no 17

Have you accidentally looked into the sun or bright light and then looked away, the image burned into your eyelids? That’s an afterimage.

I completed my round of sessions with my acupuncturist and my osteopath on Thursday for the shock I experienced around my accident over my summer holidays. I’m regulating my stress response much better now. I'm noticing a wild improvement in my nervous system compared to before the accident. It's a pleasant surprise.

Here's what I saw, heard, or sensed that's stayed with me in the past week. Let’s begin.

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What I Saw: Everything Counts

My daughter and I are sitting on the cemetery lawn, fake Moai statues towering behind us. With an awkward expression frozen on my daughter's face and mine hidden, the photo is a perfect example of an outtake. My daughter would be quick to delete this shot, deeming the image and the precise moment unworthy of the memory it takes up on the phone, and the actual conversation not worth remembering.

Aside from photogenic-enough selfies, I have very few shots of us together. This is the most common artifact of my life as a single parent: thousands of photos of my daughter, and very few of me in the frame, documenting how I'm stumbling, learning, growing, and changing as a parent and a human being.

Sometimes I wish I had more photos other than selfies to see myself and the life I’ve made, even bad snaps. I romanticize this aspect of living with my child's other parent: through the photos they take, I'm in the frame. I'm being witnessed in the course of my life. I digress.

Scrolling through my photo library, all the selfies look and feel the same; the aesthetic is limited and made repetitive by the angles imposed by the length of my arm and the number of people in the frame.

History and Making the Cut

I delete many of the photos I take. I'm probably taking too many pictures without paying attention. Very few are good enough to keep. On second glance, though, many of the "bad" photos capture the moment and the essence of my relationship with the person with whom I share the frame. Much more so than saccharine selfies do.

The outtakes teach me an essential lesson in how I see: I’m hyper-critical of how I look, overriding my judgment of whether the photo is a keeper or an outtake. That skews the archive and narrative of my personal history telling.

I’m reminded of browsing old photos from my grandparents' time, the candid shots. The candids are more intriguing than the beautiful and staid studio portraits; men with stern to aloof expressions and the women soft with almost vacant smiles. Until I came across the candids, I had a particular perception of what life was like then. In the process of photographic natural selection (whether by self-censorship or war and disasters), so much information about life had been stripped out. We often recount and remember our stories by the photos that remain.

Maybe there are few real outtakes in my life, and everything counts.

A Question for You: Go into your camera roll. Look at the photos you’ve tagged as favorites. Look at photos you’ve kept but aren’t necessarily favorites. Check the ones in the trash! Then, think about future generations of people in your family or neighborhood. Do your criteria for what makes a photo good change?

Message from my Body: There’s an app Kriya for That.

The Taste of Regret

There was a night in June, some eleven hours before I wanted Afterimage to reach your inbox, that I wanted more energy and a surge of creativity to help me complete (and start) the latest installment. I also wanted to Write from Abundance.

I thought about people who say: “There’s an app for that. I knew there had to be a kriya for what I was looking for.

A kriya is a practice within yoga meant to achieve or create a specific outcome. I went to my yoga resource center and found it: The Kriya for Energy, Creativity, and Abundance.

Some people say the effects of yoga are like a self-induced high. I consider it as a tool to self-regulate. The closest example many of us might have is a workout. We can set an intention for the training, sync (or hold) breath to movement, raise our heart rate, cool off, and stretch again with breath. It changes body chemistry, how we feel, and how we see things.

It sounds complicated, but it isn’t. I practice it because it works.

Kriya for Energy, Creativity, and Prosperity

I swapped coffee out with a kriya, wrote the newsletter, went to be relatively early, and slept like a baby.

Here are some short videos on The Kriya for Energy, Creativity, and Prosperity. Consider it the first Afterimage Companion. Let me know what you think.

Here's to more energy, creativity, and abundance in the coming week.

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