Sketches

//These are just experiences from the past couple months that struck me, or seemed like the kind of things that should be written down.  Hope you enjoy.//

The water flows around you like liquid glass as you look up, ahead, at the rays of light that cut through it like gleaming strokes of a silent knife. You pull yourself forward, watching the ripples of brightness beneath you.  Now you’re among them, caught for a moment in the midst of molten, shining light, and a world of brightness and longing lingers in that breathless, fleeting moment.  Then it’s gone, past like a dream of morning.  You surface from that mysterious, lonely world, pushing hair from your face, shaking off the drops of water – they sparkle just a little as they fly away, they remember the rays of light.  You squint up through the water that yet blurs your eyes; the shouts of children echo around you, and the light catches your brothers’ red hair, turning it to fire in the evening sun.

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The flowers hang down too low.  The clusters of white blossoms are like a curtain, guarding the little wooden boardwalk towards which I’m riding, and I try to push them aside, to duck underneath; but it’s no use.  They catch me in the face and baptize me with a shower of dew.  And now I pass the trees (one of those little swamps, the reason they built the boardwalks here), and it’s still there – that metal gate, and the dirt road beyond, running under the steel towers of the electric lines.  It’s little more than a path really; a set of tire tracks, worn out of the grass, stretching ever on and on between the trees.  I’ve always thought, if I just turned off here – just opened the gate, and rode through – if I could just go down that road, it would lead away to some fairyland, some world where the sun keeps on sending its beams through a curtain of mist to glisten on the dew-strewn grass, under the electric lines.  If somehow I could just travel on and on and on…

I’ve had the camera out all afternoon.  Trying to learn, to capture an image, a moment of beauty or grace or hilarity.  But here, sitting on the floor of my friend’s room, it seems inadequate.  How can you capture in a single moment all the depths of personality, all the quirks of language and intricacies of habit that you know so well?  The light of their eyes or the way they toss their hair when they laugh.  How can the sunlight shining through the window, striking everything into sharp contrast, reveal the beauty that only shared laughter and sorrows and fears and joys will ever show?  How can a picture capture a life?