Synchronicity

I wouldn't say that I'm psychic or clairvoyant. But there have many strange synchronicities in my life that I just can't explain. I wonder what they mean and if there's a way to harness the power.

Today I had been doing a search in my photos for a trio of musicians because a bride had asked if I knew a group available for her wedding next month. Scrolling through the photos, my attention was drawn for a moment to a series of photos I'd taken of a guy M. was friends with. M. met him when he was teaching drawing at the cultural center here back in the spring of 2006. The guy was very nice and polite. M. ran into him again last fall. It turned out that now he was essentially homeless, living in his beat up Volkswagon van, and was addicted to sniffing inhalents. He acted totally crazy towards me and took every opportunity to try to touch me. M. sort of severed their friendship after 2 incidents. One was when A. was high and visiting M.'s studio and he allegedly made crude comments to a nun who was visiting for a religious retreat. And then one day A. was driving with M. as his passenger and got into an accident, hitting a motocycle. Apparently it wasn't his fault, but the police arrested A. and dragged him off to jail and impounded his van which happened to contain 2 huge bags of M.' laundry that he'd just picked up from a laundermat.

At one point, he had been parked outside my front door and later moved the van to a nearby block. Anyway, we hadn't seen A. in months. But today, I happened across his image. I looked at several other images and then later, when I was getting ready to leave to shoot a wedding tonight, I went to close some open programs on my computer and I noticed A. photos again. I felt a little creeped out, so I made sure to shut down Windows Explorer so as not to have to see this guy's face later.

Minutes later I left the apartment, still feeling a little creeped out, and not even a block away from my apartment was A.'s van parked on the street. So weird. It was as if by just thinking about him he appeared. More likely, I sensed his energy on some subconscious level and that somehow was connected to seeing the photos. As I said, I can't explain it and it still freaks me out, but this type of thing happens often enough that now I also think, "There's one of those weird syncronicities again; what's that all about?"

Anyway, the wedding was great. I was a little nervous because although I've been shooting some portraits in the past couple of months, I actually hadn't shot a wedding since the beginning of January. When I don't shoot for awhile, I get that fear of screwing up someone's wedding photos. Now I haven't screwed up a series of photos since I was 18 and the roll of film in my Pentax K1000 camera wasn't wound properly. I was in France at the time and thought I was taking loads of great photos of the family that was hosting me for the Nacel exchange program. I didn't realize there was a problem until I got to what I thought was the end of the roll and it kept going, and going, and going, and going... That was 22 years ago and who knows how many rolls of film so it's a pretty unreasonable fear but hey, it's someone's wedding day and I take that very seriously.

But tonight I felt great. The families and friends were so nice and the couple were laid back, and the bride told me a couple of times how much she loved my work online. And it always feels good when people tell me how great I am and what a good job I'm doing when they haven't even seen a single photo I'm taking. It does remind me that although photography is about the photos, being a photographer is about a lot more. One thing I'll say for myself is that people always seem to have fun and I like that.

Blogging is funny because it's so selective. I felt compelled to write what I did and I didn't even mention getting into a fight with my ex-landlord today and it escalating to the point where I threatened to kill his children and I called the cops and had my first experience of discrimination by law enforcement against a foreigner (me). Maybe I'll talk about that another time.