Powerlines 6

I started this blog to get comfortable with digital photography, and to stretch myself a little photographically.

I realised this morning that I was doing something else as well.

When I started this blog, I was in a bad place. I was - and still am - in a lot of pain, and not entirely sure how much it would ever improve. Moving is difficult - getting from the couch to the kitchen is a cost-benefit exercise in pain versus need, and doing many of the things I used to take for granted is impossible. With that much pain, too, thinking or planning is hard - even without medications, it's like moving through quicksand, and so exhausting that usually the effort is just too much.

Life is still a lot like that.

But this blog, though, is one of the ways I transcend that - even make something of it. Take all that pain and frustration and the fear that this is all there ever will be, and... offer it up. Turn it into a mirror of the outside world, all those things with a real, definite existence outside of me, and take comfort in their solidity. And more than that. Every picture anyone ever takes is a metaphor; not just of the things it represents, but of other things - ourselves, our world... so many symbols! The photos in this blog show a world in which pain is a part; but only a part. It reminds me that I'm the same, and I'm the greater for it.

There's more to it than that, of course, but we'll explore it through the pictures.