The arrival of spring always feels immaculate and pristine. A spotless perfection full of hope and optimism, and fresh possibilities. I could spend several serene hours simply being content with this stranger we call the sun – letting it cover, lift, and warm me from within. This type of peace only comes during the first signs of this season.

We anticipate it for months and once it comes, it consumes us. It’s presence never leaves our minds and we rest with it, inhale it, inflate our hearts with it. This conscious appreciation fades with time and we become accustomed. We forget about the dead of winter. The dreariness, the chilled stillness, the dark and depression.  The shiver melts out of our bones and pours from our bodies as we accept this newfound sunlight. We drink the humidity and dance in warm rains. Then the buds come, and we embrace them. We love them like we love our favorite melodies, but once they’ve bloomed into flowers, we neglect to notice. We walk by, spoiled and ignorant, and viewing the world with summer soaked eyes. An over saturation of goodness turns into an immunity to the acknowledgement of beauty.

Spring is only sincerely appreciated after an honest winter.

Just as peace can only be fully understood after war, or joy can only be truly experienced after great sadness, we must shake hands with the worst in order to grasp the best. Despite the desire to flush our minds of past pain, we must allow remnants of the cold, violence, and anguish to remain, simply as a reminder. It is only then that we are able to value the flowers and entirely experience the season they represent.

Spring is here. The sun is shining today, and will again tomorrow. Birds are chirping happily and the warm wind is all embracing. Allow your porous soul to sponge up this season, and refuse to wring it dry.

-Author Unknown.

[Portland Oregon, Mt Tabor April 2013]

Mary and Joel are good friends of mine and photographers from Portland Oregon, they showed me their city, their spring, and let me loiter in their life last weekend as we attended Collaborations for a Cause, a conference for photographers and NGOs. I owe them the biggest thank you, and am waiting to return the favour on the east coast. The weekend was the end of a two week trip west, and now back in Guelph, Ontario I’m buying memory cards that I should have bought tax free in Oregon, and getting ready for weddings to start. Many photos to come this summer, many to make, many to share.

adelante caminante

“I was halfway across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future.”

On the Road – Jack Kerouac

A poem compresses much in a small space and adds music, thus heightening its meaning. The city is like poetry: it compresses all life, all races and breeds, into a small island and adds music and the accompaniment of internal engines. [The port city of Hong Kong] is without any doubt the greatest human concentrate on earth, the poem whose magic is comprehensible to millions of permanent residents but whose full meaning will always remain elusive.

- E-B White

“A photograph is both a pseudo-presence and a token of absence. Like a wood fire in a room, photographs – especially those of people, of distant landscapes and faraway cities, of the vanished past – are incitements to reverie. The sense of the unttainable that can be evoked by photographs feeds directly into the erotic feelings of those for whom desirability is enhanced by distance. The lover’s photograph hidden in a married women’s wallet, the poster of a rock star tacked up over an adolescent’s bed, the campaign-button image of a politician’s face pinned on a voter’s coat, the snapshots of a cabdriver’s children clipped to the visor – all such talismanic uses of photographs express a feeling both sentimental and implicitly magical: they are attempts to contact or lay claim to another reality”

- Susan Sontag.

This is the first of a weekly blog series meant to bring the bits of  literary gems I find into context with my own photographs. I’ve been doing it for some time here on this blog but now I have a clever name, and weekly post expectancy. I’ve created this slideshow not to start this series, but to compile more than a year of my life and travels into one place. As this new series and the idea for this slideshow came together in fusion it just seems fitting to start by releasing both at the same time. I hope you like it.

[Canon 5D 35mm f1.4 | Keelung Taiwan | April 2012]