The Virginia Creeper on the north fence is beginning to turn a bright red.  The Montana skies have been filled with smoke, making everything hazy.  I new football season has begun with the beloved Grizzlies.  Today is my first day of vacation, for the fall, and I am back to work on this project.  I realize several seasons have passed and it’s time to get started again.  This has been a very productive year for me.  Though I have taken some time away from this project, I feel an even stronger connection to it in my heart, but it almost feels like I have to relearn it.  It was a year ago this month the website was born, and fall of last year became all-consuming.  I need to learn to find balance, but perhaps that is just the status quo of life for most of us.  I spent a great deal of this year developing my studio garden; it is one of the things I am truly passionate about.  I keep saying I am on the 3^rd year of a 10-year plan, but this year it leapt ahead to about the 7^th.  The basic structure of it is all now in tact.  I truly feel at in heaven when I am outside working.  I also spent some time this year reconnecting back into my community and hanging out with friends.  Did a lot of work on the studio space and even hosted several chamber concerts in the space.  It seems the space and gardens are becoming a perfect venue for fundraisers and everyone that comes into the place marvels that is exists here in Missoula.  My photography has also made several leaps as well this year, as my summer has been filled with projects, more notable working on a series with a burlesque group called The Cigarette Girls.

The upgrade to the site was finished this morning and I leapt out of bed and began working on it once again.  I realized how much I actually missed it all.  I am currently cleaning through much of the site and organizing some structural elements and am hoping by the end of the week to begin working on some new galleries.  Be patient if you see things begin to shift and fall out of sorts, it’s just me dicking around with it trying to become reacquainted.  It somehow feels like I have come home.

It has been an extremely busy year for me, busier then I think I have ever been in my life.

As I get older I seem to become more focused. I see a vast world in front of me I did not know how to dissect or investigate when I was younger. Sex seemed to rule supreme and dominated most of my existence. It seemed enough to sustain me. Not to say my desire has changed, but seems to have migrated from a physical activity now more to an emotional state. I feel I am becoming introverted, perhaps more introspective in the way I look at my self and those that surround me. I peruse those things that are more meaningful to me now, seemingly with more passion, perhaps trying to figure it’s relevance to my meager existence. In the beginning I feared my difference and mostly chose to remain hidden, to lurk in sort of the shadow of the world that surrounded me. I grew up on a cattle ranch in the mountains of Western Montana and Montana is where I choose still to remain. Now that the flurry of summer activity is beginning to wane and as I finish up my last wedding project of the season I am being drawn back into this project I started last year.

I have spent the last couple of weeks resolving issues I have been struggling with to maintain the site and move it forward. On Monday it will migrate to a new operation system and hopefully become more manageable.

This morning I pulled an old book down from the shelf  Men for Men: Homoeroticism and Male Homosexuality in the History of Photography Since 1840  by Pierre Borhan and as I sat in the crisp morning light of my garden, listening to the trickle of the water from the creek at my feet, I begin to realize the journey of our culture, which was once clandestine, now has become something so common that we take it for granted. What was once a punishable offense, to dabble in such arts, is now revered with a liberation of personal expression. But I see and realize in my heart it is something I still revere as sensational. I see the importance of my connection to this project and it is time once again to embrace it whole-heartedly.

The Naked Man Project has suddenly grown exponentially beyond what I had ever imagined. This morning when I called a client back about scheduling a headshot for the beginning of next week he informed me that my Cyr Photo website was not working, and he could not get directions to the studio location, he mentioned there was some sort of J loop error and he could not access it. I took down his email address so I could send him directions and jumped on the site, it was indeed not accessible. I then jumped on The Naked Man Project site and saw the same messages. I then tried to log onto the server and it too was no longer accessible. I immediately sent an email to Julian to see if there was some sort of server malfunction. Indeed there was! It turns out The Naked Man Project was having so much traffic that it blew out the server causing disruption to all the sites on the server. Once Julian had stabilized it and began to figure out what was going on, he shot me an email that I have created a monster that is no longer containable with the equipment we currently have. It is time to either abandon the project or take it to a new level.

Oddly enough I had almost abandon the project and because I had not worked on it in months. After devoting an entire year to the project, I had somehow felt it didn’t really take off, and that it was perhaps just a narcissistic lark I had chosen to pursue. My life seems to be filled with abandon larks that never take off. I did manage to complete the year, satisfied but exhausted. Some of the models I had worked with were requesting that I remove them from the site or change their names because they didn’t like the notoriety and how popular the site had become because of being able to search their names on the Internet. Though they had signed model releases and initially agreed I respected their privacy and adhered to their wishes. In a sense it was just a bit much for a place like little old Missoula Montana, after all we are all a part of very small community. It disheartened and broke my pride a bit to have committed so some time, energy and determination into a project that not many, well within my community, seem to appreciate. I began to questions if I had crossed the boundaries of social and ethical morals, of exploiting those who had trusted me with their greatest intimacy. You see most of the models were from my community, mostly Montana, nobody has ever been paid, including myself in the creation of the project. It was all born out of passion and the desire for the exploration of the process. Last January the site had outgrown the original server and we had to upgrade. When we did the migration to the new server issues began to arise and my energy was consumed with how to maintain the site. What was supposed to become a self contained entity suddenly began to eat all my energy because of my inexperience and lack of knowledge with how the Internet works pushing me further away from the creation of art and what brought me to the work from the beginning. There was also suddenly a lack of interest of subjects to be photographed. What was happening? I begun to realize most everyone was intimidated by me and my little art adventure. At this point I decided it was time to lay it to rest for a bit and put my focus elsewhere, give it some distance. My boss at UPS called me into her office one day and said close the door, and in a whisper she said I saw your sight, and looked around as if we were doing something naughty said it was very good. She seemed quite impressed, though it was only appropriate to mention in a whisper. The origins of the horse whisperer had begun in Montana, had I now created the n____ man whisperer? It then dawned on me as I began to realize the ambivalence I was feeling from other people toward the project was more of a hushed appreciation.

It’s been churning in the back of my mind for some time now to get back to the project. But now it beckons me. After an intense afternoon of franticlly trying to figure out what to do; we have decided to put the site into a maintenance mode so we can restructure and organize it to keep up with the influx of traffic. The real kicker is I was completely oblivious. I had no idea and was astonished when Julian began to tell me the numbers that were coming off the site. It is now time to dig deep and decided what is really important. Consider what is it I really want out of the project? Is it worth a new investment? So here I am wide awake in the middle of the night sitting in the middle of my empty studio, naked, trying to come to terms with this monster I have somehow created.

I realize that life is merely an illusion that the only thing really important is our emotional connection to things. How is that we feel the older we get the more disconnected we become from our feelings? Is it really the business of our lives, the desperate race to fulfill our desires? To somehow find meaning sometimes where there may not be any at all. Sometimes the desire taking us further away from who we are to the point that we become lost and begin to abandon the things that are essential to our livelihood. I keep trying to be an artist in Montana, but it seems the harder I pursue it the further I get away from connecting to what is meaningful. I have somehow forgotten what brought me here from the beginning.

This morning I had a dream about my Grandmother Elise Cyr. I saw her living out her last days in a hospital bed and I would go to visit her. And though her body had become lifeless, I could see the vitality within her eyes and expression. I somehow helped her to relive that vitality again as we became suspended in a reverie of thoughts, feelings, emotions, and memories. In my dream I took her to a place of life and I could see within her soul that she was contented. Though she could not speak, she was filled with joy. In the dream I was trying to move her to a retirement center that was filled with other people similar to me, artists, where she would find inspiration and live in adoration. You see my grandmother always delighted in entering my world. It is my grandmother who gave me the passion of my creativity. You see, she saw things in me that no one else could envision. I was a very strange kid, enveloped in a darkness I could not understand. All I can remember from childhood was an angst, perhaps because I was so different. Where everyone else found fault in the difference, she somehow took delight and helped me explore it, to celebrate in my uniqueness. She was the most wondrous cook and she taught me magic of her world. But somehow the more I learned from her the greater a suspension grew out of me becoming a sissy as dread began to strike others around me, plunging me into a world of isolation and for the first time I found harmony in a world of creation. She taught me to sew, I soon pulled the old brightly colored flour sack curtain from the windows in the little shack and made myself a shirt, taking apart one I had already had to imitate the pattern. My grandmother poured every creative talent she had into me, and she believed in me when no one else could see my remarkable potential. My life flourished as a creative kid and I was further ahead than most others my age. I was ridiculed and tormented on the playground. I become fascinated with theater and the possibility of telling a story acting it out. I sang a solo at the Christmas Pageant. And when I finally went to the University, barely able to afford tuition, she secretly bought me a season subscription to a performing arts series to see all the amazing talents coming to our small town.

Many years ago I was working my way through a program called The Artist Way and one of the exercises specifically asked me to name the true champions of my life. My grandmother was at the top of that list. She still is.

In my dream she found the solace she was looking for at the end of her life in the adorning place of my creation. Tears filled my eyes. Not with sadness, but with joy that someone could see the remarkable qualities in me and allow them to flourish, when I know others chided her not to encourage such behavior.

A strange series of events the past could of days keep leading me back to the beginning; what is essential. I have taken a break away from my creative process, filled with distraction. Now my grandmother comes back from the grave as the ghost of my creative conscience, to hold my hand and remind me of what was once forgotten.

Someone sent me a text late the other night saying they had read one of my blog posts and wanted to tell me how much they liked what I was doing.  Somehow the project seems in the distant past, almost forgotten.  I realize how much I miss it.  How is it that something that seems so vital in our lives seems to slip so far away?  I begin to look back at the last couple of weeks and see how busy my life has become.  My target and goal is still aligned toward this project, but it seems plagued by a host of technical difficulties that, in many ways, I have allowed to derail me.  Since the migration to the new server it seems most time working on this project have been resolving issues and of course the lack of time to commit to it.  I have also begun to focus my energies back to shooting and working on getting back to the core of what brought me here in the first place.  The new images have a greater depth than I have ever worked before.  The connection is stronger more focused to and with the subjects.  It’s not so much an experiment anymore because my technique has been sharpened and honed.  This project has given me a deeper sense of myself and a greater appreciation of the moments I am living.

Yesterday I learned of a friend who was recently diagnosed with cancer and passed away.  I see how fragile our lives become.  He was younger than me and it’s been haunting my thoughts the past couple of days as I begin to make sense of where I currently am in my own existence.  My own life is so vast, that I am lucky to have such woven such a richness in most everything I undertake, the biggest question is am I really taking the time to appreciate it to it’s fullest.  It is now five years since I was also diagnosed with cancer, underwent treatment, and was lucky to survive this long.  I see how survival has put my need to accomplishment into a sort of hyper drive that now consumes me.  In a way making me fearless.  But the real question is why did it take me so long to get this motivated.  Why is it that it takes facing annihilation to awaken our lives to what is really important and essential to what we need to become?  There really isn’t time to tread water anymore.  Many years ago my dearest friend Gilbert was diagnosed with a brain tumor the week he decided to retire and was gone within 6 months.  He was a man of great means to accomplish whatever he could possibly desire but spent too much of his time consumed in unhappiness.  I have really begun to question myself.  Am I really happy?  Am I too consumed by my need for my own accomplishment to see what I have become?  The process of becoming an artist means we must dwell in what we have created.  To us as artists, the fresh vibrancy of what we create becomes dulled because it is rooted in a deeper connection of continually living within it.  Someone sending me a text in the middle of the night sees a freshness and vitality that I can no longer recognize.  But it does reawaken ourselves to see some thing we have created from a new perspective and reawaken our own bewilderment to what we have become.  Though I may have been derailed from my original intent I still become aware of the extraordinary of my ordinary self.  This is my process of discovery and creation.