Thirty one thousand is the number of photographs that I’ve indulged in taking over the span of the last four years. Being a photographer was never the goal of learning photography, it was to capture the moments. Every detail of each fleeting one of them. I never imagined that what I would find in those frozen moments of time that appear as I wander through them would tell me about myself, about the way that I choose to live, or the gratitude that would be shouting from them.
“Gratitude is so much more than a polite thank you. It is the thread that connects us in a deep relationship, simultaneously physical and spiritual, as our bodies are fed and spirits nourished by the sense of belonging, which is the most vital of foods. Gratitude creates a sense of abundance, the knowing that you have what you need. In that climate of sufficiency, our hunger for more abates and we take only what we need, in respect for the generosity of the giver.”
Robin Wall Kimmerer
There it all was, sometimes day by day, always season by season, the people I love most dearly, the things that I hold most scared, the traditions that we’ve built and cherished, flowing so perfectly cyclically. Humans are so innately in tune with the flow the seasons of the Earth, and even beautifully aware of it if you’re quiet enough to hear your intuition. And somewhere over the course of the last year, swept away with most of what I know to be normal, the noise of the online world and the judgement and opinions of others chatted away in my head so loudly I lost the ability to truly tune in and revel in the awareness of that song. I had stopped publicly sharing, but not living and documenting, the pieces and moments of my life that bring joy, reveal humanity, and capture time stopped still with the raw emotion that tells the story of earthly life. And in each photo, without the power or influence of words, it was like a reel of my authentic self, playing around and around the wheel of the year.
It was a moment of epiphany similar to many I’ve had in the past year, where I laughed out loud at the triviality of it all- the time I’d spent perfecting this or that, making myself small, and grieving the thought of what should have been, only to realize that what I’ve been clinging to all along are the most important bits anyway. Being gathered around the table, wandering through the woods, covered in dirt among the garden beds, laughing, holding each other close, loving + healing + truly living. And now I fear I’ve wandered a bit far from the sentiment of what those thirty one thousand photographs made me feel today, but they created a silence so intense that my intuition sang a song of experience so pure, it belongs to me undoubtedly.
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