Paradise and My Upside-Down Education

How interesting to spend my whole life learning first hand, self taught, exploring inner and outer worlds and then to go to school instead of the other way around. A lifetime of extraordinary experiences, gleaned insights, foraged knowledge and loosely related fragments of understanding are suddenly given a framework to hold them all together. I can barely describe the experience - but all I can say is I have these odd moments of utter revelation - like this morning doing my History of Photography reading. Amazing.

All of my life, people have told me to narrow my energy and attention to one specific field, or focus on one specific project or idea within that field. And that is often necessary to get anything done at all. But something about that approach to life has always been antithetical to my nature. I don't like to put on blinders. I don't like exclusion. I resent having to limit my sights. I think it's dangerous.

And now I am beginning to think that only art and, more than that an art education, might be broad enough to begin to encompass all the different lifetimes I have led, the different journeys of my heart and mind...

Strange to end up here.... Damn - I might have to change from this diploma degree to a bfa, wouldn't that be funny!

Today, I was going through my photographs to collect a few for my landscape photo class, and inevitably I settled on my photographs of Guatemala. I wrote this to one of my closest friends an artist who lives there: "Am missing Guatemala, it really is my idea of paradise, I must say - the volcanoes rising out of the mist awaken some deep archetypal image in my soul..." Then I opened my History of Photography reading and this was the first thing I read: "We are bewitched by visions of the faraway and the fantastic because dreams of these Edens, of the overseas worlds of beauty and oddness and pleasure, seem to make life bearable. So our fantasies are sustained by a murmuring imagery of yearning." Nice when your school reading is relevant! 
Or how bout this, a fragment from another early morning email to a classmate, Heisue Chung, who had sent me her Photo History paper on Photography and Colonization - Powers of Possession  This is what I wrote:"It is painful to me to study history and see the trail of destruction wrought by the dominance of the white 'race' over the past centuries. Even the word race is another construct of white western men - so it is hard to even talk about without using their language of oppression. This too is a subject which I have spent a good deal of my life suffering about, and trying to understand. I think the subject of my paper perhaps is a psychological clue as to why....I also think we are at the end of it. Our way of life - based on that kind of rape and exploitation of people and the land is at its end. I fear the reaping of what we have sown...." And my history reading went on to address these very themes.