Captured
I really like photography.
I think I’m pretty good at it too. I like the feeling that I have captured a unique moment in history. Maybe capture is the wrong word to use. Witness and record is a bit better, though somewhat clunky. I like to capture little scenes that strike me in some way, singular circumstances of placement, entropy, and light that first capture me. There it is, capture IS the right word, but only because I am captured first. My attention is pretty easy to grab, but not just anything or anyone can truly captivate me; that requires something special. I’ve never written about photography, and I am becoming fascinated by the language needed to do so. I didn’t like the word capture when used to describe what I do with a camera because is sounded so proprietary and grabby, like I’m just out in nature snatching things up and taking them away, but that isn’t the way of things for me at all.
When I am out walking, it doesn’t matter where, my monkey brain is on high alert, and often on the brink of high emotion. This situation is manageable, I’ve been managing it all my life with varying degrees of success, but it’s profoundly exhausting, and I can’t spend all my time crying in relief over a brief respite, nor raging impotently at the injustices of the world, I’ll die, it’s too much, and no one wants to be around me when I’m like that, especially me.
A couple of years ago I quit drinking alone. By this time there weren’t too many people that wanted to be around me and my intense apathy, me least of all, so I was usually alone, meaning I quit drinking entirely. I found that alcohol is a great way to hide from overwhelming brain activity, and without it, I nearly drown in memory, regret, and imagined catastrophe. Regular counselling helped with processing the big issues, and the minimum dose of medication cooled the red hot puzzle that I was trying to assemble out of the pieces of my mind, but there are a lot of hours in a day, a lot of minutes in a life, so just try to imagine my relief, my calm, my serenity when I witness a whirlpool on the river under the harsh afternoon sun, the uncanny alignment of a heap of kelp fronds, the muscular wildness of a tree on the ragged edge of the West, a traffic jam of snails, the coppery frond of a fern, respectfully laid to rest, as if for burial, by the caress of the falling tide.
Imagine the peace of my world in those moments of witnessing.
Imagine how small, and how quiet, and how nurtured I feel when I am captured.
