a little film (Iceland)

I am much more a photograph person than I am a video person. Video just isn't in my blood-- my parents have thousands of photos of me as a child, but I've never seen a home movie of me as a baby, or any other age.

So this is new territory, and I'm pretty excited about it. There is something that film can capture that a still photograph inherently cannot. It moves the way your molecules move when you're exploring a new land for the first time.

This new land we travelled to was a surreal, hard, fairlyland dreamscape.
I hope you enjoy it through our eyes.

I hope it inspires you to make a little film of your own.


Song: Six Weeks, by Of Monsters and Men (who are from Iceland!)

(enlarge it for the full effect)


b + j in : iceland from Joann Liu on Vimeo.



Takk for watching.

Words + photos from the land of ice coming up next...

Of Late: July Musings

 

1/ Strawberry basil, fresh lemon and Tahitian vanilla with bffs      2/ Just missing Scott on the double dream deck (AKA Triple D)

3/ A soul cleanser, this paddle     4/ BBQing everything with the siblings

5/ Little hands and little frogs on Saturna     6/ The Greens and an Ella

7/ The tea party of the century for our special friend     8/ This is my Everything.

euromoon (no, euromoon!)

This trip has been at least three years in the making. When I knew we were getting married, I dreamed that at the end of the big party, the big feelings, my shiny new husband and myself would be on a plane to Europe. While others get really excited for continents like Asia and South America, I pretty much only get googly eyes over the Big E.

(I don't know why. Maybe I'm secretly racist. Or maybe I was a colonizer who was afraid of planes and going too far from home, in a past life.)

In late 2012, I started to become aware of Icelandair and their stopover deals-- you can stay in Iceland for a maximum of seven nights on your onward destination to some other European country that the airline connects to. Two countries for the price of oooooone. Bicep + thumbs up emoji!
The closest North American hub to us was Seattle, and I plotted over who to bribe to drive us down to the States.

But it was not to be. School starts early in the Yukon, and so we pretty much only had two weeks for a trip after the wedding. We re-brainstormed and I put aside my Euro ideas for the moment. If you're a regular reader of this blog of mine, you know that we ultimately had a truly lovely mielmoon in Sooke and in New York.

Of Late: June Musings

1/ Peonies: a living work of art     2/ Earl Grey donut date    3/ Trying out glasses-wearing again      4/ Nairn Falls

        5/ Pie birthday party at the park    6/ Matt Kivel record to make our collection a little bit more mellow 

        7/ My first growing thing to sprout from a seed!   8// Pops + Sis celebration

An Essay on the Perils of Moving-While-Married

It is the month of June: the same month that we got into our blue truck named Bibi and left the Junction for a more southern postal code.

 It will be a year soon, since we left for good.

 The blasting sun, the heady smell of hot pine, bird calls early in the morning-- all this reminds me of that month we rolled up to BC and tentatively reclaimed it as ours.

I wrote this essay in the winter of 2014. It's been ready to publish for months now.

Each time I thought about pressing the button to post, I would hesitate. It felt still too close to me, like looking in the rear view mirror and seeing objects that appear closer than they actually are.

But! it is the month of June! Earth has nearly completed a full orbit from when I felt these things last!

My synapses that hate Change, that are slow to fire, have finally done so.
I am happy here, in this postal code. I feel grounded. I love my husband.

(Thank God.)

So now I share with you a time when I was very, very, very, very, not.

Thanks for reading. Let it serve you and me as a reminder that life is full of hardness and lightness both.
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Of late: May Musings

       1/ Watermelon radish reverence.  2/ Hey Happy cafe in Victoria.  3/ Brown Ridge, Saturna Island.  4/ Emily Carr 2015 grad show.

5/ Hidden brook at corner of St. George & 11th.  6/ Bagels in Mt. Pleasant.  7/ IT'S OK at home.  8/ Raspberry rhubarb.

 I told you I'd write soon, and then a whole season went by. The cherry blossoms even came and went. No apologies-- because no posts means living my life; actually standing under the blossoms and having blossom fights (like snowball fights, but with pink petals), rather than documenting everything-- but I am eager to carve out a space for this once more.

This is just a little something, fashioned from a structure that I saw elsewheres, but it's enough to thrust me back into using my fingers to type the words that I feel so hard in my brain. 

I do hope you've been well.

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2014 in Pictures

Resurrect.


I thought about you, this, often in the last five months. I should write something. So much has happened. I should record it for me, for us, for them. 

At some point, after a couple months and then one more, and another... it becomes much harder to begin again. The images and events seem to take on either very mundane properties, or becomes so huge that I wonder, how can I explain this to anyone?

So I suppose it takes something like the first day of a brand new year to catapult me out into the expansive sky again.

As per tradition, I give you my collection of 2014 photographs. I do it more for me than you. It steadies me to know where I've been; it shows me the history of this year that makes up the skin cells and molecules I have at this moment.

To be sure: know that it has been a bit of a trying year. Pictures don't ever capture this. Sometimes it feels like a falsehood for me, to share images of only the highlights, and not talk about the hardships that come from being complex human beings. I don't want to mislead you, or myself.

So trust that when you see my photos--or anyone's photos, for that matter-- you are seeing the golden moments. The ones that inspire hope or laughter. The ones that remind you that life is good. The ones that are necessary.

Gratitude to the golden moments of this year that got us through all the changes of growing up.

Happy New New.

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