Some days after knowing about the cheating, I went to a mountain retreat with some friends.
We bathed naked in the river, we had miso soup for dinner and meditated in behalf of clarity.
Rilke wrote that all insights occur after the fact: I was scared to death, but feeling relieved by
dissolution.
My hands felt unbearably hot and I was struggling hard with a lagged need for physical
containment. In that warmth I flash backed the dilapidation, the rust, the spoilage, the washout and wreck of the previous years.
The one you live with can be a spiritual master or a scrubby guru.
The one you live with can bring your essence to light or brush truth and beauty aside until you become a dead one walking.
Since then I’ve experienced a progressive turnaround and major adjustments.
I love my daughters and my girl beyond what I thought possible.
I arised refreshed from doubt and surrendered to photography as a life-long calling.
Everything is there, disturbingly appealing to the senses, reclaiming the lost years from precariousness and seclusion, ready to bloom.
Txema Rodríguez
photographer
That great golden hive of the Invisible
Antiphon
I’ve gone through several nightmarish relationships in my life. As a result, my self esteem was damaged beyond remedy. The women I used to be attracted to vaccined me against any kind of complacency and self-absorption and made healthy vanity the fastest shortcut to shame.
Photography became the only acceptable excuse to demand approval and attention, the only source of comfort and relief, the emergency exit, the raw material of new beginnings after emotional downfalls and quakes. The spinal cord of my identity.
And suddenly, the biggest stroke of luck: her adventitious appearance, the unpredictable realization of all emotional needs. The struggle for survival mutated into another kind of primal drive: to give her something of great value in return. To let myself be noticed and succeed, putting this single virtue to a test. To clean up the mess left by past sentimental choices, working hard to earn her magnificent silences, giving the world something as precious as what I had been given.
I barely wheathered the storm until she reclaimed my name from obscurity. Maybe one must be completely emptied in order to be worthy of true grace.
I remember the first time touched her skin with my lenses, long before we really found each other, so even though times of economic recession are not the easiest for artists, I trust the means to find me like she did. Photography is not about distinction and celebrity, but love returning to the world like an antiphon. The privilege of channeling cardinal revelation through ordinary things.