the capacity for knowing
for remembering:
finite

while filling the mind
out the bottom
like a sieve

a constant, imperceptible
drip

ecclesiastes 9:11

“I returned and saw under the sun that—

The race is not to the swift,
Nor the battle to the strong,
Nor bread to the wise,
Nor riches to men of understanding,
Nor favor to men of skill;
But time and chance happen to them all.”

yes

If I had a soundtrack playing in the background as I went about my daily life, this would definitely be on it.

Also, if that song were a photo, it would be this photo. For sure.

i wish

I could spend a day upside down. How awesome would it be to see everything from that perspective?!

As long as it didn’t cause any headaches, of course.

shooting stars and satellites

The sky has lately captured my heart. I am in love. Whether it’s blinding rays of sun, stark and vivid; the translucent and watercolor affect of a high layer of fog; bright sun illuminating through the gray sky, sharpening the lines of the bare trees; the vast and smooth appearance of the hematite night sky, with pin-pricks of light… I have been seized by it’s power and beauty. Maybe it’s the season of year, and the certain angles. Maybe (I hope) I’m learning to see again. See the world differently, see it beautifully, and try (feebly) to capture it in a lens. I used to see things in my world all the time, and I somewhat lost that this past year. It is coming back, but the thing is – I don’t see the same way anymore. My perspective has changed, and for that I am glad.

Just the same, I am scared to try to capture and express that again. I’m afraid it won’t come out right, or won’t come out at all, or just that something will be amiss.

I truly don’t know what I’m afraid of. But fear is never something to stop life for.

night turned into day

This was shot at NIGHT. With only a shutter speed of .4 seconds. How is that possible? LIGHTNING. Oh yes.

I know it’s artistically not the most amazing, which is why it’s never appeared anywhere before.

But for a split second, night really became day.

p.s. see also here and here.

QWERTYUIOPASDFGHJKLZXCVBNM

That contains everything I have to say. Yet I don’t know how to arrange the letters properly.

And, I’m kind of all about vivid green right now. No post-processing (but bumped up saturation in-camera, ha):

chapped lips

My lips have been extremely and (seemingly, but probably not) irreparably chapped lately. In my various and numerous attempts to rectify this situation, I bought this:

It’s a HUGE container of balm. For cow’s udders. It seems to be pretty sweet stuff, but I feel a little uncomfortable with all the pictures of udders and talk of teats on the can…

disappearing brush strokes

“…to have a history means losing part of your reality (because it has already slipped away into the past) and not yet having another part (because it is still in the future): in fact having nothing but the tiny little present, which has gone before you can speak about it. God forbid we should think God was like that. Even we may hope not to be always rationed in that way.”

-C.S. Lewis in Mere Christianity

Memory is such a strange concept to me. It has been consuming my thoughts for the past couple days, and I just now read the above and very apropos excerpt. It is odd that our moments, which undoubtedly shape who we are, fade from the sharpness they hold when they are “present,” to the blurry and treacherous territory of memory once they become “past.” I was looking through an old datebook, and there were all sorts of events I didn’t remember – coffee with so-and-so, family in town, dinner here, work this weekend, graduation for a friend, etc. If not for that rudimentary documentation, those events would likely have been lost to my recollection forever. Yet what of the abundance of undocumented and seemingly “mundane” (or even those that are not) events and memories, now lost? Small brush strokes on the canvas of life, soon to be covered up by a fresh coat – yet still there. That is what strikes me so much. The moments that make up our lives, the memories lost, have affected and shaped us – and yet, we remember only a very small fraction of them. And, I am sure, we remember inaccurately.

It is a strange phenomena, part of the much greater one of the mystery of time and existence itself – but oh, how marvelous and fascinating it will be to not be “rationed” by time and the confines of human memory any more.

unfinished

Halfway there. In progress. That is the way that my life is defined. If you are in doubt, I can show you the list of unfinished posts saved as drafts for this blog. Books on my bookshelf lie with markers halfway, two-thirds through. I open a new bottle of conditioner before I use up the old one (there are currently four in my shower). I have leftover containers of soup, of almond butter single-serve packets. Journals with a few blank pages at the end. Rolls of film left in my camera for months with exposures still left to shoot. I am a serial “un-finisher.”

I’m not really sure what to make of this, but it frustrates me greatly. Will I be able to pick a college major and stick with it (so far, I just have a chunk of random credits from multiple college settings). Hold down a job for five years? Or, even more monumental matters… will I be able to commit to spending the rest of my life with someone, when I can’t even stick with a bottle of conditioner ’til the end?

In truth, I have no answers to these questions right now. My urge is to write something to explain it, to rationalize it, to conclude this train of thought, but I have nothing. And so, again, this post shall be for now… unfinished.