Seeing better

Sue draws, as you can see here. She draws like she breathes, and she treats her drawings with casual disregard. She draws on shopping lists, on envelopes, and in her many journals, most of which she burns a year or two later. She writes on her drawings. She makes notes on them, in this case a note about what pencil she was using, because she’s trying to decide what supplies to bring with her on our trip to England. Not because she intends to show her pictures or frame them or save them, but because drawing, for her, is a tool of seeing and presence. She sees better when she draws. 

I don’t draw. I have tried, but as soon as I put a pencil or a brush in my hand, I feel clumsy and inept, like a lumbering beast with paws for hands. For Sue, drawing is play. For me, it’s frustration. I take photographs because I cannot draw, and I’m as casual about my photographs as she is about her drawings. I almost never print them, and I’m not good at backing them up or saving them. Taking them is the joy, and I also love processing them. With Blip I have learned to share one a day as if to say, with awe and reverence, “Look!” so that others can be blessed as I have been, and I love looking at what others have seen. But the more deeply I love what I see, the more an element of fear creeps in--a fear of failing to do justice, even in an ephemeral image.

I’ve been reading Mary Ruefle’s lovely book about poetry called Madness, Rack, and Honey (2012). In a chapter on Fear, Ruefle writes about the four forms of dread that Julian of Norwich describes. “And the fourth form of dread is ‘born of reverence,’ the holy dread with which we face that which we love most, or that which loves us the most” (p. 106). 

I have that kind of dread in representing what I love, holy dread. I have said many times that for me taking a photograph is an act of love, and it usually is; it might also be an act of exploration, as was my last blip of disruption. But most often it is an act of love, and with every photographic act of love, an interesting shadow arises, a dread born of reverence. Like Sue, I find photography a tool for seeing. I see better when I have a camera in my hands. 

For the next seven days I will be catching up with an online course I paid for and have put off until it is almost too late, so I won’t have time to do much commenting, but I will pop in for delight and sustenance when I can.