No matter where I go, I always end up in a place that reminds me of home.
The truth is that I don’t love to travel. I always want to come home early. I get homesick. I worry that we are spending money that could be put to more practical uses. I can barely tolerate the confinement of a train, plane or automobile. Because of my back, I need to get to get out of any seat and move around every few hours, so it takes forever to travel with me. I cover my neck with BioFreeze. Unless you love the smell of menthol, I am decidedly unsexy. On the the way home from this trip, it felt like my bra was going to cut me in half and I had to wiggle out of it on Interstate 95. My digestive system is sensitive so we do a lot of picnicking with packed meals. Think ham and cheese sandwiches and yogurt parfaits.
In short, I am pain to travel with. No one should want to ride with me.
But my husband loves me as his co-pilot. We navigated 8 hours of interstate travel to reach our destination. Traffic, traffic and more traffic. Road work where very little work appeared to be happening. Lanes shifting and cars crawling. Speeding up and slowing down like a slinky. The deafening chorus of cicadas along the way. Traveling by a sliver of moonlight, windows down, laughing and talking all the way.
A forty-year marriage is a beautiful place to live. Worth the trip to sit on the lake . . . in love with him still.
It is entirely possible to be still on a busy street in an urban area. To feel like a child again, experiencing everything with delight and wonder. It doesn’t matter how much time I have, which lens I have with me, what the weather may be or even what the light is like. Taking pictures always restores me.
"Mindful photography means stopping, allowing yourself to be still to make contact with your present experience, to observe your relationship to it, which in turn intensifies your experience and presence allowing you to absorb it without trying to improve or alter it." —Paul Sanders
I wish I had words to express
how these pictures make me feel,
why I took them in the first place.
How I didn’t love them at first.
Is love at first sight even a real thing?
But how when I waited and rested with them,
they came calling to me.
As treasures of an ordinary day,
and a heart broken wide open
by the tenderness of the seasons,
the undeniable passing of time,
and the beauty of it all.
