A Genesis of Intention

As the end of the year comes around, seeing all the automatic recaps for the year the different sites offer people to publish a visual journey for the year that is closing, and against my instincts not to do what everyone else is doing, I can't help but feel the desire to do the same. As a middle ground between my instincts and my desire I chose to curate and create mine in a blog. I know many do it blog format as well but I appreciate the liberty that his format grants you within a little looser constraints. Besides, this blog is an actual story item of one of the things I can pin on this year. I did publish a few posts last year but it was in a time I still wasn't sure what I wanted to do with the blog.

207 was in many ways bittersweet. In some ways I feel I've taken a leap forward but in some a step or two back. I don't know if these steps backwards will later be a form of tactical retreat, like the darkness that frames the light...I don't know.... I only know that its part of the bittersweet.

As the new year approaches and in the spirit of these type of blogs, I can't help but think on what comes ahead in 2018. I think because 2017 in the few steps that I managed to take forward, it was because I was intentional...Intentional... This word looms before me as I think forward to 2018.

It is because I went to seek out with more intention this past year that I'm setting myself some goals, and goals need a time frame for them to work best, and why not a whole damn year?

If you are one of the few that reads my blog, and one of the fewer still that reads this far, perhaps you can help me out in my adventure or path to accomplishing one of these intentions for 2018.

2017 for me was a year that I decided to become more intentional with my photography and start exploring it more, and as I did I started developing a habit organically that I later decided to structure into an actual habit, nay an actual ritual: Come shine come rain, I decided that every Saturday morning, at least every Saturday morning, I was gonna get up early pack my camera, drive or walk out to any given location, didn't matter which, even if I didn't know where to go, I would go out to take pictures.

And as I started doing this I started wanting to pen down these experiences on this blog.

The more you do something, the more you know yourself in relation to that thing. And I discovered that when I choose a location such as a mountain, a hike or a part of downtown, it was hard for me not to immediately visualize of what pictures I wanted to take there, but I've found that my idea of those pictures, could sometimes become a roadblock into finding the hidden treasures that each location holds for us. A blindside by a mental image that maybe didn't even exist. It was hard to push myself past it, and an hour into walking around, feeling anxious, I would get rid of that expectation because I would be so disappointed by it, that I would stop caring about it, and once I no longer cared about it, it was then that I would start finding beautiful pictures, beautiful at least to me. Pictures I was really proud of, that I really liked.

So I think this I will want to intentionally focus, to be able to manage myself through this cycle better so I can enter this "no-expectations" mindset, in which I feel I thrive, and maybe even find a way where I don't have to suffer through disappointment in order to enter this state of release of expectations.

I want to figure that out more in 2018. I understand this is a very personal journey, but maybe different sets of eyes see different sets of things, which is why in this blog post I include two sets of gallery shows.

The first are the photos that I took (last weekend) with this expectation blinding me,...I feel there's an awkwardness to these pictures, but yet something hiding behind them..