ex+is+10+tial

In our brief moments at the terminator we live in twilight. Shadows form within shadows and our eyes struggle to adjust in the strange light as our surroundings obscure the sun.

Do you remember what this feels like? To glance away from the setting sun and find that the eastern sky is already cloaked in darkness? To straddle the line between night and day? To see how the colors around you are shifting and glowing; changing from moment to moment?

Amazing, isn't it?

It happens every day, once at dawn and once at dusk - whether we take the time to notice or not. It's hard to pause when our lives are full, but consider this: it's even harder when our lives are empty.

There is another place where light and shadow meet. Another terminator with colors of its own. A borderland between clarity and obscurity, lucidity and fantasy. It is the seam that splits our psyche between states of wakefulness and sleep and, it too, can be witnessed with abundant regularity.

From time to time - as if standing on a California beach at sundown - I will take a moment to observe the details around me in this existential twilight. I will observe my outbound awareness and the sense of my physical self from the shadows of my newly forming dream state and I will separate my mind and stand apart to witness the unfolding discomposure of imagined places and events as they appear and disappear before my mind's eye. I lay and I watch - dreaming and awake - while creativity and orderly cognition compete for ground in a strangely enlightened mindscape.

And I sometimes wonder if the people that I see there, standing on that beach, could possibly see me too - with one foot anchored by space and time and the other in some common place - unbound by the strings of our mundane and individual perspectives. Together at the edge of dream and reason.

This photograph is called [potent]iality. It was created, in studio, using a strobe (with snoot), a reflector, and ritual magick.

Hope you like it.

- Jake