Coldly Collected Thoughts

I love the quality of light in the winter time, it feels so romantic and rich, especially at sunset. The sun gleams a lovely orange tone and the shadows created are a complementing gray blue. The angle of the sun as it goes down elongates and darkens replicas of everything it touches. 

Light is a wonderful thing, but while I was walking through the woods I caught a glimpse of the sun at the top of the hill. I just walked down about half way when my eye caught the shadow of a tree on the ground. Letting my eyes follow the long line across the snow covered ground to the source of the shadow and then to the sun.  I wondered metaphorically if it is possible for people to completely lose sight of light. More specifically is it possible for an artist to lose their source of light or do we simply lose the will or imagination to create?

But what really made me start thinking, was a plant sticking out of the ground that at a certain angle, with the light source behind the dried leaves glowed with the evening sun. If you moved a couple degrees to a different place the light wouldn't ignite the plant through the transparent leaves any more.  What I gathered from this is that different angles and perspectives show us different intensities of light. 

I would like to think that it is impossible for that kind of thing to happen to an artist and a person. I believe this because I understand that people constantly change and discover different perspectives. The thought of a lost light really haunts me though.

I can think back to times in my life where things seemed to be lightless and my thoughts perpetually caught in a starless, moonless sky. For instance there was recently when I stopped taking pictures all together for about a year. I was really discouraged about photography because of a bad class and I thought I would never pick it back up. As time went by I realized I was only discouraged because I needed to grow, I needed to better myself in order to find my style so I could progress. That took some time but no matter how dark or bad things seemed to get for me I always found a source of light. I think that is true for others too. Light made or seen through darkness isn't always self made though, sometimes we need outside influence to help our eyes open to the illumination still present in all situations. Even thought I still haven't come to a conclusion about the questions I was asking myself today, I have found that I feel pretty optimistically about it. I am at the understanding that perhaps it isn't that there is some kind of light around us somewhere that we are looking for but that we as a person are a source of light. Thinking like that means that we don't glow or shine at our brightest all the time but we are always luminous, even if it just a little bit. 

One of my favorite songs by the Foo Fighters has a lyric "all our deepest blues are black", that I used to see as a beautifully dark way of describing sadness. I would be reminded of bruises or having the blues so deep that they turn black. Today I interpreted it a little opposite, maybe all that is black is really deep blue and if you just add a little something like white it could become the sky, or a little red you could have a bunch of purple flowers or a brilliant end of the day sky. 

There are a lot of thoughts in here...What do you think?

-M