The way we share today. There’s so much out there. So we don’t bother to sift through the junk. Content to glance at photographs and read the 1, 2 status posts. A picture and a few words seem to be the only medium to get a story told. A picture, without your thousand words.
Today there was a huge, bright yellow perched on a branch by my window. She was golden, or maybe the color of a daffodil. She was magnificent I let out a tiny whisper, “oh my.” I wanted to take a photo but she was too far, too fast for my lens.
And then there’s this row of white flowering trees lining my road. I pass through the same path every day and three times already stopped and took a shot. The trees are filled to the brim with flowers overpowering the leaves that are barely there. Different times on different days I try to capture the glory of trees that bear crisp white stars on silver branches. But I cannot fit the row in my frame and the colors are stark, not subtle and silver like I see on my road.
Then almost everyday since March, the breeze catches a dandelion, and a faint ball of white fuzz, the size of my fist, wafts swiftly by. How do you take a snapshot of that?
There’s a temptation to take photographs of everything. I’m itching to tell you things. A cloud, 7 dogs playing outside with 20 chickens, the leaves that fall like rain.
Except that there are too many shots I miss. And I could only fit frames in seconds. And instead, moments drift. The dandelion passes swiftly. The bird flies away. The rows of flowering trees won’t tell me their secret in a shot.
And so I write these down instead. I write for me and for sharing a bit of the world that lives in me. Hoping that one day, I am bestowed the gift, lent the Genius, to capture moments in prose, in a thousand words. And that someone somewhere reads them. Without pictures.
The Girl and the Grail 