passion and sanity

what the squirrel saw
van dusen gardens, vancouver

According to the Chinese horoscope, those born in the Year of the Horse are known for their passionate nature but beware if you should have a daughter born in the Year of the Fire Horse for their unbridled passions will be multiplied many times over and bring nothing but trouble for their family. Thank goodness my parents never believed the astrologers considering I was born on the first day of the last auspicious Year of the Fire Horse otherwise they might have left me on the side of a mountain to fend for myself. The thing is I do have issues with passion.

In one of my first performance appraisals my supervisor noted that I was too passionate about my job. I thought that was not only a ridiculous notion but even more so to note it on a performance review. I didn’t relent until it was removed. Before I took up photography I spent a few years working in an environment where my passionate nature propelled me to work hard, to fight for change, and to try to do the right thing. I wasn’t always understood and became quite frustrated when the change was slow in coming or non-existent. People said to me, things are as they are and implicit in that was my duty to accept the status quo. Imagine how my heart sang when yesterday on page 41 of Chris Orwig’s “Visual Poetry“, I read this: I will never let visual apathy set in. I want to see things anew. I want to dream big dreams and let my imagination loose. As Miguel de Cervantes said: “Too much sanity may be madness and the maddest of all, to see life as it is and not as it should be.”

This journey to learn photography is exactly where I need to be. If it is your passion too, embrace it fully. Do everything you can to feed those big dreams and live your life as you should be. The next few posts will be about what I’ve done so far in the pursuit of my passion in the hopes that it will inform and inspire those who are at the beginning of this wonderful adventure.