something worth pointing to
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For some time now I’ve lost a sense of purpose in my work. There’s an acute awareness that I’ve not kept up to speed with what life is asking me to become, and yet I honestly don‘t know how to proceed. I look around and notice thousands of other photographers out there photographing similar subjects in much the same way and I feel myself growing bored. Something is missing.
I woke early yesterday morning, made some coffee and sat down in front the computer to come up with an image to post to my journal. Scanned something in and had it on the screen trying to decide what to say about it. Nothing came to me and the longer I looked at the image in front of me the more ridiculous it appeared. There really was no point in posting it so I sent it to the trash.
Sometimes I think we’ve flooded our lives with so much clutter and insignificance that we’ve lost our unique vision. Have we become less discerning in what we give our attention to? It’s as if life has become a series of never ending mindless pop-ups covering our view and distracting us, one on top of another, and as soon as we x one out a new one appears until we can’t even remember what it was we were looking for initially.
Later in the day I was doing a search on google for something completely unrelated to photography and the thoughts I’d had earlier when I inadvertently stumbled upon an obscure passage from an unpublished writer I’d never heard of before. I’m not sure why I even followed the link that led me in her direction. But I read the paragraph once and then again slowly, her words burrowing inside my darkened hollowness, fanning the flimsiest flame which then illuminated everything.
There is a saying that claims we are not human beings having a spiritual experience, but rather spiritual beings having a human experience. I forget that sometimes. A woman I only know of from a single written paragraph reminded me that I am in fact a mystic, and there must still be something worth saying, worth pointing to. I am grateful to her.
~Cynthia
She’ll use image-language, not discourse. Giving an image is the giving of gold, the biggest things she’s got…
Hurling and wielding the best stuff she can imagine,
…she agrees to the quiet morning hour in front of God in exchange for a bit of revelation.
She doesn’t ditch tradition as much as take it for its word and peer inside its cavernous shell.
There must still be something worth saying, worth pointing to.
~Jessie Harriman
