On Photographs

 I took pictures today as the sun was setting.  Almost every day I take pictures, whatever catches me: rocks, plants, water, light. Tonight, walking the dog, the setting sun took away my breath. No picture I take ever does justice to what I see, but it doesn't discourage me. Even dim reflections bring me back to the moment. 

This is an ordinary thing. Phones with cameras have made photography easier and also, more equitable. Certainly, the opportunity to be unconstrained by the fear of screwing up the shots and wasting film liberated me. As a kid, I saw photography like all visual mediums: only talented people can do it. The rest of us are embarrassing ourselves. 

My parents took pictures. They documented our childhood, up to a point. There was a period with very few pictures, and then later, when my siblings and I were older and leaving home, they began taking pictures of seasonal changes. Pictures of flaming sugar maples in fall, deep snow piles in winter, shining branches that looked like they were coated in glass, after an ice storm. And their cats, so many pictures of the cats. These weren't very good photos, but that didn't seem to matter. My mother put them in albums. 

When my brother and I sold the house in 2004, it was a gut-wrenching project to clean out that house which three generations had lived in. The photographs were everywhere.  At the time, I remember thinking: Why the hell do I have boxes of pictures of the old tree? And all this snow? And these cats? WHY did they take these pictures??? 

Recently, I was having a discussion in a group where we were asked if we had a spiritual practice. Many shared that writing was theirs, and though that's true for me, what I said was that one of mine is taking photographs, usually every day, and looking through them to return to the immediacy of presence.  

When I look through the pictures on my phone, or in albums, or in one of the digital vaults where everything goes -- like heaven after death, it's all in the cloud -- it feels like sacred ritual. Each piece connects to the next. Bead next to bead on a string, like a rosary or Buddhist mala, image after image. Each unique, each part of a whole. 

The visual mantra of life.

This week, for the first time, I imagined my parents looking through all those pictures. Not just taking them and stuffing them away, but taking them out, looking at the storms, the snow, the trees, the cats. Remembering. Reliving. Imagining this, I thought: I understand. As a child, you don't often feel like you can ever get your parents. I was 39 when my mother died. By my age, my mother was already fighting cancer.  Because I've been a parent without either of them alive, I've wondered a lot: how would it have been?  But I won't ever know the answer to that question, so when I make a connection like this, it feels like finding buried treasure.

As I write this, it's 10/31, Halloween. Samhain. Tomorrow is Dia de los Muertos. Is the veil thin? I'd like to believe so. Sometimes when I write, I imagine my parents are with me, over my shoulder. Certainly, they are in my heart. 

So friends: take all the pictures. If it moves you, if you want to remember it, do it. Go back; relive that instant. Life is only instants. You get to choose what to keep and what to savor. 

Peace