Let's Do This (1 of 4)

For years now, I’ve wanted to write so many words, to YELL them into the cosmos actually, but yelling is unproductive and I haven’t known what to say without coming off as ranting, so I’ve kept the words inside of me instead. However, on the heels of having written my recent posts about my weariness with others’ commentary on my diet and realizing that I’d misread some dear friends… I decided it’s time to go ahead and get everything out in the open all at once and be done with it.

Let’s talk about bodies and weight, the inevitable companions to the foods we eat.

I’ll go first: I was a scrawny kid who was sometimes downright scraggly during growth-spurts - all long-limbed bones stretched over skin without any muscle. I stayed slim until college when I gained some weight because my meal plan for the dining hall was all-you-could-eat (which I naturally took to mean cookies!) After college I went on birth control and put on a little more weight. Then I got married, gained the majority of my weight and grew to my heaviest. (It wasn’t a particularly healthy time for me emotionally - I was adjusting to my first job out of college, beginning my marriage, setting up our first home, and placing all sorts of gendered pressure on myself about the wife I thought I needed to be).

From birth I’ve had a fraught relationship with my stomach. In high school I once joked: ‘I guess I’ll never know if I’m pregnant, because I’m dizzy and nauseous all the time anyway!’ (ba dum, ching!) No one was talking about food intolerance then - and I was often anxious anyway which created plenty of tummy trouble too - so it wasn’t until I was 27 that I started learning about the link between food and some of the symptoms I’d felt through my life. When I went off sugar and dairy I plummeted back to my original weight (before college-cookies, birth control, and marriage). This was as surprising to me as it was to everyone around me (some of whom were alarmed), but the rapid weight loss didn’t worry me because for the first time, I wasn’t dizzy, nauseous, or cramping anymore. That’s how I knew that I was on the right track.

In the years that followed I got to know my body more and learned to listen to it better. Through all of this I learned what my body’s natural fluctuations were. With the help of my bathroom scale I found a 10-pound range that felt right. I’ve always kept a scale around because it’s been a helpful way for me to be honest with myself about my mental health. Anytime I start to peak over the top end of my range, it’s time to take a good look at how much emotional eating I’ve been doing (eating has traditionally been my preferred maladaptive way to cope with stress). By tracking my weight I can sometimes head-off bigger problems before they show up (like pushing myself too far with my emotional eating and then having some sort of health flare-up).

Last summer when tension at work was so thick you could cut it with a knife and Benjamin and I were preparing for our departure from the city, my stress levels were at threat level midnight (bonus points to anyone who knows that reference! DM me if you do, I want to know who you are!). I ate and ate and ate and ate some more. Without hesitation I can assuredly say that it’s the most solidly sustained, overeating I’ve ever done in my life. Even as I felt how uncomfortable it made me (new unfamiliar symptoms began that I later wished I’d questioned earlier instead of adding to the ongoing destruction) I kept eating. The truth is, I was coping so poorly with all of my stress that even a rational check-in with my scale for it to say ‘hey girl! you’re getting to the top of your range. maybe it’d be a good time to check in and see what demons you’re trying to escape with all that junk food you’re eating!’ couldn’t have made a difference. I was so out of touch with any of my internal or external support systems by that point.

That’s the best place to start an honest introduction to you about food and bodies - with an overview of my changing body through the years, how I’ve learned to listen and adapt to its needs, and by confessing that I’ve traditionally used food to cope with challenging situations and emotions. But this is just the beginning and I have a lot more to share (and confess) in this arena.

Click here to read Part 2: Eating My Feelings.

Typewriters & Sleep-Wake Cycles

When night fell at the end of the day that I’d found Ollie I was much too excited to sleep. First, I couldn’t go to sleep because I was filled with ideas of essays to write about Maggie. Once I wrapped up all my writing and fell asleep in the wee hours of the morning, I couldn’t stay asleep because I was too excited to get up and playing with Ollie the next day. For those, and other reasons (we got up early one morning to look at Venus! She was gorgeous!), I kept having too many late nights and began running low on sleep that week.

A few nights later, Benjamin invited me to come to bed on time so I could catch up on some sleep - I dragged my feet, as is our usual routine. Then suddenly another typewriter essay came to mind that was insisting on being written. This made me quite eager to get into bed! Since we’ve been guests in others’ homes, I’ve been doing all of my writing late at night when the house is asleep and all is quiet and not distracting.

As he closed his book and turned out the light to go to sleep, he rolled over and gently encouraged me not to stay up too late. I told him I had writing to do! Instead, I ended up dawdling by reading all manner of things about typewriters online - a practice that’s become routine since we found Maggie at the end of November.

As I was putting all of my typewriter history questions to the internet and reading all sorts of interesting tidbits, it suddenly hit me: Benjamin said he’d do Maggie’s first photoshoot the next morning! Deciding I definitely wanted to be well-rested to enjoy the shoot to the maximum (brief though it would be), I went straight into business mode. I diligently set to the task of writing my latest essay so that I could get to bed, get good rest, and be ready to collaborate on Maggie’s photoshoot (I do so love being Benjamin’s photography assistant, regardless of the subject).

It amused me to realize that typewriters were both the reason I wasn’t sleeping (too excited! too much to read and learn! stories to write!) and also the only reason for putting myself to bed promptly to get good rest. In relaying this story to Benjamin the next morning, I let him know that typewriters have become a powerful motivator in my life right now, so if he needs anything done, all he has to do is tie it in with a typewriter somehow, and I’m on board!

A Reacquaintance

As Benjamin labored over Ollie at the little table in our guest room, I fell into a deep sleep before dinner. As I slept, the sun lowered behind the trees and the light grew dim outside our wall of windows. Benjamin abandoned his window-side post to seek the brighter artificial light at the kitchen table and continued his work on the typewriter. It was Friday and Ollie had only come home with us the Sunday before, but Benjamin still expected to have Ollie finished by the end of the weekend.

Later, Benjamin came into our room to gently rouse me from my sleepy state and announce that dinner was ready. Knowing my proclivity for dawdling when waking up, he whispered excitedly to me ‘…and there’s a surprise waiting for you.” My interest thus piqued, I groggily made my way into the kitchen to find Ollie sitting in my chair at the dinner table. It took Benjamin five weeks (of a rather patchy work schedule) to get Maggie in good working order so it seemed much too soon for him to be finished with Ollie already.

Yet there he sat, polished and gleaming. He was ready for his first test-run!

After dinner, we pulled Ollie onto the kitchen table and loaded his feeder with paper. While Maggie takes some finesse to load up, Ollie takes paper like a champ. Benjamin warned me that some of the keys were still a smidge sticky, but that he expected them to work their way loose with the repetition of use. As with Maggie, my first ever letter on Ollie was a thank-you letter to my grandmother - the benefactor of both typewriters. Benjamin stood behind me and looked on as I typed, watching for any sticky points so that he’d know what to focus on during future tune-ups.

While there were some sluggish, sticky keys, the most surprising development was that the carriage and key lock would activate itself seemingly at random! The keys and carriage auto-locked no less than 6 times on a 1-page letter! It was easy to decide to go ahead and permanently disable the feature, which is actually how we found the typewriter to begin with. While we assumed it had come loose (although we couldn’t tell how) the debacle certainly made me wonder if my grandfather deactivated it years ago to permanently solve the problem himself!

Besides the randomized auto-lock feature, Ollie definitely loosened up as we went along. It was a treat to reacquaint myself with his familiar feel and sounds. Other features were new to me - having only used him as a curious toy when my brother and I were kids, I’d never properly learned about all he had to offer.

With the first letter successfully behind me (despite the hiccups) Benjamin settled in on working out some of the finer details while I brought Maggie and my letter-writing box in to make the kitchen table letter-writing central. There I lingered late into the night, flanked by my two typewriters, listening to chill music, and keeping all of my favorite snail-mail supplies close at hand. Ollie will need a little more TLC at some point (he’s still not operating as smoothly as Maggie), but for now he’s more than serviceable. We’re getting on swimmingly and enjoying each others company. It’s great to be back in the company of an old friend.

Finding Ollie

Two years ago I was in a salvage store in Northwest Seattle when I came across an old, familiar face. It was weathered and its condition was questionable at best, especially for the price. It was difficult to justify bringing it home with my limited knowledge about its state and what it would need to regain its health, so I left it there on the small table near the aisle where it sat. But I called my dad soon after and asked: did my grandmother still have the old West German Olympia typewriter that my brother and I played with when we were kids? After checking with her he let me know that the typewriter was long-gone. This was disappointing news although not entirely unsurprising. Why keep a typewriter that no one’s used in a few decades?

During the Christmas and New Year holidays my brother sat next to me at the kitchen table on the first evening of my acquaintance with Maggie. I mentioned to him that part of my joy in discovering this beautiful girl was that I’d asked before about the old Olympia only to be told that it was gone. He flatly refused to believe it and told me he didn’t think that could possibly be true. While I saw his point, what reason did I have to think my grandmother was mistaken? I’d already given into disappointment about it two years back, but he wasn’t so easily convinced.

Days later I found myself back in my old bedroom hunting for a mystery suitcase that my grandmother had a vague notion might be in there but she couldn’t be sure. The only place I hadn’t looked that could hold something suitcase sized was behind the door of a child-sized wardrobe. When I opened it to peer inside, I couldn’t believe my eyes. There, stored with an old board game and other items that didn’t even register (I was too excited to take much else in), was the old Olympia - the one I’d been told was long since gone!

With my breath caught in my throat I squeezed to lean into the tiny wardrobe. An old board-game sat atop it and I removed it and set it aside. It took some doing to lift the heavy typewriter out from the odd angle at which I’d approached the wardrobe, but soon I had it in my arms. With the board-game re-situated where I’d found it and everything else in its place, I delightedly carried the typewriter from the room and happily announced my discovery to my grandmother and Benjamin.

Although I explained to each of them that this is the typewriter that taught me to love typewriters, I still suspect that neither really understand the love I feel for these machines - all the hope and possibility they contain and the soundtrack of cadence and rhythm that creates the backdrop against which to work. It’s the feel of pressing the keys and pushing the bar back and forth. Sounds of hammering strokes and dinging bells. To be sure, I’m grateful for my little laptop - it does everything I ask of it - but sometimes only a typewriter will do. Typewriters scratch an itch that laptops can’t hope to reach.

Hidden Treasure

There were baubles and beads of all colors. One large piece of pink, studded costume jewelry seemed like quite too much for anyone to wear but when I tried it on we were surprised that it actually had its own unique charm. Many of the earrings were ear-screws (my very favorite kind earring) and an orange pair with plenty of beaded dangles made delightful rustling noises beneath my ears as I shook my head. Some of the pieces are in need of repair, including the three-strand, black, beaded choker that fell apart in my lap as I attempted to fasten it around my neck. The old, brittle thread snapped at my touch. We made plans with Benjamin, who joined us midway through our jeweled affair, to repair a couple of pieces.

No one considers me much of a wearer of jewelry, which is fair since I’m not often seen sporting it. But I do very much enjoy costume jewelry and it always catches my eye in antique stores. My traditional favorites, the ones I always look for in local shops, are brooches. But as I slipped an extravagantly long strand of orange glass beads over my head, and wound it around my neck a time or two, I was reminded of how much my inner kid loves the weight and clinking movement of a strand of beads swinging from my neck.

Two pairs of costume earrings with emerald green and clear sparklers attracted a decent amount of our attention. One pair was round while the other was rectangular in shape. We pre-assessed them in favor of the rectangles but upon trying them on discovered that the round ones were actually a better fit for my face. Of all the items I browsed through, these are not ones that I would wear, but of course I thought of St. Patrick’s Day. It wasn’t long before my grandmother commented how perfect they would be for St. Patrick’s Day-so I hatched up an idea! What if we each wore a pair of the complimentary earrings on St. Patrick’s day and then exchanged pictures with each other?! She was game and we divvied up the green sparkling earrings accordingly.

Despite my overly casual, thrift-store, comfort-oriented style, I am now in possession of earrings (which I haven’t worn in probably 10 years) including some dangly ones! There’s also a few brooches, including some wildly sparkly ones, beads, and a bracelet befitting a mermaid. I will wear them when I dress up and when I dress down. Basically I will wear them when I feel like it, just for fun, or when I need a bit of an emotional boost. One doesn’t need to dress up or dress well to enjoy wearing great-grandmother’s jewelry.

As we finished looking at the jewelry, trying it on, and laughing together, she told me she thought there might be some more jewelry in a suitcase in the same bedroom, although she wasn’t sure where the suitcase might be or if there even was one. She suggested I go looking for it. I returned to the small room and began to look around. In a small space it didn’t seem likely that there were many places a suitcase could hide. There was one suitcase in the room and it didn’t contain any jewelry. The closet was suitcase-free. The only other spot that could hold a suitcase was in the door of a child-sized wardrobe. I opened it up and didn’t find a suitcase full of costume jewels, but a truly wonderful treasure nonetheless.

Playing Dress Up

According to my father, January 6th, Epiphany, is the last reasonable day to have a Christmas tree in one’s home. The liturgical calendar, from Advent to Epiphany, was our only argument against his humbuggery each year. Although he enjoyed seeing the tree lit up with all the family ornaments adorning it, he was always the last one ready to put up the tree and the first one ready to take it down.

So, in keeping with our traditional arrangement, I knew the day had come for me to take down the decorations that I’d taken responsibility for this year on my family’s humble estate. I started with my grandmother’s house, with its simple decor of wreath, nativity, and a few other seasonal sundries. Even with the small smattering of items, I was finished much more quickly than expected. I still had ample time before lunch, so I asked her if she wanted to play with her mother’s jewelry.

When I’d pulled out the Christmas decorations out of my old bedroom a few weeks before, I’d noticed a box of jewelry on the bed and I asked her about it. It was natural that it caught my eye right away because I have so many fond memories of sitting with my grandmother at her vanity and playing with her jewelry when I was a girl. I wondered if this jewelry was hers or my great-grandmother’s. She confirmed that it was her mother’s and mentioned that she almost donated it to a local garage sale once since it wasn’t getting used, but decided she couldn’t part with it.

After thinking about it for a couple of days I mentioned to her that the thought of the jewelry winding up in a garage sale left me feeling rather sad. I let her know that if she ever thought about garage selling it again that I’d like a chance to look through it first; she encouraged me to do so. This is what led to us sitting together in her living room, on January 6th, playing with jewelry together like we did when I was a kid; she at 90 and me at 36, trying on jewelry and talking about each piece as we pulled it out of the box.

Maggie's Past Lives

Maggie had an interesting life long before she came to me. She lived in Arizona before arriving in west Texas with her recently relocated mistress around 1946. At the time, my grandparents were newly married and owned a local cafe in town and chain letters were all the rage. With the cafe being centrally located and typewriters being scarce in most households, my 18 year-old grandmother identified a business opportunity. She purchased Maggie for $25, about the same amount they paid in rent for their apartment each month, and began typing copies of chain-letters for customers in the cafe. She charged 25¢ per page and was able to recover the cost of the typewriter in no time.

My mom remembers my grandfather using Maggie often enough and my mom used her for a time as well before Maggie fell into disuse. During the hot west Texas summers, their home was cooled by a swamp-cooler. Over time, the damp air caused Maggie’s case to start smelling musty so at some point my grandmother moved her out to the garage where she waited patiently for me to find her.

At the end of 2018, 91 years after she was manufactured and about 72 years after she came to live with my grandmother, she was given fresh life thanks to my love and wanting of her, Benjamin’s diligent work to restore her, and a new name for her new life: Maggie Underwood - the typewriter I’d long hoped for who was there all along just waiting to meet me.

Meet Maggie

The name search started with a list of the top baby names for girls in 1927. Once I had a shortlist of names that might suit her, I considered the nicknames one could derive from each of them. Naturally, we (my brother and sis-in-law helped) tried the candidates with her surname, Underwood, to make sure it had a nice ring to it. ‘Margaret’ made the short list but wasn’t one of my favorites. ‘Maggie’ seemed nice though. It didn’t take long for me to derive ‘Magpie’ from Maggie and then I knew I had a strong candidacy for a name and nickname pairing!

One of my early reading books featured a magpie. As a result I’ve long enjoyed magpies themselves as well as how the word feels on my tongue. Magpie was a nice fit because she’s black, has some shiny bits (magpies are reportedly attracted to shiny things, a misnomer as it turns out, but still a pervasive stereotype), and (as my brother dryly pointed out) she’s very noisy! The more I thought about Magpies (their intelligence, curiosity, and chatty nature) the more I liked it - but I decided I’d better sleep on it.

The next morning Benjamin and I were talking about her and he mentioned something about slugs. I stopped him. Slugs? He informed me that ‘slugs’ are the metal-bits that strike the page with each keystroke. I stopped him again and whipped out my phone for a quick internet search. Are slugs part of a magpie’s diet? They are. That’s when I knew I had it. She’s black, shiny, chatty, and has a belly full of slugs!

This is my Maggie, my Magpie, my new-old friend. I’m anticipating so many wonderful adventures with her. I can’t wait to keep spending time together generating all sorts of creative and wonderful things to bless others with and make the world a little bit better place, one typed page at a time.

The Right One

Benjamin and I arrived in Texas a couple of days before Thanksgiving. The following week, we found ourselves tackling my grandmother’s garage. A whole wall of shelving was coming loose from the wall and things were leaning uncomfortably close to the car. It was time to pull everything off for sorting and deal with those precarious shelves. As we were removing items from the shelves I lifted a faded, hard-sided, black box and was surprised to discover that it was heavy for its size. I sat it down on the garage floor near the other items and warned Benjamin that I didn’t know what it was but that it was rather heavy. He looked over at it with a glance and told me it was a typewriter.

In my memory, I swear time stood still because that’s how monumental the moment felt. But in actuality, I think I probably got really animated and excited instead; I was ready to open it right away! We opened the case and inside was the most beautiful, old, black typewriter. I couldn’t believe it. We sat it aside to continue our work, but my wheels were already turning. What condition was it in? Could it be made to work again? Where did it come from?! I couldn’t wait to find out more about it.

Admittedly, I was baffled to find it. In my last post I described all of the glorious treasures we had to play with when we visited our grandparents and I assure you that I availed myself of them. I’ve always taken great delight in exploring, rooting through, and uncovering treasures. I like to see the storage rooms, drawers, closets and other such tucked away places where imagination and wonder can hide. Because the items at my grandparents’ house were so novel and exciting, due to their unique interests and work, the payoff was consistently quite high - so I snooped, explored and treasure-hunted around there a lot. This is why my surprise was so great upon finding something I’d never seen before. How had this typewriter never once come across my exploratory path?!

In the days that followed we had plenty of time to learn more about it. Benjamin identified it as a 1927(!) Underwood Portable 4-Bank. He began working on it and painstakingly, scrubbed, cleaned, oiled, polished, and restored every inch of the beautiful machine and its case over the course of the next five weeks. The typewriter itself was dirty with age but generally in good working order. The case, however, looked so rough and faded that I was unsure if much could be done for it. Instead, Benjamin stunned me by restoring the deep black color by moisturizing the dry fabric with some shoe-polish wax. He glued down the edges and seams that were coming up and trimmed loose threads. He polished the metal pieces and y’all, he even crafted a new leather handle to replace the one that was long-since missing.

She is a vision of beauty and a gift of love. I typed my first letters on her on January 4th and I’m itching to type so many more! The first couple of rounds on her were a little rough. It took some time to adjust to her feel, find where the keys are, and intuit how she handles, but I’m learning her. Just one day later I was already so much speedier and more assured. I’ve named her Maggie, which is short for Magpie.

A Love of Typewriters

Many weekends of my childhood were spent at my grandparents’ house. They lived about 20 minutes outside of town in a smaller town in the small house where my mother grew up. Their home and surrounding property were a treasure-trove of things waiting to be discovered.

My grandfather was a tinkerer and collected all manner of parts and pieces of things. He had a small workshop, a detached garage, and a fenced-in area we called the ‘junk pile.’ There were random pieces of lumber for building things with, mechanical parts for tinkering with, and recycling materials for imagining with. With the lumber pieces he built us rubber-band guns, bows with arrows, sling-shots and tree-houses. With wheels and a handle from an old push mower he built a go-kart. An empty 2-liter coke bottle (with the side cut out just right and mounted on some wood) became a bathtub for my Barbie. Once, an empty refrigerator box became our rocket-ship.

Old linens from my grandmother also contributed to our endless imaginative play. Forgotten child-sized rusted bed-springs covered with old pillows were our trampoline out in the yard. Old blankets hung from the clothesline were our fort. An old nylon tablecloth spread out across the grass with the sprinkler running was our homemade slip-n-slide. The pecans that covered the ground underneath poked through at our knees, but we had too much fun to really care.

My grandmother worked at the local bank in their small town and my grandfather did some maintenance work there off and on. Over the years, they’d collected an interesting assortment of bank detritus - so my brother and I grew up playing with old lock-boxes, ledger sheets, deposit slips, coin counters and other odd things. They also had the usual accumulation of a lifetime’s worth of household items, having lived in the same place for just about all of their married lives.

I loved the adventurous nature of the place. There was never a shortage of opportunity for imaginative play both indoors and out. My childhood was richer because of this homestead and the small town it sat in where we could roam freely.

One (of many) of the lasting impacts that these experiences gave to me was a love of typewriters. I grew up playing with a West German Olympia SM9 Portable Typewriter. As a result, typewriters became both familiar and beloved to me. I love the feel of the keys as you strike them, the sound of the slugs hitting the page, the clicking sound as you rotate the paper in through the platen, the bell that dings at the end of each line, and the smooth feel of sliding the carriage back across to start another row.

For about 8 years now I’ve low-key been looking at typewriters. I never could pull the trigger because refurbished typewriters are expensive and I didn’t feel like I had enough knowledge to gamble on a non-refurbished one without knowing if I could get it working. Once, about 6 or 7 years ago I got a cheap typewriter off of Craigslist, but the feel of it was all wrong. We just didn’t click and I didn’t keep it.

Two years ago I came across an Olympia in a salvage store. My face lit up at the joyful reunion with an old, familiar friend. But it was in really rough shape for the price and once again, without knowing anything about typewriter refurbishment, I walked away. It prompted a phone call to my dad though, to ask about the old Olympia. Did my grandmother still have it? He checked in with her and told me that she thought it was long-gone. I was disappointed but not surprised. No one had used it in years. Sporadically, I continued to look at typewriters online every now and then without ever finding the right one.

Portrait of a Photographer

I started with my first camera around age 8 and was quite a shutterbug! I shot with that same Kodak 35mm kid-camera all the way through high school, mostly photos of people and places. I left for college just as digital cameras were still taking flight and before smart-phone cameras. I mistakenly thought I'd outgrown my kid-camera, but didn't yet have a great solution for replacing it.

During college I met the one who would become both my life-partner and a talented professional photographer: Benjamin. He got me started with my first digital camera in 2006, a compact little pearly pink point and shoot. Having a camera in hand that provided real-time feedback via the display screen accelerated my learning dramatically and helped me further develop my eye for composition.

In 2011, I graduated to a micro 4/3 Olympus, my first camera with exchangeable lenses! It was compact and lightweight, but allowed me to experiment with the building blocks of photography: shutter speed, aperture, ISO and varied focal lengths. This helped me grow my technical skill.

In 2016 I graduated to a Nikon DSLR. I inherited it from Benjamin on 'manual' and didn't know how to change the settings to cheat with auto-settings (and didn't bother looking it up), so I finally forced myself to learn how to shoot manually! This was just the push I needed to help me understand shutter-speed, aperture, and ISO even better.

But the one part of digital photography that I never grew to like was the editing. I've developed a great eye as an editing assistant and can scan through several hundred photos in no time, weeding out the great from the lackluster. But I never developed the skills, confidence, (or more accurately the patience) for taking my photos all the way to completion. It was cumbersome.

By the end of 2016, I was confidently shooting manually with the DSLR, but noticed that I'd started thinking about and really missing my old kid-camera and all the simplicity and joy of it. I looked around at my parents house, but already knew it was long gone. 

Then 2017 rolled around and film cameras just started popping up! First a Nikon SLR was gifted to me by my brother who hadn't used it in years, then I stumbled upon a basic point and shoot in a junk pile at a local camera shop. By autumn, I met the Holga, and this past Spring the Kodak Hawkeye. All the while, as these cameras kept showing up, I started shooting film again.

I love it. After being dialed in to tech-based photography for so long, I was astounded to (re)discover that these old cameras require no electricity whatsoever!  They're purely mechanical.

Shooting with film is a slow and mindful process. Because I pay for every shot I take (for developing and printing, neither of which I currently have the set-up to do myself), I take more care in deciding on each shot and I shoot more sparingly. I also shoot with different cameras and film depending on the style of shot that I want. So it can take me a while to make it through one role of film, since I’m shooting sparingly across 3-4 different cameras.

I love that it takes so long to get my photos back and that each one is a surprise. I’m still getting to know each of these cameras and how they shoot. I’m also still growing in my skill as a photographer, especially with film. Right now, I’m shooting on vintage film, which lends another unknown quality to how they might turn out.

Film is slow, unknown, surprising, simple, and fun. Film photography gave me my start and digital photography gave me technique and skill. Film gave me back my love of photography and, strangely, led me back to digital, since there are some things I will always turn to digital for (including my awesome macro lens) and instant-feedback for developing my eye.

So, now I do both.

• I shoot with the equipment that will yield the result I’m seeking.

• I shoot with the mindfulness of film regardless of which camera I have in hand…

• …and I treat my finished photo more like film in that I only do basic necessary color correction instead of trying to make it ‘perfect.’

• I use my smartphone with a black-and-white filter turned on to help me walk through the world and examine how texture, contrast and tone translates into a film medium that I have no experience with, but want to learn. With digital tech, I can learn how to compose my b&w film shots with real-time feedback and increase my rate of success as I’m learning.

It’s been the best journey. I love photography so much. Having married a talented and skillful professional photographer and artist, I spent many years only seeing my lack of photographic skill in comparison. But returning to film and finding a whole wide world of vintage cameras has reminded me that among other things, I am also a photographer.

My path is different: it’s not professional and it’s not formally trained. But it’s the earliest art form (besides music) that I adopted and one I absolutely can't give up. My path’s been circuitous and I haven’t done it alone (props to my mom, the original shutter-bug! and to Benjamin who’s taught me most everything I know, and continues to repeat himself again and again when I can’t remember technique or terminology). But it’s been unwavering in that I always want a camera within arm’s reach and I love the challenge that comes from practicing this craft.

Getting Started

Photo courtesy of Benjamin.

Time and time again I have culled through our possessions. Each time it got a little easier to let things go. It’s like ripples in a pond created by a tossed stone. The items far away from me (the outer rings) were easier to let go because there was less emotional attachment. But the closer I got to the inner rings of possessions, the ones closer to my heart, the more difficult it became. Thankfully, with practice, I kept getting better at letting things go. Even though I kept getting closer to my heart with each examination of our things, I was growing into the ability to make those decisions with each small step.

That’s why it took us 7 years to get to where we are today. I took the slow route. Any other route would have been way outside of my comfort zone and not at all in accordance with my nature. Taking it at this slow and deliberate pace is what allowed me to succeed. The thing that I love about simple, intentional living [aka: minimalism] is that it’s not about the number of things we own, or even what we own. It’s also not about the pace at which we progress. Some cull their possessions seemingly overnight. Others, like me, take years. Regardless, it works... because it’s not actually about the items at all.

This lifestyle is about mindful, purposeful living, questioning the status quo, and knowing ourselves. It’s the heart-work, the changes that happen inside of us by engaging in these practices (and it does take practice) that makes the difference. In doing so, we remove the non-essential and replace it with the essential. It looks different for everyone. For me, the non-essential includes any item that I don’t use regularly or really love. It also includes a lot of media: like an excess of television, movies or internet. The essential includes enough personal time to pursue health and hobbies like reading and writing as well as enough relational time to connect with those I treasure most.

In the end, what matters is that we begin. The first step towards a fullness of life outside of the work-consume cycle of the American Dream may be big or it may be small, but what counts is the movement. By initiating the movement, the momentum and rhythm will come. And with practice, each step becomes easier as the heart fills with excitement and hope.