In The Details

My house is sleeping. I have on my favorite headphones and Ray LaMontagne is singing about trouble and wild horses, being saved and asking how come.

I'm thinking back on the week and trying to figure out how to put it into categories and alphabetized files. There are so many things I can't write about on any given week, that it's difficult to process it all. Occupational hazard I guess, but it seems I am in a constant state of (to twist around Robert Frost) confidences to keep and miles to go before I sleep.

I love this time of year though. No matter how long it has been since I had a new class schedule, Fall still feels like it is a time to go back to learn something, start fresh, wait for color. It's small, quiet things that I look forward to all year: details like the ones shared here and here.

We're all conditioned to look for certain details as a sign of changing time, and in looking for those markers that the seasons are changing or that a holiday is coming, or that a child has met a milestone, do we miss other beautiful, not so obvious markers of time and lessons of what this is, being human?

These photo books of a week in the life have elevated seemingly mundane tasks to those worthy of a photograph, a journal entry and a printed page. In close up detail, the ordinary becomes extraordinary. Even though I only did the project for one day, thinking of how I would photograph an ordinary task helped me see it as something beautiful. The next time I did the same task without the camera, the sense of purpose and importance of the task had not gone away. If I could hold on to that sense that every thing I do, even monotonous tasks, has purpose and ramifications, that everything about how we all handle each other is a delicate moment, would life be more meaningful? Would I find answers or just more questions?

There's no way to know which details are the salient ones, the ones that will matter most. I can't take in all of them. Just like with writing, I guess it's about choosing the details that seem most closely related to the questions we're trying to answer at the time? I'm still trying to figure this out for myself. But somewhere in all of it is a feeling that I'm not paying close enough attention to my life to find God in every person, to be present enough for the people I love, to figure out why I'm here and what I'm supposed to be doing. I begin each day asking myself, "how may I serve," and the answer seems to change with every cup of coffee. Tomorrow, I think I'll just be and see what happens.




Don't let your mind get weary and confused
Your will be still, don't try
Don't let your heart get heavy child
Inside you there's a strength that lies

Don't let your soul get lonely child
It's only time, it will go by
Don't look for love in faces, places
It's in you, that's where you'll find kindness

Be here now, here now
Be here now, here now

Don't lose your faith in me
And I will try not to lose faith in you
Don't put your trust in walls
'Cause walls will only crush you when they fall

Be here now, here now
Be here now, here now
-Ray LaMontagne