Hours after a summer rain,
the skies are host to what I like to refer to as “cloud porn”.
It is my guilty pleasure to watch the shapes change,
to watch what or whom the sky would like to reveal.
I didn’t see the face with the big sunglasses,
smiling from the sky,
until I added the picture below.
Facebook is an overwhelming aspect of social media. Timeline’s are inundated with nonsense, Farmville and game requests are sent at alarming rates and too much personal information is given away like candy at Halloween. But every so often a little gem of humanity seeps through the cracks and makes me appreciate the sharing of information.
The video below is one of those rare gems. I watched it twice because the message really plucked some emotional strings in the orchestra of my life. I have always been a firm believer in treating others as you wish to be treated, in paying forward a show of altruism and allowing others to benefit from your tenderness and understanding.
Every action in life creates a ripple effect. Whether that ripple effect is as visible to the naked eye as a drop of water in a pond, or is so infinitesimal that it is unseen by the human eye, there is always a reaction. A little bit can go a long way and that ripple may spread further than you could ever imagine.
I hope you will take the three minutes to watch this video created by a Thai insurance company. Its message is heart-warming, emotional and eerily accurate. One drop of human kindness could change the tides in so many oceans.
When I first saw it, I was captivated by it. A simple photo of a friend on Facebook grabbed and held my attention but it was no ordinary photograph. I had hoped there was more of an explanation to it than mere Photoshop and I was thrilled to hear her tell the story behind the picture.
She had agreed to have her portrait done by her friend who is fascinated by the origin of photography. He posed her and painstakingly went through the process that photographers went through back in the late 1800’s. His camera was an antique with the accordion-style lens and the black hood that covered the head of the photographer.
He waited until the precise moment that he thought he had captured her true essence and he let his finger plunge the button that would acquire every detail of her spirit. The result of his effort was remarkable. He printed her face on tin to truly encapsulate the original process of printing a photograph.
I stared at her photo for a long time. There was so much more to it than just a picture of her face. There was a story in her eyes. His diligent process captured much more than just who she is now. This snapshot seemed to hold the story of generations, perhaps lifetimes of moments that led up to her being in his studio and posing for this shot.
It wasn’t a selfie or a picture as a second thought. There weren’t 100 takes in a minute because that is all we have time for nowadays. He paused, he let the camera do what it was meant to do and he took a thousand stories, captured them in one single photo and printed them on a piece of tin.
Look at the artwork in this photo and hopefully you can now understand why I was so drawn to my friend’s picture. Without the use of any computer tricks, this photograph projects so much more than just a face on a piece of paper or a computer screen. This picture has depth, emotion and a lifetime of moments that led to her presence in our present reality.
If I ever have the chance to do this, I will jump at it. I would love to see what kind of story my face has to tell and what ghosts from my past linger in the background, searching for recognition.
There was no sweat on my palms,
merely a certainty I had never known.
There was no rapid heart beat,
only a calm, a sense of knowing
that when we met
we were meant to meet.
It was a feeling of being brought together
after a lifetime apart.
It was a sense that a long journey
had finally come to an end.
It was an understanding
of a soul knowing a soul,
and that our time to meet again had come.
We had met before,
perhaps decades or a lifetime ago.
We had since locked our doors
and hidden inside,
but your eyes knew my eyes.
You had seen my heart before
and when we met again,
I recognized you without hesitation
because so much about you was familiar.
I had come home
and you were there to welcome me.
It stands alone.
Like our love, it was once filled with burning embers that cast a warm glow on our world.
But neglect is a powerful thing.
The embers fizzled out.
Charred pieces are all that remain and there is no more warmth.
The elements of life battered what was once beautiful.
The rusty shell stands alone, forgotten and empty.
But a new fire burns within me.
Disappointment has been replaced with hope.
Happiness and passion fuel the flames in my mind.
No longer will my fire be contained.
It is free to burn at will.
And imagination and desire will be the oxygen for my fire.
I don’t often stand and look in the mirror for great lengths of time. Since I cut my hair short and I don’t wear much make-up there is really no need to linger at my reflection. But this morning I did. I made the usual faces one makes while looking at themselves and I really studied my face, each crease, each unique spot that has gradually appeared on my skin over the years.
I followed the lines of wrinkles starting to appear around my eyes and, although those fissures are permanent lines in what was once smooth skin, those lines created a map of places I had been in my life. They are carved from life experiences that made me the person I am today. Each of those lines tells a story and remembering some of those stories caused me to smile which only pronounced those lines even more.
I like to think I earned each and every one of those laugh lines because I took the time to truly enjoy the good moments I’ve had. The small lines on my furrowed brow help remind me of the difficult and sad times, but times I undoubtedly learned a lesson or a coping skill. Those wrinkles belong to me. I choose to own them because I know the emotions they embody. They are imprinted in my psyche as much as they are etched on my skin.
My wrinkles are my map. They have led me from my past and, with the myriad of directions I may follow, they will help guide me into my future.
My head is here,
lost in what looks like a painting.
Texture emulates emotion, freedom.
The horizon represents reality,
meeting effortlessly with creative indulgence.
There are no rules in the clouds.
My heart is here,
swelling with emotion,
nurtured by nature and blessed by light,
comforted by the embrace of the essence of life.
free to move in a path that is meant only for me.
Yesterday was an interesting day. The energy in my work space was charged with an unknown element and the entire day felt like I was living in an alternate universe. People were doing inane things, the simplest conversation turned into a painful thirty minute ordeal and the tension could have been cut by nothing less than a chainsaw. My rhetorical question was to ask, “is it a full moon?” and the response was an embellished “yes”.
Although there is no direct correlation between the phases of the moon and human behavior, the full moon gives human beings a fantastic excuse for acting like idiots. The blame is put solely on the celestial orb, taking the onus from the one acting completely out of character but, when the sky is dark, strange behavior is accepted as exactly that with no other plausible justification.
Many of our references to luck, or the lack thereof, are written in the stars. We wish on a falling star. Our horoscopes are creatively tied to constellations in the sky. And we blame a magical orb of light for any unfavorable happenings during the phase in which it finds its truest beauty.
On those days that society deems the moon to be the cause of all of its woes, the child who still resides in my mind hopes that the fantasy man who inhabits that enchanting sphere is truly giving us the full moon.
I have mentioned before that I am not the most delicate of females. I have always been, and most likely always will be, a tomboy. It is me in the truest form of myself and how I feel most comfortable. I am capable of donning a dress and feeling pretty but yesterday upped that ante by about 90 percent.
I went dress shopping for the dress that I will wear to walk down the aisle as maid of honor for my best friends’ wedding in September. I began to sweat as soon as I walked through the door of the shop. For those of you who have not experienced a bridal shop, it is a sea of chiffon, satin and lace and had I not controlled my breathing to calm myself I may have broken out in hives.
It is a daunting task to find a place to begin, especially when my fashion sense is based on jeans, hoodies and a baseball cap. The first dress I picked was lovely. I locked myself in the change room and, as soon as I tried the dress on, the metamorphosis had begun.
The dresses kept coming but I kept looking back at that first dress. All the other dresses paled in comparison and made me more self-conscious about wearing a dress than I already was. I put the first dress back on again and I thought, for perhaps the first time, this dress could reflect my true personality without the baseball cap, the jeans and the hoodie. This dress brought out a part of me that I have ignored. For the first time in a long time, looking in a mirror, I felt beautiful.
Maybe it took finding the right dress to recognize that long-lost piece of myself. Perhaps this was the a-ha moment Oprah always talks about. And just perhaps a certain friend of mine may have been right when he said, “just find a little black dress, put it on and get over it”.
It’s not black and it has pockets but, I get it now. Maybe there is that one dress that can be the sum of all of your parts while making you feel better than you thought possible. I think I found mine today.
polysyllabic profundities 