Photographs.

A few months ago, I read something about photographs, magazines, and clips of the like that struck me. It was reflecting on the fact that photographs paint still pictures of moments and capture the sides of those moments that we want seen.

I think of this often. In these days, in these spaces, places, and moments. What we capture on film is not the whole picture. It is the frozen moments we want to remember, and those we want seen. It is the smiles on our faces, the splashes of water, the watermelon dripping, the sleds burling in the snow. These moments make us relive the good. We capture these greatest moments and the place them on the walls of our Facebook, albums on our shelves, or frames in a bookcase. We paste them in Real Simple and like magazines and draw comparison. The camera gathers the still frames of perfect and leaves behind the perception of what life is to be.

But sometimes I wonder if it is the best way to live. To capture these frozen places of time and paint our lives through them. Because we don't allow ourselves to see the whole, and determine life according to only these frames. We don't pose or let ourselves be shown in the weak, in the struggle, in the tears, in the tender.

In Just Married, Ashton Kutcher is sitting on the couch with his father and paging through an album and wondering what happened, how they looked so happy as a couple before the recent times. His father replies: "You never seen the hard days in a photo album. But those are the ones that get you from one happy snapshot to the next."

In these current days, pictures are and have been taken. But I cannot look at them. Because I know behind the still frames is my broken heart inside. It poses for laughter and hiking and jumping and beauty, but underneath it is the hurt and the ache and the cause and the cover of what is really going on and why those pictures are really being taken. They show the people aching to touch the tendar, to offer joy, to bring release. But they remember me in these days I wish I could forget. So they stay hidden in the barren, covered underneath, so the otherside of the photo doesn't look back at me.

So where I pause today is to note that pictures do capture our life. But they also capture only part of our life. So with our photographs, we should be careful.

[Note: I often say my journals and my scrapbooks balance my life. One paints the intense, the deep, the hard, the perceptive. One paints the silly, the carefree, the fun, the laughter. And both are okay.]