Expedition Oklahoma

This Land is My Land.... This Land Isn't Your Land...

This land is my land... this land was your land, in the past, but we divided it up for all the immigrants from europe in the 19th century.    There are chapters in History books called "Westward Expansion"  while the narrative is one of assimilation and genocide for Native Peoples.  The massacres are overlooked.  Abraham Lincoln's hanging of the Sioux Warriors is overlooked. 

 The west was fenced to keep the cows in, the buffalo were killed to destroy the Native way of life, killed by the millions.  In the 1840s Randolf Marcy called the west the Great American Desert, unfit for habitation.  The last part of the world to be settled, these Great Plains of ours.   The railroads came in as destroyers to bring the immigrants into this empty land.  They were brought in to form that connection, that Manifest Destiny?  But whose destiny?   

"Jesus Says Keep Out"  -  I love this photo, the three crosses, indicating Christianity and the persecution suffered by one to save the world,  while this religion was used as a tool to steal land, enslave and murder.  Where in the Bible does it say "Thou Shalt Put Up Fences on the land." Whenever I see something amazing on someone's property that I want to shoot, my initial impulse is to jump the fence and go do what I like.   Mainly because my intent is not to harm someone's landscape or poach their animals. I just want to walk on the land, to feel it under my feet.  To get the "shot" from a new perspective.   If you own land, I want you to realize that you don't.   No one can possibly truly own land.  Fee Simple doesnt' mean anything if the government fails.  Land ownership is meaningless in war or tragedy. It is a beautiful lie we tell ourselves, isn't it?  

Watch them in zoos, behind fences... just watch them.  But remember why we have fences.  Because...  we like to eat them.  Omnivores and all that nonsense...

This area is known for the Chisholm Trail, beef driven north.   Put behind fences for steak.  I like steak.  I like steak a lot.  In fact I have no issues with beef.  The noble cow sacrificing itself to be a slab of  tasty goodness on my plate.   

Whose rocks? The National Parks have the mindset that removing rocks is a sin.  In some ways I find it interesting that the Environmentalist perspective seems to be one of the pristine, untouched landscape.  The idea that man hasn't altered and shaped the landscape for centuries is just silly.  The idea that man is separate from nature.  The idea that men are not animals, territorial, biologically driven animals is also something that modern society doesn't address.   How different are people from nature?  We're not, really.  We're highly adapted products of our environment.  I mean how far can a naked ape with a big head go without tools and technology?  

Reflections on Solitude

I spend a lot of time posting quotes with my photography because sometimes I feel that these great people or writers, are so much more eloquent than myself.  That they phrase something so succinctly that it speaks to me at the most deepest of levels.  They say things in a phrase that would take me a paragraph.  They express the depth of their feelings and I'm left wishing I had that ability.   In the last week I've lost the passion for my 2012 project although I have a photo for everyday.  I'm physically exhausted and shouldn't be writing here when I have laundry to put up and literature to read.  

 

In the world we live in now, everyone is a writer.  Everyone publishes, I don't write a lot on here often.  But, occasionally I feel the need to be more personal.  Today, for the first time I had an email from a lady who said that she appreciated what I wrote, when I was feeling so down last week. What little I wrote...   I used quotes and very little of myself.    

To some degree I enjoy solitude.  Solitude is enjoying time with yourself, while loneliness is that aching emptiness of needing someone.  For the most part I enjoy going and doing things alone.  I like the connection of people but I don't demand someone be at my side in leisure activities all the time.  Sometimes it is easier and less tiresome to push people away rather than work at a relationship.  Sometimes you push someone away for self preservation as much as you love them, or you push them away because deep down you believe that you aren't the one who will ever meet their needs.  It is hard to untangle emotions that have held you tied up for years.  It is hard to disconnect when you've never had to.  Passion and reason aren't always friends.  

How can your life crumble away in a day, or a week? How can such a drastic change happen so quickly in a week.  One week you're home and fine and the next day, you're crazy.  I've decided that the more passionate a person is the more dramatic they become.  When you're normal self loses all rational thought and pure emotion rules, nothing makes sense.  You lose that filter that prevents those hurtful words that come out.  No matter how much something is explained it doesnt' make sense, because your emotions want to hear one thing and your mind hears another.  We ignore reality and choose emotions and cause each other pain.   

I am tired.  What do we have to look forward to in life.  I think as you enter your early to mid-30s those questions weigh on your mind.  What kind of life do you want to live? What do you want to accomplish?  Are you making the people in your life happy or miserable?  What role do people have in your life?  I know it takes anger to keep fighting and anger makes fear, and silence creates more silence.  But sometimes, silence creates peace.  Solitude lets you sit back and see what is necessary in your life and what is important.   I've spent years desiring this magical thing, called "Freedom," this desire for space to be who I truly was.  I've spent years believing that the negative spaces was what I needed in life.  I've desired others and I've mostly desired answers.  I believe the answers will come with that space.  If I sit and write, I give myself freely to the world, uncaring of the readers thoughts or opinions.  If I sit and write I give my opinions, emotions and desires to the world.

What do we as humans fear in life,  we fear death.  Death is a certainty and end to any uncertainty, but hopefully we have to enjoy living to get there. If we fear to live, we will die with that fear. Sometimes it takes a step into the unknown to see what really matters.  It may surprise you, what you find.  

Forgiving is rediscovering the shining path of peace that at first you thought others took away when they betrayed you.  ~Dodinsky 

Being too forgiving is a blessing and a curse, but I'd rather be too forgiving than carry a decade of unforgiving around in my heart.  I feel sorry for people who aren't forgiving.  Doesn't the bible preach forgiveness?  Yet, you realize that anger rules our society much more than forgiveness.  

 

Alone in Texoma

 

 

The walls we build around us to keep sadness out also keeps out the joy.  ~Jim Rohn

 

 

Eventually you come to realize that most people aren't looking for a fight but for someone to surrender to.  ~Robert Brault

 

 

Any emotion, if it is sincere, is involuntary.  ~Mark Twain

 

 

Where there is anger, there is always pain underneath.  ~Eckhart Tolle

 

 

Holding on to anger is like grasping a hot coal with the intent of throwing it at someone else; you are the one who gets burned.  ~Buddha

 

 

The one permanent emotion of the inferior man is fear - fear of the unknown, the complex, the inexplicable.  What he wants above everything else is safety.  ~Henry Louis Mencken

 

 

Fear makes strangers of people who would be friends.  ~Shirley Maclaine

 

I didn't want my picture taken because I was going to cry.  I didn't know why I was going to cry, but I knew that if anybody spoke to me or looked at me too closely the tears would fly out of my eyes and the sobs would fly out of my throat and I'd cry for a week.  I could feel the tears brimming and sloshing in me like water in a glass that is unsteady and too full.  ~Sylvia Plath, The Bell Jar

 

It's so curious:  one can resist tears and 'behave' very well in the hardest hours of grief.  But then someone makes you a friendly sign behind a window, or one notices that a flower that was in bud only yesterday has suddenly blossomed, or a letter slips from a drawer... and everything collapses.  ~Colette

 

 

If we must part forever,
Give me but one kind word to think upon,
And please myself with, while my heart's breaking.
~Thomas Otway

 

It is often hard to bear the tears that we ourselves have caused.  ~Marcel Proust

My husband and I are separating....  all these quotes are with him in mind.  I hope, we can learn to become friends and gain the trust we  need in the future.   Perhaps, absense makes the heart grow fonder.   

 

Putting My Misery On Display

So I went down near Waurika today and ended up driving country roads, it was a beautiful day and truly feels like spring.   I was not in a beautiful mood.  This is what happens when I put my "misery on Display" which is also the title to a song by Gary Allan which I like.  

God can heal a broken heart, but He has to have all the pieces.  ~Author Unknown

Have you ever been hurt and the place tries to heal a bit, and you just pull the scar off of it over and over again.  ~Rosa Parks

God puts rainbows in the clouds so that each of us - in the dreariest and most dreaded moments - can see a possibility of hope.  ~Maya Angelou

How strange that Nature does not knock, and yet does not intrude!  ~Emily Dickinson, letter to Mrs. J.S. Cooper, 1880

I really have nothing good to say.  I didn't go here for a beautiful spring drive.  I go to photograph when my world is falling apart sometimes.  I don't have any quotes.  I don't have anything to say about these photographs. 

Sometimes I don't want to be me anymore....  

I wish I could get understanding instead of anger.  I wish I knew who I was and why I feel the way I do. 

I just want to not feel old and broken, I want to feel peace all the time - I want trust, understanding and stability... 

Project 2012: 2/23/2012

Day 53  isn't this the most awesome thing you've ever seen? 

Project 2012: 2/21/2012

Day 52  Out of Gas...  you should try not to do this when you live 10 miles from a gas station in any direction....  because you never know when the gas station will have the pumps turned off.  

Project 2012: 2/20/2012

Day 51 - it was actually my Baby Boy's birthday but this picture wasn't taken until 11:58 realizing I had not taken a photo that day.  So here is my "fat baby boy" on the couch.   

Project 2012: 2/19/2012

Day 50...my sister made homemade guacamole.  Which I love.   This is an instagram photo. 

Tulsa

 

 

Finally! I made it to Tulsa, which is a part of Oklahoma, I discovered!  

 

 

Me...  photographer was my brother because I'm not that talented yet.  

 

 

downtown Tulsa with the fisheye lens

 

 

 

 

 

Project 2012: 2/18/2012

Day 49 we celebrated Justin's 11th birthday early... because in his opinion he just would be too tired to worry about playing with his presents on Monday night.