Meditating on Photographs

My roommates are moving out today . . . They lived with me for three months. I can recall the first couple days we were living together . . . the house abounded with joy, they even gave me a present.

And now? Now there are a lot of muffled sighs. They've hardly spoken to me for the three months they lived in my house. In the beginning, I thought we were going to eat meals together. That never happened.

Things started to go sour the day Julie, one of the roommates, told me they were moving out in a month. She said it so nonchalantly, "Oh, by the way, we found a new place."

"But we had an agreement?" I said.

"Yeah, well, one of our friends broke up with her girlfriend and we're all going to rent a house; it's cheaper."

We never had a written agreement, and therefore I couldn't even get them to forfeit their deposit.

One of the strangest things, while they were living in my house, they never even used the common area. With the exception of eating dinner in the kitchen, they used to come home and run up to their room and shut the door.

It baffled me that a couple who chose to rent a room in a shared house could be so anti-social. But such was the case.

Granted, my living habits are not very typical. I keep late hours and work from home. But in the beginning, they really didn't seem to mind. It was just before they decided to leave that this atmosphere of resentment started to surface.

These photographs by Kim Holtermand sum up my mood right now. As fall approaches, the feeling of beautiful cool detachment comes over me . . . I love fall as many do, and I am detached from the petty worries of my life . . . I love the crisp awareness that fall brings. The large empty spaces in these photographs give me an immediate sense of the hollowness. That hollowness is not a superficial hollowness but the hollowness of consciousness, the emptiness that is pure and large and cannot be destroyed.

These neon lights too reflect me in this moment. I am still illuminated with color, hopeful against the grey, metal background of my surroundings. These neon lights remind me of the lines I make in my art journal, using colored ink.

I love lines, a precise mark is beautiful.

A sort of industrial photograph should remind us of what we've become. We've become machines . . . but engaging this season can help us from remaining machines. Roomates will come and go, but fall endures somehow.

Kim Holterman's Website