Deeper

I haven’t taken photographs for a while. I have missed it, but I have also been busy with other things. School, relationship, and yard work are generally how I spend most of my time, on top of operating with intent to overcome the general malaise to whose weight I felt I was nearly unable to bear through my dark winter. It’s surprising, and a little horrifying how quickly one can forget, or even start to avoid healthy behaviors and enjoyable pastimes, choosing instead to languish in depression and the pursuit of solutions to situations that are outside of one’s control.

It’s easy to convince oneself that there is nothing worth taking photos of when, to you, everything looks bleak. Your vision defines your reality, and the thousand words of a hundred photos that you can find no beauty in, which is the value of the photographer, orate to you, in your morbid soliloquy, the dreary state of your sense of worth. It’s almost as if, if there are no blooms, and no growth, and no perfect light, there is no life, there is no beauty in the world, and there is nothing worth sharing.

In spring, it’s easy to look back and shake your head at the foolishness of your bleak forgetting and say, “See? Look! Beauty has come again and all is well. What were you thinking?” but to do so is to deny the value of your struggle, of your strength, and of your courage. Hope, maybe, or faith might sustain you for a little while, but more than those is the reality that, although you wanted to retreat into a mind without thought for beauty, you didn’t, instead using words by the thousands to create worlds without the aid of vista, and whenever you prepared to leave, you made sure your lenses were clean because you KNOW deeper than you feel, that the beauty is out there, and it would be a shame to miss it.