Richard Pelletier's Photography Journal

{ writer + photographer }

Forests

tree bark

by

tree bark
tree bark

I made this picture at a wildlife refuge on the way to having dinner with a couple of very great old friends, Lynn and Ann Marie, who I hadn’t seen in too long a time and over dinner they told stories of travels in Alaska and grizzly bears and mush dogs and Denali and helicopter rides and then the talk drifted to the set of Ellen DeGeneres’ TV show and meeting Clint Eastwood and we talked and ate Thai food — I had the pork fried rice with two stars and they brought us, Linda and me, a bottle of California Cabernet and when we were finished with our meal we took pictures of ourselves out on the seedy streets of downtown Olympia and we laughed ourselves around the block and I hoped against hope that the things I have right now, the people I have, of which fewer in number than in recent years, I can hold onto. Like the lichen the bark the tree.

Away! Away!

by

Away! Away!

 

APRIL 16. “Away! Away! The spell of arms and Voices: the white arms of roads, their promise of close embraces and the black arms of tall ships that stand against the moon, their tale of distant nations. They are held out to say: We are alone—come. And the voices say with them: We are your kinsmen. And the air is thick with their company as they call to me, their kinsman, making ready to go, shaking the wings of their exultant and terrible youth.

APRIL 26. Mother is putting my new secondhand clothes in order. She prays now, she says, that I may learn in my own life and away from home and friends what the heart is and what it feels. Amen. So be it. Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

– James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (for mh)