Oregon Autumn Dusk

Mov­ing a cir­cus to the next town might be eas­ier than mov­ing one infant the half the dis­tance. At least the giraffes can be cajoled to par­tic­i­pate. A human baby can­not be cajoled. They exist and through them runs a river of feel­ings that are attached to no story (!) and about all they “do” is be. Hav­ing pure feel­ings is a nec­es­sar­ily self-absorbed and uncon­scious endeavor. As we get older we look for ways to repro­duce this state of feel-everything, do-nothing, but it can’t be imbibed. I have found it has to arise from the inside. Maybe some­thing in us recalls the purity of hav­ing feel­ings with­out fear stop­ping them. Most of my wak­ing life is spent in my thoughts and not my feel­ings but fail­ing to get con­scious about my feel­ings does not make them go away. In fact the oppo­site hap­pens – they swell to ridicu­lous bub­bles inside. While babies can’t get con­scious about their feel­ings and they feel all of them, I have to know I am hav­ing a feel­ing – I have to feel the feel­ing – and I have to painstak­ingly do this one feel­ing (or two maybe) at a time. Weird. The price of being in purity with the feel­ings is that it is not pos­si­ble to be that and know it. As a non-baby we have feel­ings tar­nished with sto­ries and thoughts, but we get to know the won­der of that expe­ri­ence in a human body. Worth it espe­cially since we also get to see the babies have the pure form of feelings.

Any­way.

We decided to move the baby to a dif­fer­ent place than his nice warm lit­tle room in his warm, comfy house. We thought maybe a day away at the hot springs would do him good or at least do us good since he actu­ally does good every minute of the day. What mov­ing the baby does not entail is sim­ply chang­ing his geog­ra­phy. It involves repro­duc­ing his comfy lit­tle life in as much high def relief as pos­si­ble. I can get out the door with my cam­era and a week­end bag (ok and the food and a book and the other camera…hmmm). I won’t list what mov­ing him means. You either know or can imag­ine what this means(except that if you haven’t done it you really can’t imag­ine, but it will be super bor­ing if I list every­thing and this will turn in to a “dad-lovingly-recalls-baby-times” blog, and even though I do rem­i­nisce about each moment with him one instant after each moment has passed {and this is exactly as syrupy sick as you can imag­ine}, this blog won’t be that). I was increas­ingly exhausted get­ting to and from our rest­ful day away, and I was not alone, nor was I doing the hard work of actu­ally cre­at­ing from noth­ing, the food this baby would eat. I just car­ried stuff.

Then, in the midst of the rush­ing around, I stop because the light is over­whelm­ing and per­fect and the lake and the min­eral springs bath­house plop them­selves in front of me. I stop doing and make some pic­tures. The feel­ing I always get when I am work­ing with light and shut­ters and rules of thirds, that feel­ing flowed through me like the warm waters from the springs. The fatigue finds rest, the may­hem falls away and I am not think­ing. I am know­ing with­out think­ing that I am feel­ing joy.