Health Is Mental

 This is from an emerging 3am inspired, hopefully temporary selfie series titled, "The Unflattering"

Health Is Mental

What is mental health?  As of the past few years, and now at the end of 2022, “mental health” is a buzz phrase. 

It’s been an excuse for bad behavior.  It’s touted as a solution for what we see as societal ills.  It’s a way to abdicate responsibility for our actions, both personally and collectively.  It’s a sense of shame when we can’t see the symptoms within our own skulls. 

Sometimes it’s permanent.  Sometimes it manifests only on occasion, situationally.  Those two aspects are not always mutually exclusive.  One can wish. 

Situationally is the one we occasionally experience during crisis.  What’s disturbing and concerning is that the world is in a constant state of crisis.  What’s amazing is how we garner resilience to ward off the permanence of such an ecumenical state of mind.  Hopefully, that is. 

What is a buzz phrase, or buzz word?  They are, perhaps, coping mechanisms created to sustain humanity until working solutions can be found to move us beyond mere sustenance and stasis, and into a positive framework. Health itself is mental.  Hopefully, that is. 

   ©️Rick Burnett Baker

Lines Of Skin

 

Three images from my various nude, semi-nude, and abstract overlay series over a period of some 45 years.  I'm gradually preparing some of these images for a coffee table book during the coming year. 

"Holy Water"

2013

"Hither"

 

2013

"Nocturn"

2013

©Rick Burnett Baker 

Chewing The Cud

Ruminations. (Or Chewing The Cud)

Looking at this bowl of succulents one may see a plant. Amazingly, its parts are potential new plants. Break one off and it will root and form another entity. Several other plants in my home have that same potential. I take hope and inspiration from this phenomenon of ancient ways of nature, yet doubt and trepidation pull and push at my mind simultaneously when considering human mortality. Must be an age thing.

©Rick Burnett Baker

Digital Tin-Type by R. Baker

REALIZE

 

Realize

“Realize,” I whisper to myself, “you have it pretty good. Roof over your head, food, freedom of movement, (even though your personal mobility is temporarily disabled) and the luxury of complaining about things.”

“Realize,” I answer back, “life is taking natural, sometimes unpleasant paths that we all expect and comprehend, yet resist with all our emotional and intellectual wherewithal.” 

There are lulls in life, some voluntary and others brought on by the natural, unpleasant paths previously mentioned. Surely I’ve experienced such periods in my past. I simply don’t remember them as I’m recognizing and will no doubt remember this current one in the future, assuming there is a future. 

When all’s said and done, what relevance to the great scheme of things do our efforts hold to the relativity of all that’s come before and all to come before the great void? That’s a rhetorical question that manifests in all of us at different and similar times, and in different ways throughout life. Answers will come, hopefully, at varying times, or in some cases, not at all. I’m anticipating the former.

©Rick Burnett Baker

Rochester, NY