The Camera Within

January 27, 2007
It is astounding to step outside and encounter the ever-changing beauty of the ocean and her rocky shores here. In just these first few months, I have many pictures in my heart.

Just yesterday, as I flew by in my indigo blue car, I snapped a memory of a tall snowy egret in a field of brown backed horses. Then at dusk I walked down to the sea terrace. The sun had set and color was changing on every plant and rock. I realized I had come down without jacket or camera.

As I climbed back up the stairs to the cottage, I knew no color, no light or shadow I had seen would remain on my soon return. But what is a camera but a closed chamber with an aperture to receive light? We are each a lens and given to seek the light. While there is no whir of shutters clicking, the impressions of the light, dawn to dusk can be developed cell by cell in the tissues of a life.

How important it is that beauty is allowed to children...all over this world. The beauty is, we just need to not obscure it.

Political language speaks of developing nations, but really it is only people...developing people. Are they developing pictures of horror and despair or is beauty speaking hope?

I live here on a gentle coast and yet I know that there is a Nigeria, a Darfur, Myanmar,or even Salinas just east of here, a small town on the highway 101 corridor that fills the local paper with sorrowful stabbing shooting stories, a town whose leaders visit Oakland to study gang control.

So this little camera will take what pictures she can and develop and share as able...

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