Taking In

My vision changes once I begin to photograph a place.  I cannot look in the same way.  I want to feel the colors of the sky.  I need to sense the changing textures of the streets.  I crave the insights which come from looking at life through a big lens.  I want to experience the fullness of what it means to be alive.  I need to take everything which comes from the senses and run them through my contemplative and reflective self – unfiltered, no analysis; simple, raw, and unadulterated life.
 
I know it is easy to invade another person’s space when looking at life through a lens, especially a long one.  I have caught myself unknowingly taken a look only to turn away because I didn’t think it appropriate to wonder through someone’s house uninvited.  The process is extremely addicting.  You have the chance to see life from the insight out.  You find yourself in personal spaces, capturing with you eyes how magical many moments are – even as the camera waits, poised and silent.  The object of your attention most often is meandering along, unaware of the beauty and awe surrounding their souls, ignorant of the person drifting along with them who has already seen the obvious.
 
When the comment of the day turns bleak I find myself wondering if I have stopped taking it all in when I am not behind a camera.  Did I ignore the obvious?  Was I blind to life’s graffiti?  Did I contribute to the growing pool of ignorance?
 
“The earth turns gaunt and gray, the world silent and sad, sky and land lifeless, colorless.  Earth is polluted by its very own people, who have broken its laws, disrupted its order, violated the sacred and eternal covenant.  Therefore a curse, like a cancer, ravages the earth.  Its people pay the price of their sacrilege.  They dwindle away, dying out one by one.”  (Isaiah 24.4, 5, 6)
 
I’m not sure what happened yesterday.  I do know today that there are pictures to shoot, steps to walk, and life to take in.