musings and more images of hill ward

the farm where the patients worked
the ruins are now handicapped accessible! ramp and all
the last bits left from the hill ward, at western state mental hospital

so i still had a few more images to add to the steilacoom park set.
today is my birthday and one would wonder, i did for a second as i looked at these images sat on my desktop ready to be put somewhere if only a metaphorical garbage bin and for a second thought it was again that gave me these interests; decay, abandonment, the re surfacing of nature from a place below what seems less nature but what is inevitably nature because it comes from us and as Tim always says we are nature so how is it we can be nature and what we create isn't?
anyways for a second i wondered if it was increasing age that increased the intensity i feel to find and document places which are falling down, falling apart or just falling.
anyways i cant think of a time when i didnt enjoy discovering such places -photographing them up and down , possibly trespassing certain spaces and obsessing over others.
i guess i began my photographing (on the serious level of black and white film in that first class in highschool) in a cemetery, forest lawn in buffalo to be precise.
i do intend to locate some images from then- as well as get back there someday , today my birthday i feel so inclined to take my family to where i came from to show them the things i saw over and over that i took with me as images from that place of growing and learning.
i want to get in the car and begin what could be done quickly in three days but enjoyed with much more time spent decreasing the distance between here and there- as if that too would decrease the distance of who i am now to who i was then- and sometimes i am sure that girl is a stranger.

happy birthday jan 15th fellows and especially martin luther king jr.