But I wanted you to know that I LOVE this very emotional and poignant post. It touched me deeply. I feel very kindred to you and resonate so much with your feelings for these old abandoned places.

As I’ve told you before I seem almost addicted to them. I could make a whole career out of traveling around the country (especially the northeast) photographing and exploring abandoned houses, schools, churches and so forth. Almost any old abandoned building. They do connect me to guts and soul of both the Earth and humanity in way that our ‘new modern’ society does NOT at all. They express both the reality of life and the reality of death for me. AND the powerful fact that we cannot escape death and must LIVE fully each day because Death awaits soon enough. AND the reality that Earth, like Death, reclaims everything….in the end.

I love the power of those feelings. These old abandoned places are raw in their emotion and expression of all these realities. I think many people fear and avoid them for these reasons.

I revel in the beautiful crafted words and thoughts here:

“Perhaps some of that abstracted angst is simply a misidentification of the loss of that connection to the Earth, held in most recent memory by the Family Farm. And as we wistfully remember it, we murder its legacy beneath strips of pavement and garage doors.”

Dang, Michelle you are so multi-talented: as a painter, a photographer and a writer….and all equally as powerful.

This photo here knocks my socks off. I have been back to look at it several times since you posted it. I gasped when I first saw it. Tears came immediate to my eyes. It is palpable with emotion, history, smells, senses, longing, memories…

I really can’t begin to tell you how talented you are. A soul who captures all this, who SEES all this is SOME amazing soul. You. I think the more you follow this path the more powerful your work becomes. You are expressing something from deep inside you, which mean others feel that same depth through your work.

Much love,
Robin

Alan – Yes the lottery would be great – but even then – to choose!

Oh to win the lottery, I would buy every house could find!

Until then all we can do is document, so that when someone, sometime in the future, says “do you remember the old place that used to be here”?

We can say ‘yes’ and show them a photograph/painting.

Nothing dies while there are those to remember.

Alan (in Guelph)

The photograph at the head is stunning – even now I can’t be sure if it’s a photo or a painting.

I lived my early childhood in an old house by the river. I went back years later and walked through the abandoned rooms. Some transfers I had stuck on the fireplace were still there and it was as if the past was calling.

The old house has gone now, replaced by a monument to commerce (British Home Stores) but it still lives in my memory.

Last year a saw an expensive book about my home town. I looked in and found a photograph of the old house – I bought the book.

Yes – You are “here to remember” but also to record and comment and interpret through your work – who knows, someone who lived in one of your houses will see it in one of your paintings or photographs and be as happy as I was to see it once more.

xhenry

This is an amazingly eloquent

post…right to the heart of it..beautifully said, I’m empathetic with your point of view. Death and decay are what defines us..such a prevalent notion in many cultures especially the latin based . Not so in this materialistic western world we live in here.

I’m celtic by root definition and as Lana alludes…there is a deep emotional,sympathetic spirit in this old culture.
To be in touch with the spirit of things ,to be moved , to cry or be swept away with joy
is to be valued above all else.
As the native americans say…there is a heart in the tree. In the wooden house resides the spirit of the trees and the energy of all who’ve passed its portals.
So revel in what you know and feel for them. Sleep with your sentiments for it all passes as a dream just as old homes crumble into dust.