Like all of life…it is the heart of the paradox we seek, right?

But I am also intrigued by something else you write: by taking photos of others…you disappear yourself. Hmmmm. I’ll ponder that one.

Your questions and musings are significant AND there's something in me that wonders if your very questions (and even your capturing of life through a lens)IS the way you are present.

Whether we can be aware of it or not, there is something about our deepest, truest self that becomes embodied over and over again in our actions – even if we're unaware. Sometimes we recognize it through a litany of photographs through time: a particular smile, our placement in the photo, the positioning (or not) of others around us. Sometimes we hear it in the voice of someone from our past who tells us something about who we were then that reverberates right up to the present and surprises us with its consistency. Sometimes its in the way we create – whether writing, blogging, photos, events, meals, birthday parties; where our presence shows up in HOW we build and shape in these contexts.

I could go on and on. I guess what I'm trying to say is that I think you are deeply, powerfully present all the time…AND…that the presence you bring and embody is one of observance, capturing, keeping, sharing, reflecting, refracting, treasuring. My hunch is that those who know you well would use words that might echo these traits…beautiful truths about your presence – your lens – you.

I'm grateful for your thoughts, Lindsey. They are beautiful…treasures, really. Undoubtedly, reflective and refractive of you – and yes, your presence.

Pictures.
There is so much meaning in photographs. They document our lives. That we were here. They help to job our memories. They stand in where are minds cannot remember. They allow us to live on after we were gone. They capture the beauty of our presence.

Hmm. Let me repeat that.

Photographs capture the beauty of our presence.

If we do not feel present, is there no moment to capture? Is there only the moments of others? And we are simply the observers?

There are enormous questions here. But I have to say, I have reached a point in my life where I ask fewer and fewer questions. For a long while this disturbed me. Was I losing my drive, my reach, my mind? Was I content to live without questioning everything? Philosophizing? Extending myself?

And now. With three kids. I have simplified. I keep the camera on a ledge in the kitchen. I have it in my mind to send you a picture of this. I grab it when there is a moment. I place it back on the shelf so that I jump into the moment and be a part of it all, knowing full well that there is no one there to catch the pictures of ME enjoying the moment with my KIDS, because I am the photographer, too. Jen and I talk of this often. There are little to no pictures of us and our children. But many, many of them with their father.

When I jump in and leave the camera behind I have to trust that even if I don't remember it exactly I know that we had times like those – and that my kids will remember their childhoods fondly because of it…even if they don't know WHY they are so fond of the remembering.

Does this make sense? (I think I have a migraine coming on. Oh.My.God.NO!)

This serves as a wonderful extension of this question. Are you by taking pictures capturing the moment or fleeing it? I don't pretend to know. Probably a bit of both?

I love how you end with a question about memory. Is it sturdy enough? Or is it battered by the cruel passage of time? Are we, by blogging and snapping pics incessantly, plugging the holes in memory or creating them? No clue, but these questions sometimes scare me.

There is a metaphor somewhere in your dad's and now your habit of making physical albums out of your photos, just as I think there is one in our culture's frenetic tendency to take hundreds of candids that we never really revisit.

Thanks for another thought-provoking post.