On the grand scheme…
There’s nothing new under the sun. I don’t mean that there are not unique voices. As humans, we often ponder the same mysteries. The ideas that arise out of watching the sunrise or lying under the stars all lend to reflection, scrutiny and brilliant observation. Any mind that ponders gratefully, with awe, finds itself at one with a grand and mysterious consciousness, as if it’s the very first to figure it out. One is included into the very essence, there is no time or space. The moment is just for you and new because of you. Yours is the first truth. It doesn’t matter what has come before, who has also dreamed this dream. You’re not common, you are instead, the one who living was made distinctly for. To consider the immense, to be with the eons as those before you, puts you in grand company. We mortals can’t help but find ourselves thinking similar thoughts. The world provides such vastness and we can wander endlessly in our imaginations.
On a photograph…
The photographs of the soldiers stare out at me. They had a before and after. They had voices. They believed in something so completely that they donned these uniforms and carried weapons; left someone behind, taking a memory of a home, of wildflowers, of dust; a memory of a sky in spring or the friendly company of a dog. They paused for one minute in their seriousness and regalia, without names, their only history the present moment of the photograph. They walked out of the frame to the rest of their lives. Someone remembers them, maybe. Our human concerns are probably much the same. We all have eyes to see the world and hearts to feel its turning. Maybe they died that day, or lived to go home, with a heart more honed to hate from the witness of a cruel and random mortality. Or maybe full of forgiveness and hope for renewal, if not for the world, then maybe for themselves. We’ll never know. All our effects are left and forgotten. Only the art remains.