An instruction in living

I love photography. In the way that I admire talents that others have, to capture life's moments. To tell so much, to invoke such feeling simply with recorded light.

I follow some photographers on twitter, not the least of which is theJed.

Browsing his Flickr account today, I came across a series of beautiful images from a trip to Lake Powell with his family (from which the above is borrowed). The gold light, red gritty sandstone, and the algae-colored water that turns murky and brown in the shallows; it came alive to me. I wasn't there, but I felt the sleek water run through my outstretched fingers as I paddled, the warm sting of a sunburn, the slimy sludge between my toes.

Trips to Lake Powell every summer were a long-standing tradition on my dad's side, up until I was thirteen or so. Looking at the photos brought back those times — not in specific memories, but in impressions, in the vivacity of youth, the joys of being strong and free on a lake in the heat of summer. It brought my mind alive, relishing this internal stream of responses brought on by stimuli. This is what beauty is, I thought, what art should be: an instruction in living, a how-to for cherishing existence.

Later as I headed home on my blue Huffy, I still rode on that high. Rather than resenting the wind, I noticed the cold, recorded the steely sensation. In my head, everything was a photograph, everything was art. The scraggly bush that grows over into the sidewalk, the rolling gray of the sky above; things I usually don't notice, that I take for granted, were suddenly there, so real and deliciously tangible. I enjoyed the rumble and shift of the rubber wheels over a path of cement blocks set in the earth, end to end.

There is a quote from Anaïs Nin: "We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect." And while that's true, I know that I write, at least in part, to anticipate life. Because I know that for every moment I take the time to delight in and write about in retrospect instructs me on how to better appreciate the moments that are to come.