Mind Shift: Capturing the Shot Unseen

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Gratitude. As I’ve written in other articles, I have a difficult time holding onto positive events. I can be ecstatic one moment, and then a few hours later back to a drab mood, weighed down by run-of-the-mill stressors like realizing I’m out of Diet Coke. ?Anything uplifting before such a debacle (as my mind sees it) will immediately be nuclear-holocausted from my brain. Depression and anxiety are joy stealers and doomsayers, heavy burdens to be a pack mule to. One of the most important insights I’ve had recently, though, is that my strength with words can help me write the story of my many reasons for gratitude, not just the meaningful ones but also the seemingly insignificant.

One thing I’m thankful for is the fact that I am neurodivergent, meaning that I see the world at a slant and upside down. From a hidden place. On the one hand, living this way means that I notice vast amounts of data. As a result, I am constantly trying to make sense of a glut of information, which is jarring and exhausting. At the same time, this capacity to see in so many other ways informs my growth mentally and spiritually. I am not who I once was. Decades ago, I believed the untruths that my mind told me. Depression and anxiety, after all, are liars. But I didn’t know that then. I’ve only learned within the past 15 years how to hack my way out of that prison, over and over, every day, day after day. I do so by demolishing (and then demolishing again and again) the malignant world that mood disorders say is the truth of my life, and then only from that wreckage do I find a place to live that is, in fact, REAL. This bent of mind has not only pointed me toward what I can do with my light in a broken world, it has also saved my life. It has given me the mental prowess to disbelieve the falsehoods of depression and anxiety and in so doing to unrelentingly build a different house for myself, one with sky glimpsing through the windows. As I grow older, I am becoming more and more thankful for this gift, which reveals itself as well in my creative pursuits as a writer and visual artist. In the flow, in the peak of inspiration, there is no room for depression or anxiety, and I have discovered this yet again through an entirely unforeseen vector: merely by my putting one foot in front of the other.

I am not a formally trained photographer. But over the past few years, walking six miles a day through snow, high wind, heavy rain, and blazing heat has been a religious study for me. Where I formerly lived in Georgia, I trudged up and down our block eight and one-half times daily. I was known as the walking lady. When I was gone for stints of time to care for my mother, neighbors noticed and became concerned, asking after me. I was that faithful in the commitment to my walks. But due to the monotonous back and forth, back and forth of that daily ritual, it was all too easy to disconnect from the moment, thinking instead of that eighth loop, of those remaining 40 minutes. Seeking stimulation, my eyes would wander away from the pavement, skating above the small flowers that never seemed to change in the manicured yards of my neighbors, up into the oak trees and the sky beyond, where I would see magical visions of scarlet clouds. As I studied the celestial, I would regularly stop and take photos, multiple ones that were often at an angle, as though my phone had toppled helterskelter to the ground. This approach, wholly unconscious, was pursued in order to create the emotion behind what had originally caught my eye. There was great joy in this mindful, striving process, as I tried to attain that one revelatory shot. I didn’t know what that picture would be, but I kept shifting angles, though sometimes I could not find the one I was seeking, no matter how diligently I turned the lens. I often posted my photos on Facebook, where people seemed to be intrigued by their offbeat nature. They were oddly beautiful, but never beautiful in and of themselves. They were something else, something above. And they came from my offkilter mind, a brain that, intense to the point of overwhelming, emancipates itself also.

Late at night recently, I went into the kitchen to do the unexciting: take medicine. The light was turned off, allowing me to see the moon shining through the window onto a bottle of bleach,? which presented itself as a black shadow against the white countertop. Consistent with my mind’s workings, I am drawn to difference—light, dark, violent storm clouds against trees lit by mustard light, even the rainbow reflections cast by a light catcher onto my mother’s drab brown kitchen cabinets. On this particular night, I took multiple pictures of the bleach bottle’s shadow, trying to find the epiphany that I felt it so mysteriously contained. As I looked at the shots, though, they just looked weird—interesting but an ugly odd that didn’t speak to me. I kept working with the hope that the moon would redeem the bleach bottle and that something intriguing would emerge. I continued to reposition, struggling over the kitchen sink, on my toes, fighting to catch the moon. Eventually I realized that the vignette of bleach bottle and moon with its dual reflections was never going to manifest into a harmonious image. A little disappointed but only barely, I immediately started moving my eye elsewhere until finally I was shown something promising. The pictures themselves, two of them, are so abstract that it would be difficult to establish what they were images of exactly, unless an observer had been present and participating.

In both images absolute darkness, as if there were no moon at all, embraces the window. The moon itself is a half dot, while in reality it was much bigger but shrunken for reasons beyond my technical ability, its glow trapped against the transom. Fascinatingly, what looks like crazy-crackled clouds is actually the smudged years on my mother’s uncleaned windows. I had never noticed those details, and now here they were--smeared, cobwebbed panes of glass, invaluable in my eye’s creation. The shots are at a tilt, too. Part of that is unintentional; it was driven by the exacting work of trying to get the shot I wanted as I sought to exclude visual distractions. Of course, I as the photographer can recreate in words what the picture represents, but I also understand that other minds might be offput, desiring only to identify the images immediately, and with stark certainty. The desire to know or explain doesn’t matter much to me, though—it’s the looking differently, the spiritual unveiling of the beauty of mundane objects that I’m after. I can say, without qualification, I am grateful for this gift that arose in my mid-fifties, one that keeps me here so that I become one with the scene, uncovering what I can behind it, capturing the shots unseen.

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