Resistance

It is a blustery day here on We Are One Farm, minus 5 C with a wind whipping around our hilltop home, whistling through cracks in window frames, sucking up smoke from the wood stove making it seem much colder.  And  still Charlie whines to get out, to which I acquiesce, once again, and he dives under the porch for cover. So I’ll keep watch for a while for his return to the verandah door, giving me one last reprieve before I “suck it up” and enter the darkroom.

Yep, I’m a photographer, I love the moments I am out seeing things, exploring new places, being with people, being still in the garden and then I love the time when I have created a body of work that is cohesive and meaningful to me and sometimes beautiful. But some of the in-between stuff, mainly the descent to a basement room to spend the day in the dark with chemicals, I find very difficult. It is not so bad once I have made the commitment and am in the room with everything mixed and poured and laid out, but actually getting me down the stairs is a struggle. 

It’s partly just sequestering myself in a dark, cramped space that I’m not crazy about, but partly my fear that once I start to print I won’t create anything worth showing. And when I have been out of the darkroom for over a year, as I have been now, I resist because I think I’ll have forgotten how to do everything, especially with the ancient but new-to-me enlarger that I purchased when I moved here which was quite different from my old one. I have used it, in the autumn of 2006, to print Earth Air Water Spirit, but it has been idle since. And my print washer has been sitting out in the laundry room collecting dust so I must first wash that out.

The wind is really wheezing now and there is Charlie at the door. My reprieve is over, no more excuses today. I have work to do, prints I owe my models to start with. Laws of physics which I never studied say, I’ve heard, that a body in motion tends to stay in motion, a body at rest tends to stay at rest. Once I am back in the flow I know I will wonder what took me so long to start again.