As you all probably know, if not read, I visited Crater Lake last month for the second time in my life. It was the first time I touched the water. Which to me, makes it the first time and a spiritual experience of belonging.

Oregon is my home, and I want to know every facet of it. From the coolness of the waters in Crater Lake to the grain of sand under the gaze of Haystack Rock to the wildflower embrace along the slopes of Mount Hood.

These are all the big things, however. And for all their majesty, they have not provided a setting as cool as Whitehorse Falls along the North Umpqua Highway. It was at this place that a friend and I found a sufficiently damp spot, set up a camera, dipped our props, and burned.

Later, as I watched the footage, I was struck by the sense that it was a clean burn with very slips. Those that did occur were covered by grace and a smile. To cut it would have been a disaster. To cover it in music would have been impossible.

There was no music playing when we recorded. The only melody was the droning timbre of water falling, rapid and rushing to join, the northern fork of the Umpqua River. To cover that in music would have been unconscionable.

But what to do about giving this video some audio spice?

Well, the Friday after this experience at the falls, I was at a little private festival near White Salmon. While there, my friends told me how much they enjoyed my “Bubbles” poem and video and encouraged to read more. Not to just recite the words, but to read and feel the poems themselves.

It was a liberating experience, and it revealed a truth: the poetic lyrics I write are not an expulsion of an inner thought, but the extension of the inner self. However cringe or unvarnished or saccharine they may be.

I feel them. And to deny them their place and power as I read through them again, would be to deny myself my own purpose.

So that’s what happened: I wrote a new poem, inspired by this new spirituality found in both the land of Cascadia and the deed of being a fire performer called “A Prayer Roll.” I paired it with two other poems I wrote this summer that spoke to what it means to possess and what it means to be caught in loops.

And I loved the end result. Check out the preview here:

I released the full video early on my Patreon, but it will also be here on the blog on 10/30.

It may not be perfect but is an answer to a conundrum of my creative flow. One that has often felt like I was just managing my writing, photography and flow art impulses rather than manifesting them into one cohesive whole. In particular, writing had come to dominate my creative efforts. It’s been taking up more and more of time each day as I work on the poetry, the journaling, the short stories.

As that happened, the joy of photography took up less and less of my time. I haven’t stopped doing photography——I’m always bringing my camera to the function——but there was a moment this spring as I worked on the cherry blossoms posts, that I realized how much I missed video editing; how it scratched a different type of itch.

One that wished it had some field recordings of the sounds of people walking down the Waterfront. This was only confirmed later, when I put together Bubbles Popping in Slow Motion.

To that end, I’m committed to making more short films. Little slice of life documentaries. These future Casual Cameras short films are not always going to be about me spinning my stick, but there will be more poetry. There will be stop-motion scenes and documentaries of caterpillars.

No, seriously, I got about 1000 photos of a single caterpillar from Bird Creek, I’d be remiss not to write about him.

The general rule of thumb I’m keeping is that if it exists under five minutes then it’s a Casual Camera. If it ranges above that, then a Casual Camera will be made for a preview version, and any behind the scenes stuff will become a Patreon Exclusive.

Those longer short films may be more of a quarterly event, but I do want to make them and release them as they happen.

So with that said, Casual Rambler, I present to you all the new and improved Casual Camera, starting with “A Prayer Roll.”

Thank you for your support, and I hope you enjoy!

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