, is to take fairly ordinary images and crop them to abstraction.So I thought I’d have a go. Most of these are from that roll of Ilford Ortho I shot at the circus but there’s one in here from the roll of Adox HR-50 I shot in Boppard. This was great because it allowed me to revisit shots that were otherwise too boring to fit into my blog post and see if I could extract some kind of eerie abstract image from them!