unimaginable
I know how to practice attention and awareness at my workbench. But it’s harder for me to be observant of the immediate world around me. I’m guilty of always wanting to be somewhere other than here. Always searching for the geography of some unknown, unnamed, Elsewhere.
That’s the true exposure of the camera’s viewfinder. It forces you to look again at what you’ve seen already. To re-examine everything.
As much as we might like to change or shift the subject, often the only thing we can really shift is ourselves. Often the only thing we can really change is our view.
I’ve spent so many years looking at my life as something I built in place of what I never got to have. All the things I never got to do. All the dreams that never came true. The focus placed on all the absences. On what’s missing from the frame.
Then I found myself sitting in a private theatre next to my son, watching a film called Ordinary Greatness — made by Michael J Gillette , someone who had become my friend, who invited me there without ever having met me, all because of the things I make.
I never looked at my life as anything interesting or remarkable or worthwhile. I had learned to accept it. To be at peace with it. Maybe even to appreciate it. But I had never learned to see it. To love it. Or to be amazed by it.
My life doesn’t look anything like what I thought or hoped it would be. But I get to go to so many places. I get to know so many incredible people. Just because I make pictures with paper. And that’s something I could have never seen coming. Something I could have never imagined.
May you look again at what you’ve already seen.
May you find your life waiting there, extraordinary and un-proclaimed.
May you be amazed by what has always been yours.
In case no one’s told you today, I love you with all my everything
I'm so, so glad you got to go meet Michael and be in that space. The message in his film is truly incredible and transformative...and you do have a remarkable life! It can be hard to see the magic when there's so much that feels mundane.
Amen to that! Sometimes I have to remind myself that the real miracle is that anything exists at all, and that we were all invited to the most amazing party ever, which is life on Earth.