I’ve spent the last two days too busy to find time for my Image Journal and I’ve been anxious to get back to it.  I’ve been doing my IJ’s for about two years now – not with any consistency (previous versions were done via my FB photo albums).  Entries would come in spurts – adrenaline rushes in creative output.  Sometimes they would get pushed down, sometimes they’d completely take over.  There was never any balance.  I would dig the work and hate the process.  That’s what this blog is really all about, taking control over the process.  Finding the balance.  Treating creativity like sustenance instead of a controlled substance.  And the fact that I was missing days so early in the process was starting to cause me stress.

My goal is to post five entries a week, ideally Monday through Friday.  It’s practice: in disciplining selfish creative surges, in working productive creative time into the repetitive routine of a work week, in creating time away from both to reconnect with other facets of my life.  Ideally, it’s about trying to create the best day ever each and every day.  String enough of them together, and you get the best week ever.  Put enough of those together and you get the best month ever and so on and so forth.

Creating the best day ever is like building that perfect bite of your favorite meal, the one that has every single key component, each in the exactly the right proportions, expertly balanced on your fork, making it’s way to your mouth.  You can taste it – you can feel what that experience is going to be like – before it ever happens.  And when it does happen, you close your eyes and it’s bliss baby!  Seventeen seconds or so of epicurean lusciousness.  And what do you do after that?  You go back for more.

Well, it’s gonna happen.  Sometimes some of that food is going to land in your lap.  All that means is a slight delay of game.  So, I’ll be at the table a little longer – what’s the rush anyway?  I like being at the table.  All I have to do is start over again and work on building another perfect bite.  And after that, I’m going to try it again.  And again.  You can’t let the mess bum you out.  The mess is inevitable.  The mess is GOING TO HAPPEN.   I’ll tell you what would really bum me out – what if that last bite did turn out to be the perfect bite?  What if yesterday really was my best day ever?  Think about it.  How much would that suck?

So, those two days, imperfect as they were, are behind me.  Each was a chance to improve upon it the next day.  And I arrive at today, as Jonathan would say, “just happy to be here”.  How does all this tie into today’s images?  They are frustration, pure and simple.  I had plans to do something and it didn’t work out.  I was crumpling up the attempts and about to toss them away.  I was about to give up.  And that’s when I saw something interesting.  Are they the best images I’ll ever take?  I hope not – but what I can tell you for sure is that they are far better than the ones I took five minutes before.