Early evening and the light literally dances softly to the breezes. There is just the thinnest of overcasts. Yesterday was so windy that the air was filled with flying green leaves, as though we had jumped right to early fall. The wind brought down an immense pine tree at a nearby church, and with it, briefly, our electricity.
After a few days of finding nothing to photograph I have had better luck the past couple of days. I am reminded of a professor’s constant reminder, from undergraduate school, that there is always a photograph to be found if one only looks. Perhaps he was right, and those infamous photography droughts are all about one’s state of mind.
Photographs always tell a story. How could they not? We are all story tellers and stories, unique sagas that we inhabit and that inhabit us. We remember others, and are remembered by others, as storied beings. In western culture we like to imagine that we are the authors of our stories, but it is just as likely that we are carried along by a story that is bigger than ourselves, by a Great Mystery.
This tragic week has seemingly been about our collective failure to honour the mystery that is our lives and those of others. It has been about the depersonalization of others that arises from rejecting the possibility that they might also be sacred stories. Sadly, much harm has been done, and more suffering is likely to arise from that going forward.
Outside my window, the evening deepens and a sense of calm, beauty, and mystery spreads across the landscape. Here, on this radiant, suffering planet, great beauty and immense pain exist side by side, are interwoven, and invite us to make meaning from them. When we try we are very often left with an awareness of just how mysterious our lives really are.
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