Ragweed ~ Late Summer 2009
It seems to me that we can’t explain the truly awful things in the world like war and murder and brain tumors, and we can’t fix these things, so we look at the frightening things that are closer to us and we magnify them until they burst open. Inside is something that we can manage, something that isn’t as awful as it had at first seemed.
Sharon Creech, Walk Two Moons
And so it goes. Wasting time on that which one cannot control is what gets one in serious trouble. Life is lived in the context of the local, the people with whom one interacts, the places one goes, the thoughts one has, the moments to which one is privy. What takes place outside of the local is merely a narrative that one may choose to take seriously or not. Before one takes a macro-narrative seriously, however, one must settle the micro-narrative; embracing the moment of existence is a not so subtle way of such an embracing of one’s private narrative.
I continue to learn how to embrace the moment as I continue to create images in fractions of seconds. In my world behind the lens of the camera, a voyeuristic glimpse into moments of existential time immediately reduced to a non-responsive historical time, I absorb the qualities of the local allowing me to think about that which is directly before me now. It is, in an agreeable way, learning to manage the inside.
In the image in this post, the newly emerging ragweed blossom, one to which I am highly allergic, nestled between blades of prairie grass, and isolated by focus, becomes an object of art, something beautiful, to be admired. Looking at this wildflower as something other than that which causes my nose to run and eyes to itch is a move to managing the inside, of managing something that appears otherwise unmanageable; as Creech would say, seeing the outside as something not that awful in the first place.
The Ragweed ~ Late Summer 2009 by Roger Passman, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.
