
Sign up to save your podcasts
Or
I find it so funny, so funny that before my work, before my training, I have this great fear, this great divorce from joy and from reality. I forget that life can be full of play, full of excitement. I forget that. I will take ownership of that amnesia. But I might also be affected by the travel, because when I travel, I am passing through my hometown airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield Jackson.
Our mayor will remind you that this is the world's busiest and most efficient airport. I don't doubt it. The train, running underground, connecting the many runways and the many terminals overhead, runs on consistent, almost German in its synchronicity, 90 second intervals.
About 30 seconds, no more will the door is open, and everyone who is inside the train car, the autonomous train car, and it is very much a train and a car, because it is a train with wheels, those passengers on that train car with wheels will flood out, heading to their terminal, and then everyone else will flood in. And in doing so, I channel my inner Japanese body and previous incarnation. My goal in that moment is to cause as little pain, harm, and disturbance to my neighbor. I look down at the ground. Careful not to be distracted by the many beautiful bodies around me, careful not to be distracted by the many sad, obese, troubled, addicted, distracted bodies around me.
I keep to myself. I am confident enough in the balance of my physical body to stay erect despite the jostling of the train car. So I stand in the middle, in the center, taking no handrail, taking no ideal real estate on that car. And upon my stop, I say, "Excuse me, excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, passing through, this is my stop, thank you, thank you so much. All good," as I bump into someone, or more likely as they bump into me. Then we go up the escalator, I wait, I go up more escalators, maybe, grabbing a bite from the Delta Crown Room, all the while smiling as best I can at everyone I pass by.
And this, this routine has so many opportunities for joy and for play and for love, but instead I've taken the wrong attitude over time and seen it as a survival instinct. When I use the public facilities there are times when I hold my breath at a stench versus laughing at, "Oh my, how we've turned this beautiful smelling world into, ooh, foul smelling substances." But I forget those things.
I am thinking foremost about the job I'm to do tomorrow. About all the many to dos I'll have between the time I take my seat on the plane, to the time I land, to the time I'll walk and find the rental car agency, the rental car bus that will take me to that agency, to choosing my car, to checking out, to getting lunch, to steaming my suit to prepare for tomorrow, reviewing the prep work of the doctor whose office I will be visiting, considering the investment that the client for my company has made oftentimes in the 30 to 40 to $50,000 range, and how I will be responsible for that.
They will receive that result more often than not. Even if I have an off day. So there's not too much real pressure, the foundations of their success already paved before me. But nonetheless, there is much unknown, and considering my upbringing, the son of a computer scientist and the son of a certified public accountant, I like a plan, a roadmap: certainty. And not having that is something I can deal with, something I can manage, something I can survive, but it's not something that I foremost prefer. In some ways, I am the pendulum swinging in the other direction of my parents, because when I go on vacation, I plan not.
All of this leads to this photo essay, this first photo essay, inviting you into my routine, but also remembering for myself and filling my own cup, the joy that is nature. Because before the storm of my working day, my team training, I feel vulnerable, isolated, on the road in a foreign land, in a foreign city all by myself.
My peers have their own jobs, have their own lives, and so they are not connected to me by the internet, and by way of my phone. In the middle of the working day, I am by myself. And I know if I want to keep my spiritual routine, my sadhana, my meditation, I will be going to bed early. I will be fasting early.
And while I love everything that Spirit and God have given me, saved me from myself—truly, actually saved me from killing myself—the routine is an uphill journey compared to the flows and the cycles of the world that I live in presently. And all of this, the sum of all these feelings strips me from the smile on my face that I know I could feel at any moment, but I deprive myself from feeling. So that is when, at those exact moments, that is when I go to the park.
Having eaten, having steamed my suit, prepped all my statistics and speaking day notes for the journey ahead, I close my laptop, I close my workbook, and I leave it all behind. I go into my Google Maps, and I type in, "walking trail." And I look, and the first one that looks interesting, boom, bang, we go there. Sometimes just a five, ten minute drive.
So this is it, Before Storms, Orlando, Florida, West Orange Trail. July, 2024.
I've gotten into the routine of eating frozen fruit because fruit is so healthy, so sweet, and I do have a sweet tooth. Frozen fruit is also cheaper and healthier because the farmers know in freezing it, it will last longer, and so they are less reluctant to wait for the fruit to ripen, knowing it will not rot, it will be frozen. The byproduct of this is a yummier, healthier, more efficient fruit. There are more vitamins in that fruit, there is more flavor in that fruit.
So I go to the frozen food section, and I grab my bag of sliced mangoes, and I take that with me, I check out. Depending on the city and the inflation rates of that city, that bag of mangoes that I buy, the small bag, not the big one, is between $2.50 and $3.75. Depending on the neighborhood that I purchase that bag of fruit from, there will be a tax between 0 percent and 10%.
In this neighborhood, I was shopping at a Walmart, and there was no tax. I was in a poorer neighborhood. In downtown LA, for instance, at a Whole Foods, there's a food tax of 10%. Walk 2 miles to the south, even less than that, 1 mile to the south, shopping at a local store, there was no tax. In fact, for WIC products, that's women and infant children foods, the government will provide an additional subsidy on foods that are deemed healthy. Beyond that, in the poor of poor neighborhoods, of which I have visited before, you don't even need to show qualifications to receive those subsidies, for just in being in that neighborhood the government assumes enough burden to deem the redemption necessary. So it is.
I sat on this park bench in Orlando, eating my mangoes, finishing my mangoes, and with my pocket point and shoot camera holstered at my belt line, I unbuckle it, I take it out, and I capture this image of the beautiful old oak trees with their Spanish moss hanging down from the limbs and it reminds me so deeply, so greatly, so fondly of my time as an art student in Savannah.
At this moment, this tree struck me, how again it was growing at an angle, but the ferns and the other primordial plants growing up its trunk were so inviting I had to capture the tree, but the challenge in capturing trees in such a luscious area is finding enough contrast so that the subject stands out from the environment.
And it was just at that moment that I realized this thing called an aperture. is still available to me. So I opened up the aperture, and the depth of field, more shallow in this photo than some of the others, helped me focus on the beauty of the nature. And slowly in taking these photos, I felt more humanity, more joy. A smiling face returned to my countenance.
I walked through the zen garden at this point, and there were lizards everywhere. These lizards had some sort of death wish, or they were so terribly afraid of me that they weren't thinking clearly. I played a game of hopscotch on the cobblestone walkway doing as best I could, walking as timidly as I could, not to crush these lizards.
And they were everywhere, rustling through the bushes, scaring me, me scaring them. Oh, what joy. They were beautiful park benches that I would have sat on taking in that moment, maybe meditated. But the clouds above me were rolling in, and the wind was bringing in cool air, and I knew I only had maybe 10-15 minutes before the skies opened up above me. So it would be, and I kept walking.
I continued from there and we left the garden. We walked down a pathway for bikers and for pedestrians. Interestingly, bikes have been replaced by electric scooters, mopeds, and electric bikes, electric bikes that you don't pedal. You just sit on and if you get bored, you might move your legs.
In this park, they had a basketball court and two tennis courts, and there were trees everywhere of all different colors, but mostly green. In taking a black and white photo, it's strips the park of its color. And then all there is are these micro shapes and organisms: the leaves, the bark, the plants, the seeds.
I find it adorable how we had built this bridge that goes mostly nowhere. We could have easily walked around it, but the bridge is part of the architecture, part of the conquering of the land, but even better than conquering, we opted to leave the land as it were and work with that land, work over that land.
We kept walking and a little ways down from this path, there was a neighborhood, a traditional Florida neighborhood, flat as flat can be. Oh my goodness. It was so flat, this neighborhood. It felt surreal. Like in a dream, a Dr. Seuss dream, like in a dream where being so flat it felt that we might fall off, that there was no atmosphere to keep us grounded, no hill to protect us, vulnerable, agoraphobia comes to mind.
But, from this flatness, this grassland, this suburbian grassland that is 100 percent artificial and contrived using the latest pesticides and grass, there were men mowing in the late afternoon evening, having already come home from work, and there were cars returning home from work. And in the distance, there are clouds, white clouds from the sunny morning and mid afternoon being slowly consumed by the dark storm clouds of the late afternoon and evening.
But the highlights of these clouds: how beautiful. And the storm clouds were rolling in. And I knew now, I only had a few minutes before the rain set in.
Nobody leaves their home. It's very strange. And so the result is a neighborhood with empty streets. And for the passers by, and the visitors like myself walking down these roads feels and reminds me of the dream that I am living, that none of this is real.
So I continued realizing that the sky was about to open up and that there would be nothing left pretty soon.
And then, finally, as I came to the end of my walk, I felt it so beautiful to consider this trifecta of our humankind. The sky, of course, is the light and the firmament, giving us the energy and the joy we need to keep going. And this is connected by the solar panels on the homes, the energy harnesses and baskets, and vessels that we use to capture and save the beauty of the sky, be it a photograph or a DC battery for storing the energy gleaned from the solar panel. And that energy is, of course, used for the home, but funny as it is, we use it to create more light. We use it for the streetlights.
So the streetlights are waiting to be turned on. Waiting for the sun to shine down and rain cosmic rays upon the roof until that energy is recycled and given back to us, back through our eyes, through our skin, and then we emit a different type of light, an infrared light: energy, heat, and the cycle repeats itself indefinitely. How beautiful.
It rained hard after this, and I decided I wasn't quite through with my food consumption. Oh, Quentin. I went back to that Walmart. And I bought, not just mangoes, but, a drink for myself. A healthy drink, but a drink nonetheless. I was supposed to be fasting, but this drink had calories in it. And I exit, and it is ... it's on the Doppler not red but turning back to purple and blue. So heavy it could have been mistaken for snow. That's how dense the pellets were in this kind of thunderstorm.
I made a run for it. And as I ran, I realized that there was more water pressure coming from these clouds than there would have been from my Fairfield Inn shower. Yet I had my clothes on, and my clothes were drenched, having taken just ten steps so far I realized I would run the rest of the way to the car. So I did, and in doing so I had great, great fun, and I got to the car, hair, sopping wet like a mop. My one pair of pants, oh, how they would mildew, but that's okay. I returned to the hotel room, cozy, cozy as a foreign shared space can be, raining outside. And I remembered I would have work to do tomorrow.
Probably the greediness of my eating too late, I would come not to sleep for more than three or four hours at night, one of my worst night's sleep ever on the road. But it was okay. The next day was okay. That's the beauty of nature, the beauty of sharing and remembering these photographs, that even before a storm, before life's storm when it feels like the rain clouds are rolling in and covering up the lightness, covering up the joy and the fun and the play, even in that, a breath, to hear the frogs and to hear the lizards, to hear the water falling upon the lily pads, oh these are the simple joys that remind us that our work in this life, and that our relationships in this life, and that our struggles in this life, the travel, the eating, the bills, the budgeting, it is a great tool and is a great to do to occupy us and to test us, but when we're through with it, the real joy is free and waiting for us.
The parks are always empty. They're waiting for us.
I find it so funny, so funny that before my work, before my training, I have this great fear, this great divorce from joy and from reality. I forget that life can be full of play, full of excitement. I forget that. I will take ownership of that amnesia. But I might also be affected by the travel, because when I travel, I am passing through my hometown airport, Atlanta's Hartsfield Jackson.
Our mayor will remind you that this is the world's busiest and most efficient airport. I don't doubt it. The train, running underground, connecting the many runways and the many terminals overhead, runs on consistent, almost German in its synchronicity, 90 second intervals.
About 30 seconds, no more will the door is open, and everyone who is inside the train car, the autonomous train car, and it is very much a train and a car, because it is a train with wheels, those passengers on that train car with wheels will flood out, heading to their terminal, and then everyone else will flood in. And in doing so, I channel my inner Japanese body and previous incarnation. My goal in that moment is to cause as little pain, harm, and disturbance to my neighbor. I look down at the ground. Careful not to be distracted by the many beautiful bodies around me, careful not to be distracted by the many sad, obese, troubled, addicted, distracted bodies around me.
I keep to myself. I am confident enough in the balance of my physical body to stay erect despite the jostling of the train car. So I stand in the middle, in the center, taking no handrail, taking no ideal real estate on that car. And upon my stop, I say, "Excuse me, excuse me, pardon me, excuse me, passing through, this is my stop, thank you, thank you so much. All good," as I bump into someone, or more likely as they bump into me. Then we go up the escalator, I wait, I go up more escalators, maybe, grabbing a bite from the Delta Crown Room, all the while smiling as best I can at everyone I pass by.
And this, this routine has so many opportunities for joy and for play and for love, but instead I've taken the wrong attitude over time and seen it as a survival instinct. When I use the public facilities there are times when I hold my breath at a stench versus laughing at, "Oh my, how we've turned this beautiful smelling world into, ooh, foul smelling substances." But I forget those things.
I am thinking foremost about the job I'm to do tomorrow. About all the many to dos I'll have between the time I take my seat on the plane, to the time I land, to the time I'll walk and find the rental car agency, the rental car bus that will take me to that agency, to choosing my car, to checking out, to getting lunch, to steaming my suit to prepare for tomorrow, reviewing the prep work of the doctor whose office I will be visiting, considering the investment that the client for my company has made oftentimes in the 30 to 40 to $50,000 range, and how I will be responsible for that.
They will receive that result more often than not. Even if I have an off day. So there's not too much real pressure, the foundations of their success already paved before me. But nonetheless, there is much unknown, and considering my upbringing, the son of a computer scientist and the son of a certified public accountant, I like a plan, a roadmap: certainty. And not having that is something I can deal with, something I can manage, something I can survive, but it's not something that I foremost prefer. In some ways, I am the pendulum swinging in the other direction of my parents, because when I go on vacation, I plan not.
All of this leads to this photo essay, this first photo essay, inviting you into my routine, but also remembering for myself and filling my own cup, the joy that is nature. Because before the storm of my working day, my team training, I feel vulnerable, isolated, on the road in a foreign land, in a foreign city all by myself.
My peers have their own jobs, have their own lives, and so they are not connected to me by the internet, and by way of my phone. In the middle of the working day, I am by myself. And I know if I want to keep my spiritual routine, my sadhana, my meditation, I will be going to bed early. I will be fasting early.
And while I love everything that Spirit and God have given me, saved me from myself—truly, actually saved me from killing myself—the routine is an uphill journey compared to the flows and the cycles of the world that I live in presently. And all of this, the sum of all these feelings strips me from the smile on my face that I know I could feel at any moment, but I deprive myself from feeling. So that is when, at those exact moments, that is when I go to the park.
Having eaten, having steamed my suit, prepped all my statistics and speaking day notes for the journey ahead, I close my laptop, I close my workbook, and I leave it all behind. I go into my Google Maps, and I type in, "walking trail." And I look, and the first one that looks interesting, boom, bang, we go there. Sometimes just a five, ten minute drive.
So this is it, Before Storms, Orlando, Florida, West Orange Trail. July, 2024.
I've gotten into the routine of eating frozen fruit because fruit is so healthy, so sweet, and I do have a sweet tooth. Frozen fruit is also cheaper and healthier because the farmers know in freezing it, it will last longer, and so they are less reluctant to wait for the fruit to ripen, knowing it will not rot, it will be frozen. The byproduct of this is a yummier, healthier, more efficient fruit. There are more vitamins in that fruit, there is more flavor in that fruit.
So I go to the frozen food section, and I grab my bag of sliced mangoes, and I take that with me, I check out. Depending on the city and the inflation rates of that city, that bag of mangoes that I buy, the small bag, not the big one, is between $2.50 and $3.75. Depending on the neighborhood that I purchase that bag of fruit from, there will be a tax between 0 percent and 10%.
In this neighborhood, I was shopping at a Walmart, and there was no tax. I was in a poorer neighborhood. In downtown LA, for instance, at a Whole Foods, there's a food tax of 10%. Walk 2 miles to the south, even less than that, 1 mile to the south, shopping at a local store, there was no tax. In fact, for WIC products, that's women and infant children foods, the government will provide an additional subsidy on foods that are deemed healthy. Beyond that, in the poor of poor neighborhoods, of which I have visited before, you don't even need to show qualifications to receive those subsidies, for just in being in that neighborhood the government assumes enough burden to deem the redemption necessary. So it is.
I sat on this park bench in Orlando, eating my mangoes, finishing my mangoes, and with my pocket point and shoot camera holstered at my belt line, I unbuckle it, I take it out, and I capture this image of the beautiful old oak trees with their Spanish moss hanging down from the limbs and it reminds me so deeply, so greatly, so fondly of my time as an art student in Savannah.
At this moment, this tree struck me, how again it was growing at an angle, but the ferns and the other primordial plants growing up its trunk were so inviting I had to capture the tree, but the challenge in capturing trees in such a luscious area is finding enough contrast so that the subject stands out from the environment.
And it was just at that moment that I realized this thing called an aperture. is still available to me. So I opened up the aperture, and the depth of field, more shallow in this photo than some of the others, helped me focus on the beauty of the nature. And slowly in taking these photos, I felt more humanity, more joy. A smiling face returned to my countenance.
I walked through the zen garden at this point, and there were lizards everywhere. These lizards had some sort of death wish, or they were so terribly afraid of me that they weren't thinking clearly. I played a game of hopscotch on the cobblestone walkway doing as best I could, walking as timidly as I could, not to crush these lizards.
And they were everywhere, rustling through the bushes, scaring me, me scaring them. Oh, what joy. They were beautiful park benches that I would have sat on taking in that moment, maybe meditated. But the clouds above me were rolling in, and the wind was bringing in cool air, and I knew I only had maybe 10-15 minutes before the skies opened up above me. So it would be, and I kept walking.
I continued from there and we left the garden. We walked down a pathway for bikers and for pedestrians. Interestingly, bikes have been replaced by electric scooters, mopeds, and electric bikes, electric bikes that you don't pedal. You just sit on and if you get bored, you might move your legs.
In this park, they had a basketball court and two tennis courts, and there were trees everywhere of all different colors, but mostly green. In taking a black and white photo, it's strips the park of its color. And then all there is are these micro shapes and organisms: the leaves, the bark, the plants, the seeds.
I find it adorable how we had built this bridge that goes mostly nowhere. We could have easily walked around it, but the bridge is part of the architecture, part of the conquering of the land, but even better than conquering, we opted to leave the land as it were and work with that land, work over that land.
We kept walking and a little ways down from this path, there was a neighborhood, a traditional Florida neighborhood, flat as flat can be. Oh my goodness. It was so flat, this neighborhood. It felt surreal. Like in a dream, a Dr. Seuss dream, like in a dream where being so flat it felt that we might fall off, that there was no atmosphere to keep us grounded, no hill to protect us, vulnerable, agoraphobia comes to mind.
But, from this flatness, this grassland, this suburbian grassland that is 100 percent artificial and contrived using the latest pesticides and grass, there were men mowing in the late afternoon evening, having already come home from work, and there were cars returning home from work. And in the distance, there are clouds, white clouds from the sunny morning and mid afternoon being slowly consumed by the dark storm clouds of the late afternoon and evening.
But the highlights of these clouds: how beautiful. And the storm clouds were rolling in. And I knew now, I only had a few minutes before the rain set in.
Nobody leaves their home. It's very strange. And so the result is a neighborhood with empty streets. And for the passers by, and the visitors like myself walking down these roads feels and reminds me of the dream that I am living, that none of this is real.
So I continued realizing that the sky was about to open up and that there would be nothing left pretty soon.
And then, finally, as I came to the end of my walk, I felt it so beautiful to consider this trifecta of our humankind. The sky, of course, is the light and the firmament, giving us the energy and the joy we need to keep going. And this is connected by the solar panels on the homes, the energy harnesses and baskets, and vessels that we use to capture and save the beauty of the sky, be it a photograph or a DC battery for storing the energy gleaned from the solar panel. And that energy is, of course, used for the home, but funny as it is, we use it to create more light. We use it for the streetlights.
So the streetlights are waiting to be turned on. Waiting for the sun to shine down and rain cosmic rays upon the roof until that energy is recycled and given back to us, back through our eyes, through our skin, and then we emit a different type of light, an infrared light: energy, heat, and the cycle repeats itself indefinitely. How beautiful.
It rained hard after this, and I decided I wasn't quite through with my food consumption. Oh, Quentin. I went back to that Walmart. And I bought, not just mangoes, but, a drink for myself. A healthy drink, but a drink nonetheless. I was supposed to be fasting, but this drink had calories in it. And I exit, and it is ... it's on the Doppler not red but turning back to purple and blue. So heavy it could have been mistaken for snow. That's how dense the pellets were in this kind of thunderstorm.
I made a run for it. And as I ran, I realized that there was more water pressure coming from these clouds than there would have been from my Fairfield Inn shower. Yet I had my clothes on, and my clothes were drenched, having taken just ten steps so far I realized I would run the rest of the way to the car. So I did, and in doing so I had great, great fun, and I got to the car, hair, sopping wet like a mop. My one pair of pants, oh, how they would mildew, but that's okay. I returned to the hotel room, cozy, cozy as a foreign shared space can be, raining outside. And I remembered I would have work to do tomorrow.
Probably the greediness of my eating too late, I would come not to sleep for more than three or four hours at night, one of my worst night's sleep ever on the road. But it was okay. The next day was okay. That's the beauty of nature, the beauty of sharing and remembering these photographs, that even before a storm, before life's storm when it feels like the rain clouds are rolling in and covering up the lightness, covering up the joy and the fun and the play, even in that, a breath, to hear the frogs and to hear the lizards, to hear the water falling upon the lily pads, oh these are the simple joys that remind us that our work in this life, and that our relationships in this life, and that our struggles in this life, the travel, the eating, the bills, the budgeting, it is a great tool and is a great to do to occupy us and to test us, but when we're through with it, the real joy is free and waiting for us.
The parks are always empty. They're waiting for us.