Nora and Chris Photography

Today I’m sharing with you a poem that Nora presented to me a couple of years ago for our anniversary. A handwritten copy of it hangs on our wall still. It is by Khalil Gibran.

You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore.
You shall be together when the white wings of death scatter your days.
Ay, you shall be together even in the silent memory of God.
But let there be spaces in your togetherness,
And let the winds of the heavens dance between you.

Love one another, but make not a bond of love:
Let it rather be a moving sea between the shores of your souls.
Fill each others cup but drink not from one cup.
Give one another of your bread but eat not from the same loaf
Sing and dance together and be joyous, but let each one of you be alone,
Even as the strings of a lute are alone though they quiver with the same music.

Give your hearts, but not into each others keeping.
For only the hand of Life can contain your hearts.
And stand together yet not too near together:
For the pillars of the temple stand apart,
And the oak tree and the cypress grow not in each others shadow.

This has got to be my favourite poems about marriage, one of my favourites about love. It implicitly rejects the idea that marriage involves possession. “To have and and to hold” seems a little too archaic, a remnant of a less liberated time. Removing possessiveness from our love moves closer to a place of true unconditional love, which is to me is the essence of everything– which some people call God. I can’t think of a more perfect meditation on love than letting it be “a moving sea between the shores of your souls.”

I love you, Nora.

-Christo 

When I was a younger man, getting tiny roles in independent plays, I often noticed that the best actors seemed to be the most arrogant ones. Somehow they made the boldest choices, played out the most interesting scenes. These were men and women who seemed completely convinced of their own greatness and infallibility both onstage and offstage. I was tempted to take away the lesson that in order to be a great and prolific artist, you needed to at least assume similar air. I may have occasionally employed this paradigm, but resisted it for the most part, probably because I knew in my idealistic heart that there is always a light alternative to all darkness.

To transpose some of those lessons to the art of writing, and to paraphrase the late, great Robert Kroetsch, writing is a constant act of bold exploration. No matter where you’ve been up to now, ahead of you is always more white nothingness to write into. These artists accomplished this by having or adopting a mentality that they can do no wrong, so they needn’t fear.
Great! Except, if you don’t know how to drop that mentality in real life, you’re a jerk.

At about the same time as my early days in theatre, my interest in writing was really starting to take form. I would constantly get ideas, and I wrote everything down. I would hear a phrase in my head, like “redo the thing” and write an entire poem from that, following one whisper of an idea that could have just as easily been disregarded. While I was pleased with what I produced, I was too caught up in the excitement of creating judge a poem before it was finished, and still unfettered by the various aesthetic biases that time and university would hang around my wrist. As a result, I was quite prolific in those days.

In juxtaposing those two paths to creativity now, I think I can articulate a new paradigm that is a lighter alternative to the douche-to-the-world route. It is by adopting an attitude of curiosity, an excitement toward uncovering the obscured light of new creation that leads us to happiness and prolificity.

I see that excitement in Nora and I (especially Nora) when we are taking photos. With any luck we can keep challenging ourselves to remain childlike in our wonderousness. Speaking of photography, isn’t that another example of bringing light into darkness? Like, by definition.
I think we succeeded recently in a shoot we did for a local designer to showcase her new wedding dress design. We took some chances with our lighting set up… It looked janky from the outside, but the results paid off.

Check out my jeans! I accidentally threw them in the wash with a red bath mat. Ouch. The resulting pink tint stimulated my sense of curiosity…
And here is how this experiment turned out for us…

Also, here’s a video from my pal Dave Morris, about what improvisation skills can add to your life. I especially like the part about play!

Love and Laughter,
Christo