The atmosphere had shifted. The thick, honey sunshine no longer coated everything in its path.  Hide and seek patches appeared and disappeared as clouds made their presence known in the sky. The air had stilled and quieted, thinking about how it would collect itself into a force that would soon swirl and blow, rather than gently cool the skin of sunbathers on this Florida beach.  Perched eight stories above the sand, I had a bird’s eye view overlooking the oncoming storm, which was both magnificent and terrifying. The clouds out in the distance had not yet made their way into my area, but the writing of what was about to transpire was literally on the wall (cloud). Nature was kind, allowing me a few seconds to grab my camera as she momentarily primped before her photo shoot. As if on cue, she let loose a torrent of rain thick and definitive, as the lens came into focus.  Memorized by the power, the beauty, the fierceness, I clicked away, hoping I could convert some amount of this energy into a digital signal that would forever remind me of my time on this planet.

I AM NOT A PHOTOGRAPHER. I am a traveler, an explorer, someone who delights in natures’ visual bounty. My photographs serve as a reminder to me of what I have learned, need to learn, or need to re-learn.  They are a time stamp of my life.  After capturing this image, I played with simple filters available on my iPhone.  I gawked at how technology transformed my images from foreboding black and white, to sleek silver, to warm, to cool, to any variation of the above. Even more amazing was how that simple alteration of imagery generated within my psyche different constellations of emotional renderings.   It’s how you see things.

As December stamps upon us the finality of another passing year, and my mind races through the previous months to inventory the good, the bad, and the ugly, I am reminding myself to use my filters. Waiting in traffic is not a waste of time but an opportunity to learn a little more from that interesting podcast I’ve been listening to. The pain from a hard work out is muscle forming.  You get the idea. That being said, there are a lot of big, ugly things out there in our world right now that seem to be resistant to even the rosiest of filters, even when I am at the peak of my optimism.  My iPhone does not seem to have an App for finding the good in everything.  Technology, I’m afraid, is still behind on that one.

So how did our ancestors, without all our fancy gadgets to filter, to alter, to rethink, and re frame find meaning in this world and continue picking themselves up and moving forward everyday?  My conclusion is with Hope and Love.  I have not seen that on any of my new devices. That, I believe, is in all of us, if we are willing to look and remove whatever filters we have put in place to keep us “safe” from the ramifications that having Hope and Love entails.

Wishing You a Season of Hope and Love,

Lisa