The Big Ones, and, Photography

There are Big Things I have to write about someday. They are the psychoemotispiritual equivalent of all those photographs sitting in a box in my closet, because they deserve so much more than to be randomly stuck in an album. They deserve mats, arrangement, and quotations. Not necessarily captions, but definitely some good quotations. But not cropping. I do not cut my pictures any more. After once receiving scrapbooking materials as a present, I played around with the fancy-edge scissors, removing all but what others consider "important" in a picture. The cracked wall and the tall tree and the empty sky in the background were cut out. But after cutting I realized, the reason we scrapbook is so that when we're eighty with nothing to do but sit all day we can look back at the story of our lives in pictures, and what if then, all we're aching and yearning to see is a year 2000 sky?

But because these pictures deserve so much, and there are now so many of them, the task is Overwhelming, so I do nothing at all with them. They sit waiting for a day in my life to come when the Urgent does not supercede the Important.

There are things like this I have to write about, too, but they're so enormous I am frigtened to begin- frightend that once I start unpacking I won't be able to stop. On the list, if you're curious: the trips we took when I was growing up; the art of living in six different states and wondering if that's the same as "being" from six different states; Rich Mullins, and what he meant in my life. I know that when I start writing about these things, they will be Long, so long that my previous "long" posts will look trivial. This, too, makes me hesitant to start, because I fear boring you, the gentle non-existent reader (from my comment numbers, I don't think I have any readers anymore), as one forced to listen to a endless narrated presentation of a friend's vacation photos. The telling will be for me, not for you, though. Maybe, someday, I will take these memories down from the shelf in my soul and be brave enough to start putting them in order.