Lightness of Heart…

The hunt for a decent online program to put together a slideshow of photographs into a video continues – with as much patience as I can muster…

I used this song to tie all the photographs together: images of my little girl unfolding, a reverse origami lotus flower, from birth to now. Almost four years old…

The tender joy, the poignancy of light, the sense of simple celebration —- this song tells of my love for her like smiling through tears…

Negative

I wanted to write something about light. But light is a tricky piece of clay. Whether it’s the Christmas trees of light that fire off in your brain when you bite into an apple, or the distortion of the outside world through rain, it’s hard to do light justice.

It’s too easy to stray into the charcoal-simple battle of light and dark – good and evil. When in fact light is also what it cancels out. An illuminated doorframe, a blackened room beyond…is a single piece. The light frames and makes the blackness of what is not.

That moment when the shutter is depressed and the aperture snaps black is the moment that the camera imprints the image. The term ‘negative’ in photography is more appropriate than can ever be fully realised.

For me by the same ‘negative’ impression, beauty and devastation are lovers. They seem to keep close company and confuse my emotions with tragic joy. It’s waking up to find that the dark room does not cradle the person whose image followed me from a dream. It’s the defiance of New York City – it’s the hope of the Holocaust, the immobility of Pompei.

Nothing is as beautiful as what reminds us of what we used to have, or will never have again.  Perhaps beauty is a possibility not fully realised, marked by stars of imperfection and loss.

For me, beauty without imperfection feels calculated, contrived and intimidating – it is no longer beauty…it is awe. Whether that be the coldness of some precise church, or a glass-skinned skyscraper, I battle to see these things as beautiful – reverential but not beautiful.

My grandfather was a hard man – a hard man with a closely guarded heart. He kept his money close and his feelings even closer. When my gran finally released herself from a long battle against Lymphoma, my dad delivered the news to him.

It arrived on a cold June morning like a fated letter from some distant war. I watched my grandfather begin to weep as he allowed the words to find their way into the maze of his heart

I was in my early 20’s at the time and as I watched him in a cloud of my own pain, it felt like someone had picked open the seams of my understanding.

This was like the so many other times in my life that I have felt devastated and still felt the constancy of beauty’s hand on my back.

I can’t help but believe that the presence of light can still be found in the blackest of rooms. It’s what keeps me alive. There’s beauty in the breakdown.