I have no fear.

February 28, 2018, Columbia (Missouri.)

Frank Bruni, the New York Times columnist, may be going blind.
I have been partially deaf since the age of twenty-three.
It has stopped me from applying for jobs, over the years, thinking I could not do good enough work because of my disability, although nobody ever told me so.
What great writing can do. Bruni's column on his disorder, a rare neurological degeneration caused by an "eye stroke," brought me to tears, and after all these years, to the realization that the only disability that prevented me from working at those editing jobs I never applied to was my own fear.
The obstacles and upsets that all people are faced with, as Bruni writes, do not stop them from doing what they do and pursuing their dreams, nor should they. The acknowledgment of our weaknesses only serves to remind us time and again of the beauty of the present moment.
There is no other.
After a year of waking up to the work of activism, the joy and the feeling of liberation of working toward a greater good, thanks to the new political (dis)order of the land that I now call home, after years waking up to myself stronger through the river of a journey of pain and discovery, on January 1st of this year I wrote "I have no fear" in big capital letters on the slate blackboard that hangs in the kitchen. It included a disclaimer: "Other than the big Ds: disease and death."
Thanks to Bruni's column, his description of what some people do living with a handicap much greater than mine, the strength and wonder in who they are and what they do, I can see now that even those fears are like the clouds of this grey winter day in the Midwestern plains, soft and part of the cosmos but without substance of their own.
I have no fear.
Only gratitude, for my disability is also your opportunity to embrace what is best in our humanity.

Red apple.

December 8, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)
It’s Christmas coming already. Somebody told me one day that life was like a roll of toilet paper: the closer you are to the end the faster it goes. Yesterday was summer and tomorrow is Christmas, France is a long way behind, and the circus, it closed then reopened, and the leaves are brittle now and we are together again but we were never apart.
The furnace rumbles in the basement, underneath the living room sofas. It rattles like an animal waking up, full of discontent. It has turned cold in this warm autumn. We put the tree in the front yard as I had dreamed. It is a tree made out of metal rods and plastic thread that you assemble from the bottom up, like a giant legged puzzle. Marcos found it on the curb at a house he worked on and picked it up and he gave it to us because he has no use for Christmas trees. The last and only other time we put it up it was in front of our motor home on the parking lot of the circus in Hugo, Oklahoma. We didn’t turn on the lights much because electricity was not on us. Here it is surrounded by the fruit trees I planted in a semi circle without wanting to when we moved to Columbia. The wind keeps toppling it down. It is beautiful, if a little smaller than I had imagined it would look in this perfect semi circle of life.
There is tiny red apple on one of the bare fruit trees, right next to the fake Christmas tree. It calls to the round shiny Christmas ornaments. If it’s still there after Christmas I will give it a name, for good measure.

Clamors.

July 3, 2017, Saint-Ismier (France.)

It is a summer of wide traveling, and I revel in my good fortune, and dwell in my silent wounds, that stubborn gift.
The landscape changes. The thoughts come and go, incessant, and the joy is there too. I am in the country I grew up in, France, visiting my aging mother, and I feel like a stranger, and the thoughts follow me, with the wild breath of the horizon on their tail.
The boys like the food here, and it is good, and we revel in it, and laugh. The bread, hard crust, the infinity of cheeses, raw milk at its best, the yoghurt aisles that stretch on and on, that sort of hard salami that you can only find here and that my mother sent me once in a package only to have it confiscated at customs and a stern note slipped in admonishing me that it is illegal to ship meat and I will be prosecuted (but I didn’t do anything! I protested silently, while also silently bemoaning the waste of such good food.)
I find the voices judging, they open old thoughts. It is all in my head.
The sights are wonders, majestic mountains here, the multifaceted beauty of Paris - but for its trail of memories, even the careful arrangement of macaroons in the window of a bakery. The art of eating for the sake of its pleasure has to please the eyes too. It is all an elegant feast.
I feel like a stranger, in my longing for the clamors of the New World plundered. My thoughts yank me there, the wounds whispering.

There.

April 20, 2017, Columbia (Missouri.)

There, laid bare.
They do that, now - sometimes.
I photograph them, if they’ll let me.
There, that’s it.

Hard velvet.

April 7, 2017, Mountain Home (Arkansas.)

Nothing beats the beauty of the southern Missouri hills in the late afternoon light of an early spring. The velvet of the view glistening on the palm of my eye.
But the beauty, it has strange fruits: in the hamlet of Hartville, the sign welcoming into town with an American flag and a Confederate flag, like sisters.
We made it back to the circus and life on the road for a few days, and back again, and I made it back into my candy store of photography. There is something about the circus that won’t let go of my imagination. It is nothing exotic; for us it was daily life for years and its routine still is. It may be the heart at the bottom of it, like a twin to mine.

It's crazy like that.

March 29, 2017, Hope (Arkansas.)

Photography is crazy like that.
The trees did not look like that. The light was interesting, but it came to life through the lens, or rather took a life of its own entirely, unfurling a view only my eye could envision.
Photography is crazy like that, and that’s why I’m in love with its song.

The sand castle.

March 28, 2017, Ashdown (Arkansas.)

We’re going to make a sand castle, he said.
I was walking to town when I saw them. An older man and a little girl, playing in a sandy area off the street in Ashdown, Arkansas, a small town off highway 67 in the southwestern corner of Arkansas, by Texarkana. I asked if I could take their picture and he said yes, this is my grand-daughter, she’s two, we’re going to make a sand castle, she lives right there behind the trees. They had a red plastic wagon and two five-gallon buckets they were filling with sand they scooped off the ground.
His name was Michael, and she was Sophie. He worked at the lumber and paper mills in the area, and was taking care of her until he had to leave for work.
There was sand in her red rain boot, he shook it off.
The morning was getting warm.
I remember Ashdown from the first year we worked with this circus, in 2008, there was a tornado coming and the lot flooded, and the thought of it is all dark and eerie.
This morning I went walking from the lot into town, a long slow walk, flat, past houses crumbling down and others well tended, closed shops, two men working on a car in their driveway, talking loudly, their bodies protruding from the hood, suit-stained grey, a guy in a pickup truck with a cowboy hat that disappeared into the truck’s ceiling, another with a long white beard driving an oversized farm tractor, passing me by, the shadow of someone saluting me with two fingers raised from behind the wheel of a grey Mustang down a deserted side street.
There are train tracks slicing along the town, and highway 67, and a river museum, a few fast food restaurants and a farm supplies store, and not much else.
As always we’ll be gone tomorrow.