No Ordinary Moments

When I updated the slideshow on this site recently, I found myself taken in by the images. I paused to watch the show for awhile. Before long, something remarkable happened, something that surprised me.

I know all these images intimately. Some have been with me for years now. And, generally speaking, it's usually the newest image or images that are my "darlings." Many of the darlings during their reign as darlings spent some time as my computer desktop background until another darling came along and bumped it. I don't exactly "love 'em and leave 'em." But I do enjoy the refreshment of a new image when it takes that place--proof positive that I've been right all along to avoid a tattoo. There's just no single image that I've wanted to look at for the rest of my life.

Still, as the slideshow images appeared and dissolved before me, I found myself entranced. Life itself opened up before me, a frame at a time. Each pulsed, burst with the light of its subject, and recalled to me what fell beyond it, before and after it. However nondescript one originating moment or another might have been at the time,

they gleamed now. In the light of all that gleaming, I recognized something I had not quite recognized before: photography exalts. By eliminating the Everything, it features--lifts up, showcases--the Something--the subject in the photographer's frame.

Everything was illuminated, not unlike the sacred texts of old. The images had become larger than life, and so did the moments that had borne them. I saw--felt--delicacy, intricacy, majesty. Each came alive for me, and I sat awash with Love. I saw my lived life become precious (again) before me. I "saw the Light," I suppose, and I saw it like never before.

I have a sort-of friend who has made it clear over time that she doesn't consider what I do here "art." There are many who would agree with her, I'm sure. I wonder about it--especially when I am called to exhibit or to speak about what I have created or exhibited. After all, photographic art comes from expensive SLRs that are works of art in their own right, from long hours spent in darkrooms that from time to time birth the unmistakable and irreproducible masterpiece.

Who's to say, really--I cannot. Even "beauty" is in the eye of the beholder. But I believe that seeing is an art--and a gift when shared with the one or the many. It is by seeing and then capturing what is seen that the photographer exalts. Exalted, the image offers seeing to others--invites it. What is visual art if not an invitation to see?

What I saw in this series of images is pure Light. Gifts of the Light, venerable stations of Light worthy of all my Love. And I stand reminded that there really are no ordinary moments.