The Beautiful Things

The house is silent. Gerry is out having coffee with his cronies. Maya, not quite herself after a dental procedure the day prior, snoozes on a blanket in the den.

I carry a vase of grocery store flowers downstairs to my woman cave and set them on my writing desk in front of the north-facing window where the light is best.

I put the macro lens on my camera and connect it to my tripod. I lean down and look through the viewfinder, moving the vase of flowers back and forth, adjusting the angle of my camera, playing with the image, waiting for the magic.

Here is your life. You might never have been, but you are . . .

And there it is. What wasn’t before, now is. I set the aperture and metering, adjust focus, take my hands off the camera and push the remote shutter release. Click. I move the flowers and adjust the position of my camera. Click. And again. Click. Click. Click.

I move to my get-stuff-done desk, plug the CF camera card into the slot, and download the images. I scroll through them, deleting some and saving others I can work with.

Here is the world. Beautiful and terrible things will happen.

In precious silence, I do something that feels to me like making art. Me, who hated art class as a child and believed for most of my life that I was not creative, making art. It’s amusing.

But give me some flowers, and my macro lens, and some digital post-processing tools and I can sit in solitude and silence and craft something that points, not to me, but to the Creator of me, and this, and everything.

Don’t be afraid. I am with you. . . I love you.

These quiet moments are some of the beautiful things; some of the terrible things will come on another day. Sometimes I feel a heaviness knowing that. Sometimes I can barely breathe knowing that.

But I believe as sure as the sun will rise in the morning that I’m not alone here, and that fear is a stinking liar, so I lean into the peace and make art as a prayer.

(Quotes from Wishful Thinking by Frederick Buechner)