A friend told me a story yesterday of a shuttle driver she met on a recent trip to New Orleans. While she and her husband were riding to the airport in the shuttle, the driver made two short unscheduled stops. Each time he reached into an ice chest beside him and gave a sandwich and bottle of water to a man who met him at the shuttle driver’s window. They shared a blessing together and then the shuttle driver drove on.
Hearing stories like this makes me believe that there are
Angels Among Us
doing what they can to spread light and love. These beacons of light demonstrate to us that love is a verb. Loving is not a passive sending out “love” from afar. It is an active choice in daily life from how we choose to interact with others to how we treat the earth.
In this season of New Year’s resolutions, choosing a word or intention for the year, I suggest adding an aspiration to actively love others and the earth. I know that I will not do as the shuttle driver did and spend time befriending the homeless of our city on the streets. But I can do other things as simple as saying a kind word to a stranger or giving money to help feed the hungry. In each interaction with others I can choose to be kind, respectful, and caring.
Angels
You might see an angel anytime
and anywhere. Of course you have
to open your eyes to a kind of
second level, but it’s not really
hard. The whole business of
what’s reality and what isn’t has
never been solved and probably
never will be. So I don’t care to
be too definite about anything.
I have a lot of edges called Perhaps
and almost nothing you can call
Certainty. For myself, but not
for other people. That’s a place
you just can’t get into, not
entirely anyway, other people’s
heads.I’ll just leave you with this.
I don’t care how many angels can
dance on the head of a pin. It’s
enough to know that for some people
they exist, and that they dance.— Mary Oliver
From Angels to Sh*t Sandwiches
On a more mundane note, I am spending the week doing computer house-keeping chores, re-organizing my photo backups, and creating a new photography catalog for 2023, since my previous catalog now occupies almost 2 TB of disk space. This tidying and re-organizing is not my favorite activity, but necessary if I am to ensure that I don’t lose any of my work. My 2023 catalog will be the fifth catalog of photographs I’ve created since I began my photography learning thirteen years ago.
Elizabeth Gilbert calls all of the stuff one needs to do to support one’s creative practice a “sh*t sandwich.”
Because if you love and want something enough—whatever it is—then you don’t really mind eating the shit sandwich that comes with it.”
― Big Magic: Creative Living Beyond Fear
I am looking forward to finishing this particular sandwich and moving on to more appealing “sandwiches” in my photographic pursuits.
Have a beautiful first week of the year.
May you walk in beauty.
Note: Photos below are from my walk at Big Willow Park in Minnetonka yesterday.
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