Consider this

Sheryl's most recent newsletter (it's mine too, but Sheryl is tending to write more of them) went through a few different forms before I was willing to approve it. Why? She's on a bit of a tear over a lot of social injustices going on right now. Like, I don't know how "right" it was for our government to go bailing out huge corporations with tax dollars. Like a lot of Americans, I think it looks pretty wrong, and yet I've seen some very intelligent arguments in favor of it from some people who frankly know a lot more about economics than I do. I don't think it's necessarily fair or right, but I can see our government recognizing that letting the economy go free-fall into severe depression probably would have been worse.

When it comes to knowledge of world economic affairs, I might as well be an infant (had to tie in with the photo somehow). But, sometimes we know when we need to take action and not just shrug our shoulders and go "oh well". When it's home, family and friends at stake we sometime must stand up and take action even if we don't think of ourselves as activists or all that political. So, we put out Sheryl's activist newsletter, and immediately got some rave reviews. People were grateful for our candid honesty and acceptance of the emotional and actional life as being just as spiritual and important as anything. We also had a couple people pull themselves off the newsletter list, which is kind of ironic-- because that's a pretty obvious protest too. Oh well, can't please all the people all the time.

I've been on Facebook lately, and the good part is that I do get some contact with a few old friends of mine. The rest is up in the air. I had some minor contact too, with a photographer whom I do not know but whose work I very much admire. He's not willing to share any info with me about the business of photography, or the art, or anything. He posts silly crap on Facebook all the time. For the record, it's mostly silly crap on Facebook anywhere you look. I'm usually very lucky, that when I decide to contact a person with a reputation, some degree of fame, they usually write back. Well not this time. He wrote back as a matter of politeness to let me know that he doesn't know what to say to other photographers when they ask the kinds of questions I was asking. He said maybe I could take a class out of Santa Fe. We were in fact thinking about relocating near Santa Fe as it turns out. This photographer just put his house up for sale too, and says he's trying to dig up some work for himself, so I have to wonder how well he is currently doing in the industry anyway. Nothing like somebody asking for business advice from you when you're getting ready to sell out and get the hell out of Dodge.


I once or twice had other photographers hit me up for advice, very enthusiastic-- some come across as babyish and seem to want almost a mommy who will lead them through everything step by step. Another came on so strong wanting to pal around with me and go out on shoots together, have his girlfriend model nude for us-- it was weird and I shut him down real fast. So, I sort of know what it's like to get contacted out of the blue about things you aren't making yourself available for.

You know one of the luckiest things is that when we do get clients for the spiritual healing practice-- they are like the perfect clients. We love those sessions. And we spent a lot of time making sure that we did indeed give the right impression about ourselves. We want most of all to foster growth and evolution, not dependency (ha! tied into the photo again).

Sheryl is not blogging much right now because she's working on a book. I'm supposed to be working on mine, but I'm still shaking off the writer's dust and continuing to focus on photography as well. We're all babes in the woods in some way, and even though I've published a lot of short stories and news stories I have never put together a book. Sheryl has put out three, but she's never had a close editor like me-- a veteran of many writers workshops, so ouch, growing pains, but at least we're growing up. (How many tie-ins to the photo is that now?)