liminality and pictures

Hi, everyone, thanks for tuning in. This

morning, I'm thinking about an article I read about photography

from an indigenous perspective, and the language of photography:

of taking, capturing, shooting, and the gun-like violence

embedded in that. And I'm thinking about one of my oldest

friends, who when he talks about creating photography talks about

making a photograph. I never really thought about that. And I

don't know if he learned that at art school, or if he learned

that inside himself. But it would fit his deep gentleness.

Making a photograph. And in this article, they talked about the

ways in which indigeneity has had to re-encounter photography

in this modern context, in this colonized world. And what it

means to decolonize photography, starting with the definitions of

decolonization, and the definitions of photography, and

how we do it, and what we do it with, and what it means to make

a photograph about a thing. And liminality. And they talked,

there was this one sentence where they said, that "men and

women and LGBTQIA plus people" as though that was a whole

separate category And I felt this click in myself, and

thought, yes, yes, that to me, queerness is a word to describe

personal liminality. But it's also more than that it's a...

it's a... it's its own place. I talk about being genderqueer.

But even using the word gender attached to queer makes it feel

like I have to somehow genderize my queerness; like there's a a

way that I have to describe myself as tugged between two

bodies, when in fact there is no "between two" to be tugged. I am

all of those things that people think are masculine and

feminine. And I am not many of the things that people think are

masculine and/or feminine. And... and. And. It is the most

embedded part of my identity in the way that I know men who say

that they are "so men," and women who believe that their

whole me-ness is wrapped around womanhood. And I never

understood that. But I do understand my whole self being

queer. And I'm thinking about the way that queerness and the

concept of queering things which came into common usage, just

about the time I was coming through college. I was

privileged to be able to be at a college that offered some of the

first formalized Queer Studies classes. And I was privileged to

be able to take them, and to start to reconceive my entire

academic and intellectual journey with this centeredness

of queerness. And now, of course, I sit and try and queer

everything around me because otherwise it doesn't fit me, it

doesn't suit me, or it doesn't interact with me, like it's

okay, that some things around me aren't queer. And some things

are truly neutral. They don't, they don't need queerness

embedded in them in order for them to be for me. But so many

things need that element of me in them somehow; need to know

how to talk to being not just outside the lines, but outside

of everything normative and expected and simultaneously,

deeply normative and expected. Like this is a thing that has a

place in our culture, and I belong here. And when I take

this idea, this thought, this practice of queerness into work,

I can't help but remember my internship supervisor, Brian

Kopke. I hope he's resting and painting and walking and playing

his flute well, by which I mean deeply and without any regard

for what other people think of it.

I think of my internship supervisor, and how he

introduced me to the idea of doing our supervisory meetings

at this sandpit that had been converted to a dog park on the

edge of town. And so we would take his baby Golden Retriever

puppy and get in his car and start talking as we drove to the

sandpit. And then we would walk and walk through the trees and

up and down and through the gorse. And talk and talk and

talk and laugh at the dog as she got muddy, and got curious and

scrambled in and under and over and around things. And we would

walk and talk. And then when we were done, we would walk back to

the car and towel off the dog and get back in the car and

drive back to the beautiful church building, and go back to

the rest of our work. But what I learned from that, more than

that I like walking in the woods with a dog, and that that's a

great way to get things, moving:

thoughts and ideas and feelings

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and practices that maybe aren't moving in the stillness of the

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office, it's also a great way to get actual privacy. And it's

great way to get things, moving:

also a great way as it turns out, for someone with ADHD, to

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get a lot more focus on what his intern is saying. He made no

great way to get things, moving:

secret of it. What I learned from that is that sometimes the

great way to get things, moving:

work is better done interleaved with other things in the world.

great way to get things, moving:

Sometimes two things do go together, even if they don't

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look like they do. Sometimes, you don't know what wisdom is

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waiting for you in the middle. Which, you know, actually, I

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knew I had known for a long time. This was not unfamiliar. I

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did an interdisciplinary undergraduate degree. I was

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constantly connecting and reconnecting one subject matter

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area to another until finally I just made it official. And the

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reason that this is up for me now is that I think it is time

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for us to think about what we need to interleave what we need

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to mix what we need to weave together what we need to

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uncompartmentalize. As leaders, it is very tempting to expect

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and hope that people will compartmentalize themselves and

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their lives, that they will leave their feelings out of the

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workplace, that they will leave their work at work and go home

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to things that are not related to their work. But if you have

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ever stayed up late tossing and turning about the passion of

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your life, which is also your livelihood, you know that that

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is not a thing. And so we just try to pretend that it's a thing

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for some reason that I can't figure out. And instead, what if

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we recognize the deep integration of everything with

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everything, which is how life works. When people get pregnant,

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humans, our bodies swell, and change and rewire to favor the

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fetus over the health of the gestating parent. And what does

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that mean concretely? It means that if your fetus wants to, it

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has the power to kill you. And that is one of the reasons why

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we only carry our fetuses for nine months. Because it would be

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a lot more logical developmentally, if we carried

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them for twelve. But if we carried them for twelve, they

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would take so many of the resources from the parent that

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the parent would die before the fetus was born. And so our

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compromise is kind of like a kangaroo. We carry them around

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on the outside for the next three months. We are wired

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deeply with our environments, into our environment. And it is

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true that we extract resources from our environments, but we

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have to do it in a way that doesn't kill them or us. And we

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are wired deeply into our businesses. When we found

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something, we are integral to it and it is integral to us at the

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beginning. And yes, our goal is to create something independent

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that can run around the world without us. That will

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potentially carry on after we're gone. And in order to create

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something that is truly sustainable, we have to remember

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our deep interconnection with it and it's deep interconnection

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with us and that is on the macro and the micro level. So in

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addition to that deep interconnection out there, the

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big one, the what is the purpose of your business? And is it

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destroying the world? Or is it nourishing it? question. There

great way to get things, moving:

is also the small question, the set of small questions, the

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question of how do we make our lives and our being and the way

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that we are in our business, be sustainable, be deeply

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integrated? How do we change from sitting in an office where

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we could be overheard, and we can't really sit still. And we

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can't really have our feelings, to going to the sandpit where we

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can walk, and talk and shout and cry, and throw the stick for the

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dog. Sometimes that is literally the solution. Sometimes you need

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to take meetings off site. Sometimes you literally need to

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take meetings in an unexpected environment. Sometimes you need

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to do things for one another, that don't fall strictly inside

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the bounds of what we think of as appropriate for business.

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Sometimes we bring someone lunch or dinner. It's not your job,

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but we are all each other's business. Sometimes you can't do

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that. Sometimes you don't know what their needs are. Sometimes

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it's just going to make it worse. Which means you have to

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know each other well enough not to do that. And to leave the

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space where the spaces belong. And sometimes, sometimes it

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means giving someone agency and independence. Sometimes it means

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explaining your reasoning so that you can give them agency

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and independence. Sometimes it means admitting that there's a

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little bit of a black box to the way you're running things. And

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that's on purpose. And explaining what you're doing and

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giving people the freedom to come or go as they need to.

great way to get things, moving:

Sometimes a lot of things. And sometimes it means asking

great way to get things, moving:

yourself what should be shared? What should be sacred and quiet?

great way to get things, moving:

When it is appropriate to capture something? And when you

great way to get things, moving:

are simply going to make a photograph.