Tea with Laurie

"You can bless the world with a photograph," Laurie says at tea, surrounded by holiday lights while rain spatters the window behind her. "You can bless the world with a poem or a song. But you can also bless the world with a long gaze. Babies bless the world. Very old people bless the world."

"Cows bless the world," I add. I have a deep fondness for cows.

We're talking about photography, about Hasidism and the holy sparks everything is made of, about the photographer Vivian Maier who spent her life making photographs that nobody saw till after she died. I'm talking about Maier to everyone I know. I'm trying to learn something from her. She's important to me.

This morning I was talking on the phone to Devorah about Vivian Maier, and she emailed me a poem by Rebecca Parker that I forwarded to Laurie.

Parker says, "Choose to bless the world." Full text of the poem is here.

Vivian Maier blessed the world. Can I choose that? I'm not sure I understand what it is to bless the world, but I know I love the world. I don't, as Andy Warhol said, like everybody. But I love hunks of the world. I'm sure of that. I love the eleven cows that were our neighbors in Louisiana back when Seth was a baby. I love what is passing and breakable. I love what's unlikely, what's funny and dear and makes me laugh. I love underdogs and misfits, I love what's queer and doesn't fit in, I love what's tender and fragile. I love the unconventional and resilient, the worn and battered, the endangered.

And so I take pictures. This could be the only moment I have to love this face, this knee, this piece of moss, this puddle or this one street that will never be this way again. I take pictures of what there is to love as a way of admiring what I see and offering it for others to love also. Even when I do it badly, even when it's not edgy or imaginative, even if I can't tonemap it or layer it as beautifully as some do. With a picture I say, "Isn't this marvelous?" My friend Laurie, surrounded by lights in front of a rain-spattered window. Isn't she marvelous?

P.S. Happy Hannukah to Laurie and all those who celebrate it.