this meaning behind this image is pretty clear on the surface, but like all my titles, it has a much more deeper and emotional meaning from every feeling i felt while capturing the impression...as this image was created by experiencing the wilderness of the sonoran desert "all through the night"...
i was walking down my faintly lit path of the unknown into a new world, thinking of her, though we still have yet to meet...i could feel her presence with me, though i did not know where she was exactly...i was comforted by the loving stars overhead, excited and scared at the same time...hopeful, but worried i'd somehow misread the signs, so unsure of myself, but never before so positive of what i wanted so badly...
i was an oxymoron wrapped deeply in contradicting feelings of untold amounts of mystery, romance, fear, and amazement...i sensed her with me in my heart, and she felt me in her heart...she's out there somewhere in the universe thinking about me thinking about her...this dreamy vision amidst a rapid heartbeat driven by a massive emotional rush of a hopeful romance one day soon, blended altogether with tears, smiles and sighs entwined as one...
as it turned out, i lived a lifetime of hope and happiness in one just night...all night long just being, just breathing and just letting go...truly living and experiencing life, so unexpected, and letting moments take my breath away...how could i not capture a beautiful impression with my camera?
"i know what i want. i so badly want the entire fairy tale, like julia roberts in pretty woman desiring to be "cinder.f*ckin.rella"...no more will i settle for mediocrity, or sacrifice my feelings for broken promises, or compromise for anything less than the extraordinary...i want the complete package: a total happily-ever-after...and in her eyes, i will see the hope that maybe i might finally have found a chance to have it all" ― bodhinku, the entire fairy tale
....................
"i lived a lifetime of happiness in one just night...all night long just being, just breathing and just letting go...truly living and experiencing life, so unexpected, just letting moments take my breath away" ― bodhinku, just
this image is a picture of the stars, the milky way, and jupiter, all above a classic looking saguaro cactus in the middle of the sonoran desert...taken during a magical evening all through the night...to get to this location, i headed out to the deep sonoran desert last saturday with high hopes of some beautiful images...
i went out into the heat of the sonoran desert with hopes of capturing dramatic impressions of monsoonal clouds, glowing sunsets, and saguaro cacti...but the big afternoon clouds slowly evaporated by the time sunset arrived, so no glorious sunset...but all good, because the clear skies provided instead for a wonderful evening of shooting heavenly bodies in the night...the crescent moon, the milky way, the planets, and the stars over-top of the saguaro cacti...a magical time spent all through the night, taking images with my camera in a beautiful wilderness, a time spent that i wish never had to end...
so, pictured here is my memory in the form of an impression, captured of this wonderful time...all through the night i was breathing in life that took my breath away, moments lived that i will always treasure...just like the famous quote i cited above in the last section says: "life is not measured by the number of breaths we take, but by the moments that take our breath away" ― vicki corona, tahitian choreographies
sorry, but now a little bit of a side-track ramble with me babbling on a bit...
i had to make the tough decision to not take my doggie with me on this trip (and he was very missed)...i didn't take besos (my pup) because of all the wicked evil cholla cacti all over the place where i was headed...ironically the cholla (pronounced "choy-yah") are nicknamed as the "teddy bear cactus", which they are anything but fuzzy and cuddly...for the cholla are just plain wickedly evil plants, maybe my least favorite species on the planet...and if their species were to disappear forever, along with mosquitoes, stable flies, no-see-ums, and new zealand black flies, i would not feel one tiny iota of remorse for their collective extinction...
the cholla cactus has the nasty reproduction habit of budding by dropping tons of round golf-ball sized spores, with every millimeter of their surface area encased in tiny but sturdy sticky prickly spines. they are truly santan's velcro and fiercely adhere to anything they come in contact with, and i mean anything. the fiendish buds fall off the tips of the cactus by the barrel load and lay all around close by on the ground...these little demons spread by wind and unlucky animals to increase their area of disbursement to a much wider circumference with time...and each spore germinates eventually into new cholla plants that grow and bud in the same way to diabolically spread hundreds more of their heinous seeds about... they are the devil's spawn and are awful to be around...
good boots, a good flashlight, and caution, plus a pair of needle nose pliers in your pocket (just in case one adheres to you) are the only ways of dealing with these little pricks...it would take a brave (or maybe crazy) person to walk around barefoot, or even in flip-flops if cholla are even anywhere close in the vicinity...
once one hellish spore attaches to you, you must remove it cautiously and slowly...because it literally explodes super stiff piercing needles all over anything it contacts when you try to remove it hastily. it takes some serious restraint to just let it stick in you until you can carefully remove the vile bud intact as one piece using needle-nose pliers...for if you brush at it, it breaks apart and viciously sticks to the next surface just as bad with needles covering even more space on the new surface, and then if you touch it again, it spreads even more again, and so on...and that is just one little villainous bud...getting numerous of these feisty unholy bastards on you is just unspeakably misery...
so imagine an aussie shepherd doggie, with all its energy, spunk, and obsessive focus...just imagine them getting a few on their fur or paw pads, and what kind of a brutal disaster would happen as they panicked to shake them off, inducing them to explode, to only become covered more and more with spines spreading all over, making the situation exponentially worse and loathsome...so, no besos on this trip, unfortunately cholla abounding are just "no bueno", and just not a good or safe environment for a doggie...
but this weekend and the next few, no fail, besos will be on adventures with me, i will not leave the poor guy home again for a long while...
"in trying to understand myself, and things that really make me glow with happiness, i created something special here...one fusion joined together from my psyche, dreams, visions, feelings, emotions, thoughts, and illuminations from the inner workings of my combined mind, heart, and soul" ― bodhinku, zen to me
"all through the night i was breathing in life that took my breath away, moments lived that i will always treasure" ― bodhinku, my treasure chest