Tomiko Jones, sounds like a spy, a pirate, an adventure. She is a strong, bright light. In pursuing a passionate life, Tomiko is a truth-seeker, through her work as a photographer she allows the moment to reveal itself, for divinity in the natural world to seep in. Then she captures it. It takes patience to achieve this, quiet concentration and deliberation, then letting go to enter into the moment. To let the present be just itself and recognize the majestic, visual poetry that is inherent in everything. There are powerful stories in every last thing and Tomiko through her work as an artist, recognizes and honors the ones that resonate for her.
Tomiko and I had a conversation more than an interview in our time together. I would say that was an integral element to all my time with all the women I have sat down with in this project; give and take and holding a space of listening compassion. With most of the women I want to just illuminate their truth in that current moment between us, I try to speak as little as possible yet be fully engaged. Then there are a other women where the exchange is amplified by an actual conversation, an exchange of ideas that provides the strongest platform for the woman I’m sitting with to explore and reveal her truth as it comes to her. Tomiko and I were deep in conversation about fear, vulnerability, refuge, art, from the minute I walked through her door and we continued that in her bedroom sanctuary, her “Cloud Palace” that Tomiko chose to hold our interview. I just turned on the camera and we were deep in it. Tomiko witnessed her own vulnerability and gave the gift of offering me the opportunity to join her, it was beautiful.
Please clink on the link and enjoy the full length interview of Tomiko Jones here: http://vimeo.com/316332617
Tomiko and I zoomed around so many topics, the petals of emotional illumination unfolding with excited grace as we sparked each other’s consciousness. The gift of speech is mighty; give a person the room in which to express themselves with an open heart, a clarity of mind often follows. What comes to me now as I write Tomiko’s story and its been some months since the interview in Madison on her Cloud Palace took place, I watch the video footage and remember what that white, light room felt like, the Japanese tea and the black and white cat and the lobbing back and forth of bright, verbal flowers. The strongest thread that I tease out now that shapes itself like Tomiko, is surrender and contracts with your ancestry. And love.
Love and Fear, the two primal emotions, the bedrock of the human experience. Impulse and consciousness.
Tomiko started off our time together with a story about flying to Hawaii with her mother and sister to bury her father. Or release her father actually, as my understanding of the Buddhist death ceremony, Hatsubon, is a ceremony of letting go, surrendering a loved one to the water, to the ocean, allowing all the fear and sorrow to splash out and be carried away. Hatsubon, is the project and installation that Tomiko has been absorbed with since the death of her father. Begun during his dying process, through his death, and continued and shown and expanded, morphing onwards as Tomiko’s grief and life itself continues. Tomiko’s dance with love and death and honoring her father, who they were together, who she is carrying him inside her forward. Its an amazing work that Tomiko has created, the installation has traveled and be shown in a variety of US galleries, the project unspooling and resonating with a wide audience in its candor of her grief and the mystery of death that baffles us all. How to honor the inevitable in the midst of all the fear. Tomiko’s work is quite wonderful, I would do yourself a favor and follow the link to Hatsubon and her photography and dive in.
When I was checking out her site and exploring her work to get to know her better, these are the words that I wrote down in response to experiencing her work: drama, quiet, tension, waiting, listening, human-as-visitor.
Ah! But the story about Tomiko and her family flying to Hawaii where she spent a part of her childhood, to release her beloved father into death. The gist of it is this – Tomiko, mother, sister are flying to Hawaii, mid-way there is an announcement from the captain that they are turning around and heading back to the mainland due to an undisclosed issue. Tomiko’s sister knows the insider scoop of planes and this kind of announcement. She herself announces that there’s a good chance something is seriously wrong with the plane and for all of them to say their goodbyes online to their loved ones just in case. Tomiko didn’t go online, she opened her journal and started writing to her father. She made a pact with the ghost of the man that made her, that she would live her life to the upmost, never give up on the passionate life, commit herself to immersion into the cosmic juiciness of it all. If Tomiko could survive this plane ride, she would live her life the best she could,, full-on commitment.
Making a pact with death. I’ve done it myself, not something to undertake lightly.
Tomiko did survive that plane ride and as she describes it, the next couple of years up to the present day of the interview, she has been clearing more and more space in herself and her life. Dropping and letting go of stagnant relationships, jobs that were no longer fulfilling, leaving a city home for the country into a bare bones existence, getting quiet. Getting real. Falling in love unexpectedly, understanding that her life long pursuit of passionate life experience had been somehow sacrificed along the way, the powerful fear of not honoring that call inside herself. The fear that comes with getting older, to no longer being young, and not being really old. The caution that creeps in with that.
Fear and Love.
In this state of in between, Tomiko has placed herself. Life has called her there, mystery and purpose. For women, this is a powerful time. Existential crisis, mid-life crisis, perimenopause; call it what you will but it is a time of reckoning for women on a primal level. All that was tangible, that was worked so hard for, all that was so important somehow; adrift. Those life structures, they float suddenly away, and there the woman is, alone with herself and it’s usually very scary in some way. Then comes surrender. It can take all kinds of shapes and sizes, forms. But it is surrender to what is whatever the guise, whatever it takes to get a woman’s attention. We all bow down to it. That life has changed, our bodies are changing, our place in this world is shifting, our purpose now unclear. And we must sit in that question mark, perhaps indefinitely, and live. The passionate, full life that we as women have an intimate access to. Because we bring life forth? Primary caretakers? We have a closer access point to the mystery of the sacred? Perhaps. Perhaps its because we are wonderful, made to do and be and feel wonderful, deep, scary, divine emotions and impulses. Perhaps its our gorgeous intelligence and our ability to recognize several truths simultaneously and hold them together without ourselves flying apart. That’s what I like to believe. We as women have an innate intimacy with the surrounding world, this in-between time is an incredible opportunity to cultivate that intimacy and let it lead you.
Surrender.
Tomiko is somewhere new. She let go of all that was before in the commitment and promise to her father that she would not compromise in the endeavor of the passionate, present life. Tomiko is literally somewhere new as she accepted an assistant professorship of the arts at Wisconsin-Madison, moved half way across the country to Madison from the west coast and has bought her first house, where the Cloud Palace is. She has made space and is immersed in possibility.
When you are somewhere new, before it becomes familiar, your life has the possibility to be anything. You have left something created behind, a life. Now you are in a new life. it can be anything. Yet you take yourself with you. Wherever you go, there you are.
Finding Tomiko in Madison was a lovely bit of serendipity.
I actually knew Tomiko may years before in my hometown Bellingham, WA. Bellingham was a place of growing up for Tomiko as well and we met as punk rock teenagers at the local coffee shop, Tomiko was going to the town’s university studying photography and being mentored by my uncle’s techniques of large format photography and seeing the power of light. We weren’t very close but we cherished the same people so there was a connection. Somehow we connected again in later years in Los Angeles for a minute, I followed her work on social media. When I was making my way out of Washington and traveling down the west coast at the beginning of this project, Tomiko popped into my head as a woman that I wanted to interview, spontaneous and with out much explanation, I had faith that we would cross paths during this project and the opportunity would present itself.
I knew Tomiko was in California so i had it in the back of my head that I’d reach out along my trip south. It didn’t turn out that way, Other women presented themselves, different California stories were told. But, “Tomiko,” floated through my head as I left California for the southwest.
Some months and women’s stories later, I found myself in Iowa for a couple of months exploring my ancestry through the lens of this project. I interviewed family members and documented the family archives. I was born in Iowa, left as a small child and this was really my first opportunity to meet my family again. When I was preparing to leave Iowa and head south, I saw on Facebook that Tomiko had just moved to Madison, about a three hour drive away. Ha! I contacted Tomiko and set up the interview the week before i left. I arrived to her new home and her place in her question mark and we had an amazing time together. We had been having our own journeys with the quest of surrender, but there were emotional parallels and it was wonderful to share them with each other. Similar questions we were asking of ourselves in our journeys and in our artwork.
I have experienced many forms of seeking refuge and sanctuary along the way of this project, my favorite is the conversations I am having with these women. They provide sanctuary for me in their gift of sharing what makes them feel vulnerable, what they each do to create sacred space.
When I asked Tomiko, she said, “Photography,” in response to what sanctuary means to her. Her work. Her passion. Her ability to see with concentration and spontaneity. The liberation of utilizing herself well. Tomiko’s words in relation to herself and her work’s process – A relationship to place… a loose mapping of the landscape… searches for places with a sense of communication… letting the sublime in…
Here, Tomiko feels safe, a sacred communication. Her through line in shadow and light.
This is the nature of refuge.
