September’s Nostalgia, Now:
[below is the condensed written version of the episode]
Whew. It’s been a long time.
I actually had to check and the last episode I released was May 6th.
This year’s been hard. I had a pregnancy loss, and grief and overwhelm and disorientation just took me out. It’s taken time to feel again.
More so to feel life force again that feels real and authentic in wanting to share in this way.
I’m not going to try to catch you up on everything- that feels impossible.
I just want to roll back into this space by sharing where I’ve been lately.
I made a new Nostalgia Now template. If you’re new here, Nostalgia Now is my monthly photographic journaling ritual. It’s the practice that, for years, kept me tethered to the pulse of my life, & in sync with myself.
And, like so many of us do, I drifted from the thing that helps me most right when I needed it most.
A dear friend gently reminded me, “Maybe it’s time to do a Nostalgia Now again.”
Even then, it took me weeks, no- months, to actually do it. But when I finally sat down in a café before therapy and opened the template, I got full-body goosebumps. It was like remembering how to breathe.
Through my time in therapy (with a focus on internal family systems) I have noticed that in trying to grasp a feeling of wholeness, I have looked past the whole of me and have overemphasized only a few specific parts that are the most familiar. The parts that I have felt most beholden to and enmeshed with for the majority of my life.
In seeing that and in not trying to fix it- in looking directly at it without squinting my eyes or looking away, everything begins to melt into the innocence of a little girl that sees everything with such love and for a really long time, such fear.
As I relate this new understanding to my practice, I realize it’s seeing different parts together, like the fragmented photographs that are seemingly disparate, into one space that creates coherence.
It opens a way to visualize and feel how they can all coexist.
They’re all a constellation.
They’re all in me and I can swap out a gajillion photos in each one.
Any one photo is never the most important part. It is the whole that happens through their interconnectedness moving through me that creates the experience of life.
And when we can get used to this feeling of fluidity, when we can release the control of making it look a certain way or reinforcing an old identity, we can expand and open our eyes to so much more possibility. So much more life.
I’m sharing both templates here on Substack in separate posts- SEPTEMBER & OCTOBER.
Substack is my home base for visual versions of these podcast episodes, my picture portals (free writing and poetry paired with images), and this Nostalgia, Now journaling practice.
When I looked back at my photos this month, one line came through:
“Abstraction helps us grasp the real thing we’re seeing.”
Most of the images I chose were blurry or indirect- silhouettes, reflections, repurposed fragments. I realized how often I intentionally blur an image, because sometimes I see more of what I’m seeing when it’s blurred.
Like how you close your eyes when something tastes really good to taste it more.
That’s what photographic consciousness is for me.
It’s just being awake through the lens of picturing life, and somehow, that act of seeing through the camera (whether the camera is actually there or not) brings me closer to the real thing.
It’s funny how what seems like a barrier becomes the thing that lets us touch truth.
It becomes the way we can finally get to it.
I’ve gone from creative and emotional paralysis to floodgate. (at least it feels like that even though it took the better part of a year to get here.)
The grief, the due date that came and went, the ache of what could’ve been- all of it turned into this need to birth something.
So I’m birthing again: new templates, and a rebirth of my course Manifest Your Memories in a different form. It’s deepening into what I call photographic consciousness- this ongoing exploration of how we see ourselves seeing.
When I looked at all the images together, I wrote:
“Every unconscious act of taking a picture is a split second of becoming conscious to my life.”
This ritual helps me trust the present moment again. It reminds me that blur and abstraction can be a side door. a softer way in when the front door’s tangled with thought.
Sometimes when I feel that gripping- that furrowed brow, that resting worried face, I try to melt instead of tighten.
What if I close my eyes to see even more?
What if I ask, “where’s the side door here?”
That’s the essence of this practice.
Looking back at your photos not to judge or regret, but to listen.
To treat each image like correspondence from your deeper self.
One of mine in the template was taken from my bedroom window.
My partner, my sons, and my dog were in the yard playing football.
I was trying to escape the noise and the needing for a few minutes but was instantly swallowed into the vision thanks to the distance I put between them and I.
From the second floor window I instantly saw them through a version of me that knows them with scruffy beards and families of their own.
Instead of trying to freeze time I was warmed to life.
I blurred the image even more through focusing on the screen until they looked like a painting. It felt like painting them with love, with my eyes.
Another was a close up of my son’s hair.
The original picture was of him smelling a flower but I cropped in so close- just to the corner of his head. So close and so blurry it became abstract. But that blur brought forth the sensation of breathing him in in the way I always do.
In this practice I find clarity but not in the way of desire to make sense or find answers. Not in a way of desperately trying to create proof of life or to combat forgetting. (although I am human so I can’t claim that those things have nothing to do with it.)
“I pressed the button anyway because it didn’t fucking matter if the picture came out well or not. It’s a physiological honoring of experience. An anchoring.
This.
Here it is.
I’m touched by something.
This.
And then we get to see what happens.
And the picture is the byproduct of life erupting from you.
Meeting life.
And whether or not that byproduct is what you expected or not expected,
or something you like or don’t like- whatever that is, that’s a whole other conversation.
So now this picture that "didn’t come out very well" becomes a symbol.It becomes, "I honored my impulse and I took this photo, and now it’s this abstract burst of light out of darkness."
And just like that, a visual metaphor for everything that is right now in my life.
This practice of seeing what I saw gifts me with reinforcing my faith in life and my self.
To trust my vision will not let me miss the point of my life.
It helps me to remain open to expanding into new perspectives for experiencing. Not to know more but to feel more directly.
To be in sync with my now.
Seeing the seemingly disparate photographs that I never planned to take or planned to use for a greater purpose all together in this way makes me proud of what I see.
It reminds me that the gnawing feeling that creeps up on me, whispering that I’m not doing enough, whispering that I’m not seeing the point of my life or that I’m missing something devastatingly important- it is wrong.
Every unconscious act of taking a picture is a split second of becoming conscious to my life, and in this ritual of reflection, I anchor in the trust of my present moment and the trust in myself to see it and to hold it gently with tingling hands and gloriously blurry eyes.
So maybe it’s not about clarity at all.
It’s connection.
It’s seeing with our full body instead of just our eyes.
These unconscious clicks shows us everything we need each time we look again.
I’m happy to be back here with you.
If you want to keep exploring this conversation about seeing and staying awake to life through the photos you’re already taking, subscribe below. You’ll get the visual versions of these episodes and hear about new offerings as they come.
Thank you for listening and for being here with me.
