FLOATING

The right edge of this polaroid is dated August '71. I don't know who the floating boy is, but when I look at this picture, I see an image of what I often feel like - like I am floating and relaxed, but also like the world is vast and overwhelming, and in the scheme of things, I am just keeping my head above water. 

I found this photo on the ground sometime in 2003. At the time, I was studying landscape architecture at LSU. I was particularly unhappy and confused in the program. I liked pushing myself as a designer (or rather, pulling my own teeth), and I liked learning about the history and relevance of the profession, but none of my efforts came with ease. Being able to visualize solutions clearly is not the same as crafting and problem-solving with visual tools. I had a gap to fill to effectively translate ideas into a visual language. This gap was the source of a lot of struggling.

When I came across this image, I picked it up and taped it to the outside of my sketchbook. It reminded me of my long love affair with water. It was also a source of inspiration, a metaphor of sorts: I was the boy in the water. I needed to relax, not get discouraged and keep floating. Can a single image contain a mantra for life; can the singular experience of floating in water contain a mantra? Occasionally, I pull out the journal this photo is taped too and I meditate on the message the image imbues.

I imagine this picture was taken off the Gulf Coast of Florida. I've visited that coast over and over in my life, as a girl, as an adult. It is a place that soothes me. 

Now, six years after I found the photo, I remain enamored, comforted and conversely, frightened by water bodies. Water imagery works its way into my fiction almost always - as a land[water]scape that supports millions of life forms, some seemingly magical, and also as a place that easily, ironically, dispassionately and with finality, swallows life.