Twenty Twenty-One, You were Fun.

I’ve made a Zine to look back on this year and the good times had in Iceland.

It’s called, Twenty Twenty-One, You Were Fun. It doesn’t come close to showing everything that we did in the last year, but it does represent another year well spent.

In taking a look back at the year, I wanted to highlight the, well, highlights.

Moments that can’t be described, they have to be seen.

The times when the everyday is especially beautiful.

And of course, the things that make life a whole lot of fun.

See it here: Twenty Twenty-One, You Were Fun.

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I made a Zine called This is Portrait.

Take a break...

Beyond all polarities I am

Let the judgements and opinions of the mind be judgements and opinions of the mind

And you exist behind that

Ah so

Ah so

It’s really time for you to see through the absurdity of your predicament 

You aren’t who you thought you were

You just aren’t that person

And in this very lifetime you can know it

Right now

The real work you have to do is in the privacy of your own heart

All of the external forms are lovely

But the real work is your inner connection

If you’re quiet when you meditate

If you truly open your heart

Just quiet your mind…

Open your heart

Quiet the mind, open the heart

How do you quiet the mind? 

You meditate

How do you open the heart?

You start to love that which you can love and just keep expanding it

You love a tree

You love a river

You love a leaf 

You love a flower

You love a cat

You love a human

But go deeper and deeper into that love

Til you love that which is the source of the light behind all of it

Behind all of it

You don’t worship the gate 

You go into the inner temple

Everything in you that you don’t need 

you can let go of

You don’t need loneliness for you couldn’t possibly be alone

You don’t need greed because you already have it all

You don’t need doubt because you already know

The confusion is saying “I don’t know”

But the minute you are quiet you find out that in truth you do know

For in you, you know

Plane after plane will open to you

I want to know who I really am

As if in each of us, there once was a fire

And for some of us there seem as if there are only ashes now

But when we dig in the ashes we find one ember

And very gently we fan that ember

…blow on it 

…it gets brighter

And from that ember we rebuild the fire

Only thing that’s important is that ember

That’s what you and I are here to celebrate

That though we have lived our life totally involved in the world

We know

We know that we’re of the spirit

The ember gets stronger

Flame starts to flicker a bit

And pretty soon you realise that all we’re going to do for eternity is sit around the fire 

Visual Diary: An Explanation

I recently ditched my iPhone in favor of a Nokia 3310. With this comes the freedom to get away from some social media that was feeling more like an advertising platform than a sharing platform as of late. Bye bye Instagram.  But the question remains: how do I, as a photographer, continue to share some choice photos that might not be representative of my professional work? 

The answer, it seems, is to return to something that I was actively pursuing from 2006-2017 over at kingoden.blogspot.com.  So, in that spirit, but updated a little for the times I live in now, I give you this space.

The photographs here are going to be an attempt to go a little more in depth than an average Instagram post. I want to talk a bit about my process, what the photo represents, and why I took it the way I did. Hopefully, the results will be satisfying to you and I, alike. 

Self Portrait, 2018