No place left to turn, but the pictures on the wall..

If there has ever been a painting hung on a motel room wall that I have considered to have any artistic merit whatsoever, It has become a custom and a ritual for me to hide money behind it’s frame. I have done this a number of times now, mostly in budget Mom ‘n Pop places across the country. I do this firstly as an acknowledgment to art itself, as the active spirit and positive energy field in the world for which I am always grateful to encounter.

I also do this because I once decided that cold hard cash was going to be the standard inter-dimensional expression of gratitude to those ancient fringe gods that kindly selected it for me to see. For them, my offerings work on a sliding scale of sacrifice and the spiritual nutrition comes from the heart of the devotion and not in the actual bank notes themselves. The cash belongs to the roaming material being of a future present yet to be determined, but heading this way, crackling with blue sparks and the smell of burning hair.

This deliberate act of sending money into the future in real time, yet to be found as though teleported there in the instant of its discovery, is my small single fruit loop of good fortune, or a mysterious crazy karma turn around for the soul who finds themselves in this room with no place left to turn, but the pictures on the wall. This is my gift to you. 

I think about this person, here, but there and alone, seeking refuge, quarantine or detox and finding themselves laying on this same bed and reaching out, remotely, with their mind, beyond their physical desperation and reasoning, out to the edges of the room with searching psychic tendrils, feeling for the folded bill tucked behind the frame. Enough for either a bag, bottle, pack, a little gas, or a bite to eat. Sometimes not much of something can mean everything to someone. I know this. I also figure, if someone is in the mindset of looking behind motel pictures in the first place, for whatever reason, they deserve to at least find something there, just once, to be announced to the room with the triumphant cry of “I told you so!”.

I check behind them myself too now, in hope of finding important and personal instructions, perhaps from my parallel universe self anticipating my arrival in this cross-space-time-line. I have never found anything so far and if I did, I would not take it unless it was intended for me alone. This is part of the Astral Projectors code. 

More akin to astral codes of conduct..

Traveling and photography are both steeped in superstition. They are surrounded by talismans, curses, amulets, spells and sacrifice. They are submerged in the occult and their knowledge is esoteric and they only give up their secrets with time and to the devoted. Traveling and photography inhabit an elemental world not subject to the same physical laws of the cosmos and these forces are more akin to astral codes of conduct than anything else; They can influence the natural laws around us, but they do not ultimately have control; They are fickle and mutable and driven by invisible wills and once upon a time they would have been described as the ancestors and the secret spirits inside of all things. 

These subtle energies manifest themselves in our material world as the unexpected and the anomaly and they are present in every photograph that we have ever loved and they have helped bring all of them into being.

I suppose we could simply call this luck, or our photographic instinct. That thing we feel in our gut, that we trust, which sharpens with our experience. But, when we find ourselves standing out on a busy city street corner with camera in hand, we will all be secretly praying we have generated the necessary conditions for these super-natural forces to ignite then intervene; A pool of holy light illuminating the lone pensive girl at the cross walk, or a sudden gust of wind which lifts hats, skirts and hands together. Their presence is the name of the hope we all hold close. 

These forces are chaotic/neutral and they are to be respected and regarded in the same way as weather. Although they can be bargained with to a certain extent, they cannot be owned or claimed wholly for ourselves as ourselves. Such assumptions of control and possession run the risk of us being completely abandoned by them altogether, leaving us with nothing but our technical ability and our precious gear. 

Each morning before a day of driving I have already gone through a quiet pantomime of prayers and rituals before I have turned the key in the ignition. I don’t always make a song and dance about it, but instead my workings aspire to be more methodical, like a photoshop workflow of quiet focused attention. Like the Catholics or a Scorpio. Layered mindful steps deliberately taken, one after the other with intention. This is how I can be seen, standing outside my room at The Twin Pines Motel in Flagstaff, Arizona, at dawn, patting myself down, pretending to look for my car keys, but subtly crossing myself with a Rosary and whispering a secret order of words under my bandanna into the amethyst that is tucked into my left hand. 

Happy New Year.

The painting above the bed..

Psychic Coordinate Points (PCP#01)

Sometimes I have woken up in my motel room and had no idea where I was in America. The thrift store landscape painting hanging over the bed and reflected in the mirror can be a clue, but not one that can be relied upon. Once in southern California, I woke up from a motel nap with the air conditioner on full and the room had gotten chilly while I slept. When I awoke I thought I was in Grand Junction, Colorado in the wintertime. The painting above the bed was of a snow capped mountain range with a wide river running through it and I assumed it was the Rockies. I wasn’t completely sure where I was until I finally opened the motel room door and was met with that high key full spectrum California sunshine dazzling down through the palm trees into my blinking bloodshot eyes below. It was winter here too. Christmas Eve..