a word, forgotten

I’ve made intermittent but admittedly half-hearted attempts to blog with words as much as I have with photography over the last few years, but have never seemed to be to accumulate much momentum - an odd fact, given my historical affinity for words.

The compulsion that’s leading me to write these words seems nascent and nebulous within me, but palpable nonetheless. As the seasons grudgingly give way to one another, my own life seems to be changing with much less of a fight. Home is a memory - a fragmented and pixelated color pattern on a piece of photo paper. Those that make up my few companions are both entering and leaving my life. I’m on a travel schedule that has instilled the sort of perpetual deja vu that Jack, the narrator from Fight Club, drowsily laments in the movie.

I can’t say that I’m rejuvenated or energized by any of this, but there is a sense of self inflicted ascetism as a result, perhaps the motivation for these words. I’m brought back, however, to the name of my photoblog, Liminality, meaning “the condition of being on a threshold or at the beginning of a process.” This term is often reserved for transitional stages in life, but I’m more and more convinced it is also perpetual. But the sense of being at the beginning of a process, at the beginning of a journey, on the threshold of something undifferentiated and unrealized, is cause for perpetual excitement.

I was fortunate enough to stumbe on the tour blog for one of my inspirations, Bjork, called “The Journey Itself is Home.” The title is taken from a haiku by Matsuo Basho: “The moon and sun are eternal travellers. Even the years wander on. A lifetime adrift in a boat, or in old age leading a tired horse into the years, every day is a journey, and the journey itself is home.”