#thisherelight

hey kids. long time. kinda missing Tumblr. you can say it's because the days are only 1 hour long and without enough sun my brain doesn't work right, you could say that or you could say I feel more free to post darker, less shiny work here and that when I have more time to focus on stuff (like the dark of December) I get back to what I care about. who knows.

we’re in the heavy part of summer now. in the eight years I've been roaming the prairie I don’t remember humidity like this. alberta is not a humid environment and while my beard is loving it the air feels charged and strange. 

this year I've seen more LP elevated super cells, which are my absolute favorite, in one year than the last 3-5 years. I’ve made some ridiculous time lapses and just in general had a scenic and less pathologically dangerous storm season this year. I’ve usually kept more distance and even had the drone up for a couple of them. in short, despite fighting my way through each day health wise right now--this season has been spectacular.

I doubt everyone with massive hail damage would agree but nature is nature and she does what she likes all I can do is try to make some pictures. 

well kids, spring is finally here in the prairie. my near 6 month break from making photos is over. It was a long break and I wasn’t sure I was ever going to come back but as time has passed since the prolonged illness of my mother and her passing I’m starting to bounce back. Starting to feel things again other than misery. It’s not simple with the pandemic going on. 

But when the sun lights the belly’s of sprawling seas of clouds in pinks and blues I can’t help myself. I get excited. I feel like I'm alive again. 

So it’s been a while. I know. I took 3 months off making photos. I’ve never done that before, it was interesting waiting for the desire to bubble up again. I was pretty distracted regardless. That huge life changing thing I kept saying every year was coming finally came. Mom passed near the start of this month and then I felt the need to make work again. Emotions are weird, right? 

Everything is heavy and rich and laden with meaning right now. like a switch was flipped and suddenly everything is different than it was. my life as I knew it for the last 7 years is gone. I have to find a way out of the role of caregiver and back to thinking about what I want and need. It’s going to be weird. There’s already, in only a couple of grief colored weeks, a small well of energy building where she used to sit and laugh at my bad jokes. 

I hate that not-mom well of energy with all my being but some part of me craves having it too. 

The rest of this year is anyones guess. Theres a move coming up and I don’t know where I’ll land, or what it might look at. I catch myself aware as I roll the same gravel roads as always that the days of traveling them over and over are winding down. these pictures I make now will be the bookends between which a complicated and painful, but rich beyond belief, period of my life will live as memory, as history, as story. 

much like my mother I’m not quite ready to let it go. You always think you’re ready. You’re not. 

Life has a way of dislodging us from comfort. dislodging us from routine. It has this weird function that throws you into the unknown and eventually you get to know it so well you don’t want to leave it ever again. That’s how I started out here at the edge of all these unknown roads 8 years ago. I felt alien in this empty prairie and now it’s home. 

it’s time to find home again.