You may have guessed it, but yes I am doing it. I am starting a 365 project. One photo posted each day for one full year. I am making the point to post here on this long neglected blog, where I have had my ups and down and yet still find it a sweet refuge for thinking, creating, sharing, and sometimes embarrassing myself.
Today I read this line from the Letters of Flannery O'Connor,
I've been writing for sixteen years and I have the sense of having exhausted my original potentiality and being now in need of the kind of grace that deepens perception, a new shot of life or something...While I don't have sixteen years of writing behind me and certainly nothing even within one hundred light years of Miss O'Connor's writing potentiality, I love the expression, "being now in need of the kind of grace that deepens perception..."
And at the beginning of this year of 2015, I need that new shot of life... or something. When I photograph and write regularly, I see the world anew. There have been recent years when I felt like these pursuits, or outlets, or gifts, whatever they are, needed to lie dormant, or be given up for a time. You can always hold a thing to closely or expect too much from it. I don't need to lean on anything other than the One who upholds me and is the only real giver of life. But I sense that for now and perhaps in this year, I can take these tools He has given me and use them for some kind of good, maybe even service. Perhaps that is a bit pretentious. If nothing else, perhaps they can be a means of grace to simply deepen my own perception. And I surely am in need of that.
I was so thrilled when I saw 1/365 yesterday--I was hoping it meant what I thought it did!
ReplyDeleteIf you ever get discouraged, know that here is one reader and friend who loves your blog and delights when you write and post photos.
Know that you have two readers! Your thoughts and insight are inspiring! So happy you have taken this on. Love you!
ReplyDeleteI will be your third voice of happiness at your project undertaking!
ReplyDeleteThere are times when I've needed to be blind in a sense and have put the camera down...needing to see with the eyes of my soul and tuck those images into my heart. Or to stop the flow of my own words so I could hear quiet. I think those times can be what sometimes deepens our perception as well.
Marty, I like to think that I am sitting in a room talking with you and that was just the thoughtful response I needed to come away with. Sometimes we make too much of all the "seeing" that comes with photography, eh??:) It is just as important to put it down. Thanks for your input, I always am grateful for it.
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