there are no rules

I didn't write the rules. Why should I follow them? - W. Eugene Smith, photo essayist.

Lens: Visual journalism.

A Nepalese man breaks rocks in Bandipur.

Music is the fuel at a Tibetan resettlement village outside Pokhara, Nepal.

awareness

There are  absolutely no metaphors, just observations. 

The artist maps reality.

That's the cat-and-mouse game between the artist and the world. And it's just not the artist who plays it. Each of us is in the cat-and-mouse game with our perceptual life. Do we really see ourselves?

Or do we see only what obtrudes in daylight?

Do we crash through our nightlife, scattering subtle things that abide there?

Or do we simply watch without judgment, in the expectation of learning something? - John Cage

 

A bell

A bell in Nepal one morning.

Ring high, ring low. 

Trust and smile

Don't you just love the name of a school in Cambodia?

It sings on a clean white sign propped against a brick wall along an endless red rutted swampy road.

Down the road from a pagoda wat where friends and relatives create a cremation. He was 70.

He survived the genocide. That says something. 

The rainy season brings endless pleasure minus pain to natives and aliens.

Milling around is an art form here.

TRUST and SMILE.

Practice with friends and strangers. 

hello june

Goodbye May. Pound out your bright beautiful future. 

A Turkish man with a hammer. Gypsy music. 

Only madmen and pilgrims travel alone.

We began in India. Wandering no name alleys, streets, villages, rivers, valleys, mountains.

Darkness whispers, Who's there?

I received a reprieve from death row one night in Vietnam. My sentence was commuted to life without parole. A South American writer said parole means speech, word, a word of honor.

Parole is the condition under which you are free, with a language and human awareness.

Human freedom is unconditional.

Memory fades into living color remembered with absolute infinity. Desperate hands fold across heaving chests, feeling abandoned sucking air injuries. Stop the bleeding. Start the breathing. 

It rained yesterday. It was long sweet and slow and heavy. Streets became quiet. Everyone huddled in corners of their mind. 

Why is nature so cruel, they cried. Nature laughed, Hahaha. Human tears fell like rain. Tears flooded their memory of nothing.

Today the sun came out. It was hot. Humans cried, Why is nature so cruel. Nature laughed.

 

Scientists say old memory is not destroyed, but that many copies of the same memory could exist in parallel.

They say your memory is only as good as your last memory rather than based on your initial memory.

Speak memory.

“Years ago, I broke a bunch of roses
from the top of his wall.
A thorn from that is still in my palm,
working deeper.” - Rumi