My name is Jonah. I create cyanotype photographs and write about the quest for a meaningful life through art and mythology. On this journey, I hope to inspire you.
Cyanotype Print
the latest from the studio
To complement my cyanotype photography, I blog to help and inspire. The latest blog excerpt:
The Cure for the Jonah Complex
And from a pinnacle of that dome perilously he dared
To essay, like Icarus, the unstable air,
Leaping, with waxen wings, into the welkin;
Down to the bottom he fell, and battered out his brains:
A warning to the wise to beware of hubris.
Ever heard of the Jonah Complex? Me neither, and my name is Jonah! I stumbled upon this term while researching a term paper, and I thought, “Hmm, what is that?”
The Jonah complex is the “evasion of one’s destiny” or the “running away from one’s own best talents.” In other words, the Jonah Complex is the fear of success.
In this article, I define the Jonah Complex and suggest ways to identify and cure it. Maybe you suffer from this complex and don’t know about it!
Follow Your Bliss
Reading what you want, and having one book lead to the next, is the way I found my discipline. I’ve suggested this to many of my students. When you find a writer who really is saying something to you, read everything that writer has written and you will get more education and depth of understanding out of that than reading a scrap here and a scrap there and elsewhere. Then go to people who influenced that writer, or those who were related to him, and your world builds together in an organic way that is really marvelous. Whereas the way these things are taught normally in college and schools is a sampler of what this one wrote and that one wrote and you’re asked to be more interested in the date of the publication of Keat’s sonnets than in what’s in them.