A quote was sent to me by a talented young friend this morning. She asked of me do you think this is true? “At some point in life the world’s beauty becomes enough. You don’t need to photograph, paint or even remember it. It is enough. No record of it needs to be kept and you don’t need someone to share it with or tell it to. When that happens – that letting go – you let go because you can” (Toni Morrison)

 I do. Yet it is a letting go I doubt I will ever achieve.

I seem compelled to capture, record, paint, photograph, write.  I suspect it comes from a desire to be and feel connected, communicate. SHARE indeed. There’ve been moments when I’ve witnessed such great impromptu moment of beauty, magical scenes of wilderness and wild creatures, dramatic stormy sweeps of a sky and recognized my inability to just be in the moment of this experience if I’m without my camera. I’m sure many other photographers suffer this same dilemma.

Armed with iphones now this happens less frequently, as we are busy documenting everything from the mundane to the miraculous. As I took this image on Instagram the other evening  my partner remarked our walks are even longer now that I am shooting, writing and posting as we meander. 

  

How can I resist? It is both a blessing and curse to feel compelled to capture beauty all the time as I see it in the smallest of life’s gestures and most surprising of places.

 

Light moves across my boutique and forms delightful graphic shadows that call out to me.

A bunny rabbit scampers along a park…..can you spot it amongst the squares?

I wake in the morning and before I’ve even dressed for the day, and ‘SNAP’, there it is. A simple still life I created the night before has been immortalized forever.

The next day all the petals fell. Life is fleeting and ever changing, but the image holds it there eternally. As in everything in life the challenge is to find the balance. Balance of being in the moment and experiencing what is around. Balance in just beholding the beauty. But as an artist  I do want to paint, and write it. I want to tell it, share it. And yes, I want to remember it all….