A Time For Everything

We know things before we know them. There is an internal sense that speaks, at first, without words. Two years ago I wrote in my journal: I feel like I'm living in the past. I couldn't shake the feeling that the things that defined my life as it was, would not be taken into the future with me. It's one thing to know, another to act.

Change is violent, jarring; it can feel like you're wearing your skin inside out. Things that were always there but never perceived suddenly made themselves known: the basic need for human touch, to feel tethered in some way, felt abruptly and intensely like a sting so sharp you almost don't feel it. The human condition without a hiding place.

In all seasons, one thing remains: the constant search for answers, for those who understand, who know that being isn't the challenge, but being seen is; who push beyond the threshold by unraveling the fabric of who they were taught to be, to find that beyond one limit is another, and another, until freedom─who know that we are here for something more, and resolve to spend their lives searching for it. A time to search and a time to quit searching. 

But we don't really ever quit searching, we just alter our mediums. These days, portraits feel like the only means by which I can define a season. There is a risk that they will convey something false, something that misrepresents the person in them, but the time has passed to not have courage. When I shared this thought with a friend, she said that we can't hold back. "We hold knowledge in things that others may not have knowledge in." There are pieces of ourselves to be shared in the event that what we draw out from within might resonate with someone else.

Uncomfortable seasons are magnificent and monstrous. They feel pointless and vast. They are teachers only if we want to learn. We don't have a choice in experiencing discomfort, but we have a choice in what we do with it.

Whatever season we're in, within each exists a time for laughing, a time for dancing─things that somehow always find their way back to us.

I don't have many answers, but I think I do know what works: to keep feeling wonder. We were meant to be here.

Let everything happen to you

Beauty and terror

Just keep going

No feeling is final

─Ranier Maria Rilke